How people with disabilities fare when public policies change

Changes in public policy and in macroeconomic conditions have dramatically affected the economic well-being of people with disabilities over the past two decades, both absolutely and relative to people without disabilities. Using data from the Current Population Survey (1968–1988), we find that the households of white or well-educated males with disabilities have fully recovered from the program cuts and recession of the early 1980s. However, much of this recovery was due to additional earnings by other household members. The households of males who are “doubly handicapped”—nonwhite or poorly educated males with disabilities—have not recovered. We conclude that the new mandates on business aimed at integrating people with disabilities into the workplace are not likely to significantly benefit the doubly handicapped.     

Policy monitoring and policy analysis

In this article we introduce a policy analytic technique that we call “policy monitoring.” Using data from the Environmental Protection Agency's Hazardous Waste Division, we demonstrate how the technique can be employed in actual practice. The case study demonstrates that EPA enforcements were responsive to stimuli emanating from outside the agency. In particular, relevant congressional committees were able to influence and effect change in the EPA's policy. In addition to demonstrating how policy monitoring can be employed, we also discuss how it can be used in other policy analytic situations.     

The political economy of sugar legislation

The findings of this paper are a rather straightforward account of the political economy of senatorial voting on the sugar program. In the spirit of Stigler and Peltzman's accounts of interest group activity, voting on sugar is indeed related to the concentration of economic interests in the Senators' states. States with high concentrations of sugar growers and processing tend to vote for the program, those with high concentration of users tend to vote against it. The emergence of corn syrup as a sugar substitute and its subsequent interests in the program further supports this perspective. These concentrated interests are associated with conditions ripe for overcoming the collective action problem and, we infer, use their organizations to influence senatorial behavior. The political variables suggest countervailing forces which can be interpreted, at least in part, as further examples of organized (here, politically organized) influences on the interests of Senators. Thus, while the model is one of opposing interests, those of producers and users tend to influence different Senators. The major group-interest trade-off, then, is between the pull of organized interests in the constituency with that of party organization at the national (or national institutional level), at least for those for whom the pull is in opposite directions.It is clear, then, that variables representing (concentrated) consumer interests as well as variables representing grower and processor interests as well as variables representing grower and processor interests are significant in determining voting patterns on sugar legislation in the Senate. This model, therefore, is not one in which one-sided organizational interests operate politically uncontested. That, even so, consumer interests are not powerful enough to prevent sugar programs from passing is clear at one level, due to the existence of the program over most of this period. The existing level of the transfers from consumers to producers and of deadweight losses must be reflective of the magnitude of their respective free rider problems. Yet voting on the program to renew or alter those benefits at any level clearly reflects these interests and their interplay.     

Reviews

Victoria E. Bonnell, Ann Cooper & Gregory Friedin (eds), Russia at the Barricades. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994, xx + 371 pp.

A. S. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym. Po dnevnikovym zapisyam. Moscow: Izdatel'skaya gruppa ‘Progress—Kul'tura’, 1993, 528 pp.

S. Ardittis (ed.), The Politics of East‐West Migration. London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1994, 257 pp., £40.00.

Victor Peppard & James Riordan, Playing Politics: Soviet Sport Diplomacy to 1992. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, x + 184 pp., $43.95.

János Kovács (ed.), Transition to Capitalism? The Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 1994, xxiii + 323 pp., $34.95.

R. J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. xx + 475 pp., £45.00 h/b., $14.99 p/b.

John O. Norman (ed.), New Perspectives on Russian and Soviet Artistic Culture. Selected papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990. General Editor: Stephen White. London: Macmillan Press, 1994, xiv + 158 pp., £45.00.

Lynne Attwood (ed.), Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era. London: Pandora Press, 1993, 260 pp., £12.99

Peter J. Potichnyj, Marc Raeff, Jaroslav Pelenski & Gleb N. Zekulin (eds), Ukraine and Russia in their Historical Encounter. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, University of Alberta, 1992, xv + 346 pp., $24.95.     

Book reviews

Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals, (Hamish Hamilton, London 1994). 225pp. ISBN 0–241–00220–6 (hb).

James Petras and Morris Morley, Empire or Republic? American Global Power and Domestic Decay, (Routledge, London 1995). 172pp. ISBN 0–415–91064–1.

Keith Cowling and Roger Sugden, Beyond Capitalism: Towards a New World Order, (Pinter, London 1994), 195pp. ISBN 1 85567 301 0.

John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War. Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations, (OUP, Oxford 1994). x. + 301 pp. ISBN 0–19–508551–5.

Alan Haworth, Anti‐Libertarianism: Markets, Philosophy and Myth, (Routledge, London 1994). 154pp. ISBN 0–415–08254–4.

Honi Fern Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics. Selves, Community and the Politics of Difference, (Routledge, London 1995). 160pp. ISBN 0–415–90822–1.

Stjepan G. Mestrovic The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism (Routledge, London 1994). 226pp. ISBN 0–415–08755–4 (pbk).     

Reviews

John N. Hazard, Managing Change in the USSR: The Political‐Legal Role of the Soviet Jurist, Cambridge: CUP, 1983, ix + 182 pp. £17.50.

Martin McCauley (ed.). The Soviet Union after Brezhnev, London: Heinemann, 1983 and New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983, xii + 160 pp. hardback £14.50, paperback £5.50.

Jonathan Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy 1930–33: The Impact of the Depression, London: Macmillan, 1983, xii + 172 pp. £25.00.

Gavriel D. Ra'anan, International Policy Formation in the USSR: Factional ‘Debates’ during the Zhdanovshchina, foreword by Robert Conquest. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1983. Distributed by Leicester UP, xi + 248 pp. £20.00.

Ivan Szelenyi, Urban Inequalities under State Socialism, Oxford: OUP, 1983, x + 158 pp. hardback £15.00, paperback £5.95.

Arvo Tuominen, The Bells of the Kremlin: An Experience in Communism, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983, xvi + 333 pp. $27.00.

Gregory Guroff and Fred V. Carstensen (eds.), Entrepreneur ship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983, 372 pp. hardback £34.50, paperback £11.30.

Robert C. Horn, Soviet‐Indian Relations: Issues and Influence, New York, Praeger, 1982, xviii+231 pp. hardback $24.95, paperback $8.95.

Stephen R. Sacks, Self‐Management and Efficiency: Large Corporations in Yugoslavia, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983, xi + 163 pp. £15.00.

C. K. Chase‐Dunn (ed.), Socialist States in the World System. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1982, 304 pp. hardback $28.00, paperback $14.00.

David Kideckel (ed.), Political Rituals and Symbolism in Socialist Eastern Europe. Special issue of Anthropological Quarterly, April 1983, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 52–104. Anthropological Quarterly, 620 Michigan Avenue N.E., Washington D.C. 20064. $5.00.