VALUE TRADE-OFFS AND PRODUCTIVITY: THE TRANSPOLITICIZATION OF THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE

The political values in the American public sector are presented through the case of the postal system and i t s reorganization In 1971. This change (from the Post Office Department to the United States Postal Service) reflected an attempt to '8depoliticize11 and professlonalize postal operations. The article suggests that the results have been the TRANSpoliticization of the postal system to a corporate model of behavior and political influence, and have led to the limitation of any broadly considered public role. This i s evident in the consideration of employment and the emphasis on productivity. The corporate model undermines the public nature of the post office, and the connection between postal service and public benefits.     

B: THE NORMATIVE/IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXT OF POLICY FORMATION FAMILY POLICY: HAS THE UNITED STATES LEARNED FROM EUROPE?

"Family Policy" is a term that is used increasingly in the U.S. to describe policies affecting children and their families. In this article, the authors focus on whether societal learning has occurred across the Atlantic with regard to family policy and what, if anything, the U.S. has learned or borrowed from Europe. The authors conclude that there has been some borrowing, albeit modest; currently, some of that learning is reflected in an expanding child policy debate.     

THE INFORMATION AGE: IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. AGRICULTURE

The U.S. agricultural system is on the verge of a technological revolution that will involve biotechnology and computer-based information technology. As the U.S. economy is being transformed through the growing computerelectronics industry, agricultural applications of computer technology, which include the microcomputer and videotex information retrieval networks, are becoming established agricultural inputs. The emergence of agriculture into the Information Age promises to have significant impacts on the economic and social welfare of the farmer as well as rural banking and postal systems, and agrimarketing and agriinput firms. A development which will shape the impact of information technology is the growing trend toward privatizing information which could result in agricultural information being transformed into a purchased agricultural input. This promises to undermine many public agricultural service activities. The penetration of information technology in agriculture along with the privatization of agricultural information has the potential of accelerating the forces which are consolidating farms and changing the face of agriculture.     

INTERNAL COMPETITION OVER FOREIGN POLICY-MAKING: THE CASE OF U.S. ARMS SALES TO IRAN

Two models of foreign-policy making, the bureaucratic politics model and the royal court model, are helpful in explaining U.S. arms sales to Iran in 1985 and in 1986. The bureaucratic politics model is particularly useful in clarifying both the positions taken by the leaders of the foreign policy bureaucracy to the arms sales proposals and the behavior of these officials as the sales were implemented. However, the royal court model best ac- counts for the decisive role of the president and the deference given to those advisers perceived to be acting in his interests.     

FEDERAL LEGISLATION AND INTEREST FORMATION: THE CASE OF IMPUTED INTEREST GROUPS

This paper examines an impact of federal legislation on the formation of political interests; it identifies and defines a phenomenon we have labeled imputed interest groups . The interest groups can be seen when federal legislation makes benefit packages that serve as incentives to interest formation and ties interest groups to the maintenance of these benefit packages. Identification of imputed interest groups necessitates a re-examination of subgovernments, service deliverer-recipient relationships, and policymaking in a federal system.     

U.S. SOUTH AFRICA POLICY IN THE 1980s: CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT AND BEYOND

In this article no attempt is made to defend the Reagan administration's six-year-old policy of constructive engagement toward the Republic of South Africa, for to all but a few diehards the policy is indefensible. Instead, my response to Beres contains three components. First, I take issue with his dismissal of constructive engagement as no more than a ruse by which "to make apartheid palatable" to the American people, and argue that the purpose of the policy was to enable the Reagan administration to take credit for achieving a Namibia independence settlement. Second, I show that Beres' plea for popular opposition to an unjust policy comes too late, for a large number of Americans, during the past two years in particular, have been doing his bidding. Finally, I conclude with an assessment of the nature of the policy debate over South Africa that such popularity has prompted, in which direction U.S. South Africa policy now appears headed, and what issues, if any, remain to be resolved.     

Issue avoidance: Evidence from the U.S. senate

This research considers whether there is evidence of legislators' issue avoidance, or unwillingness to reveal one's position. It links, for the first time, two important areas of inquiry: legislative decision making and issue avoidance. The data describe senatorial behavior over eighteen years, involving approximately 200,000 individual voting decisions. During that time, senators were polled by CQ after each missed roll call, and asked to indicate their positions. Issue avoidance is a subset of the nonresponses to that poll. A conceptual model of voting and position taking is presented, incorporating both behaviors and intentions. It defines two kinds of issue avoidance: proactive, deliberate avoidance at the time of the roll call, and reactive, avoidance decided on after votes missed inadvertently. Application of the model permits inferences about intent. Proactive avoidance accounts for 12% of nonvoting during the terms' first five years. It also represents 40% of failures to reveal positions. As much as another 19% of nonvoting results in reactive avoidance. A sixth-year increase in issue avoidance is indicated, although not conclusively. The findings strongly suggest that models of legislative voting should be amended to account for both proactive and reactive avoidance.     

International social security agreements: the U.S. experience

International social security agreements are advantageous both for persons who are working now and for those whose working careers are over. For current workers, the agreements eliminate the dual contributions they might otherwise be paying to the social security systems of both the United States and another country. They also favorably affect the profitability and competitive position of American companies with foreign operations by reducing their cost of doing business. For persons who have worked both in the United States and abroad, and who are now retired, disabled, or deceased, the agreements often result in the payment of benefits to which the worker or the worker's family members would not otherwise have become entitled. Credit for social security coverage the worker earned in the United States and the other country can be combined, if necessary, to meet eligibility requirements, and partial benefits can be paid by one or both countries. Because international social security agreements benefit both workers and employers, the agreements program is supported by organized labor and the international business community. Since the first agreement was signed 15 years ago, every Presidential administration has endorsed the program. In view of this support, and the fact that the agreements enhance the image of the United States as a socially progressive member of the international community, it is expected that totalization agreements will be concluded with additional countries in the future.     

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY HEALTH POLICY AND THE STATE: A CASE STUDY OF SUDAN

Medical anthropologists have frequently limited themselves to studying cultural factors in illness, curing or resistance to the acceptance of modern Western medical services. This prevailing "socioculturalist" approach has serious analytical shortcomings resulting from underestimating the importance of the social formations in which cultural factors occur. Consequently, the policy recommendations produced in medical anthropology are often crippled by theoretical limitations. It is argued that the historically specific constellation of social relations governing production and the appropriation and distribution of the economic surplus-commonly embodied in the functions of the state-have profound effects on the pattern of health and illness as well as on the availability of health services. In underdeveloped countries an analysis of the role of the state in health is especially important, since the organs of state power play a stronger role in health care than in countries with well developed markets for medical services.
In the case of Sudan, the interests of the state in colonial and postindependence periods required a development strategy involving large-scale irrigated agriculture utilizing seasonal migrant labor. The labor and health policies aimed at economic productivity and political stability are analyzed here in relation to the adverse health effects and serious maldistribution of health services which resulted.     

ANTHROPOLOGY AND POLICY STUDIES: A NEW DELEGATION ENTERS THE U.N. OF ACADEME

Like all participating academic disciplines, anthropologists entering the policy studies field face a series of “unsolvable” problems that deal with intellectual values about how to ply one's trade. For example, what are one's obligations to agencies, and to the intended clienteles of public policies, especially when the citizens are “havenots” up against well-organized economic interests? Such questions raised by anthropologists in this volume allow one to assess the options available to applied social scientists studying public policy issues. They also lead us to recognize the existing biases of doing policy studies research. While weighing the propriety of doing applied research, anthropologists do possess critical concepts and research methods essential to the policy sciences. With a grounding in process or temporally-based concepts like “culture, context, and symbol,” applied anthropologists will strengthen the study of policy implementation. Further, with qualitative methods gaining a strong foothold in the policy sciences, anthropologists are contributing to the refinement of methods for studying the organizational behavior of actors charged with the implementation of public policy. Moreover, anthropologists in this volume demonstrate their discipline's potential to break new ground in the policy sciences. Specifically, the world view of anthropologists is likely to add a comparative, crosscultural perspective to existing areas of concentration like public health, and to increase the range of issues of interest to the policy sciences. Also, anthropologists are already developing new units of analysis different from the aggregation of individual scores, and adding new social indicators that are group or culturally grounded. In short, the policy sciences will be enhanced by anthropologists as they bring the strengths of their discipline to bear on the field.     

Needed: A smaller and very different U.S. military

Conclusion How should the Pentagon decide those missions that it will retain in house? Those missions for which it should seek strategic alliances? Those new missions that it will actively seek to develop a competency in? Or those missions that require service competition because they are viewed as critical? Or those missions that have acquired redundancy due to service poaching, and thus can prudently be the target of reductions?The answers to these questions very much depend on the leadership's developing a view of the long-term future that is very different from the past. For example, will the United States be in the business of maintaining stability in troubled Third World regions? If so, what kind of capabilities, what kind of missions, does it see as necessary to conduct effective operations in these conflicts? What can the U.S. military count on from its strategic partnerships with other nations? What competing roles will the U.S. military be asked to play? What resources are available?These are fundamental, first-order questions. But they must all be answered - a credible vision of the business must be established - before restructuring can proceed in a productive manner. This does not imply a definitive prediction of the future; rather, it involves recognizing that the United States is in a period of relatively low danger, high uncertainty and dynamic change. For that reason the defense establishment should restructure to be more flexible, innovative and adaptive. A primary goal should be to exploit rapidly advancing technologies, while meeting (or preferably forestalling) the greatest and most likely challenges to national security. In summary, developing a credible vision of the future security environment, and acting upon it, is essential if the U.S. defense establishment is to avoid the pitfalls of the interwar French military and the IBM of the 1980s, dominant organizations that restructured to be more efficient in a competitive environment that was rapidly passing into history.