Inside the Autonomous State: Programmatic Elites in the Reform of French Health Policy

This article combines the methods of institutionalist analysis and the sociology of elites to look inside the black box of the French state. We identify key groups of policymakers in the social policy sector and track both their policy preferences and the results of their efforts from the mid‐1980s through the late 1990s. Our conclusion is that budgetary and ideological challenges to existing policies led to the consolidation within the Ministry of Social Affairs of what we label a “programmatic elite,” whose influence derived less from the positions held by its members than from the coherence and applicability of its state‐centered policy model. The competition for legitimate authority between such programmatic elites, we conclude, is an important but often overlooked endogenous source of policy change in situations of institutional stability.     

Party Differentiation in Congress

Abstract At times, the American political parties are so close in terms of policy positions that critics denounce the lack of a “dime's worth of difference” between them. At other times, the gap between them on a left‐right dimension is huge. How can we explain this variation? We argue that parties can behave rationally as collective units, and that shifts in divergence and convergence can be explained as rational responses to changes within governmental institutions and to shifts in conditions outside. We analyze this argument using adjusted ADA scores (Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder 1999) to compare voting score differences between the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress from 1952 to 1996. We pose specific hypotheses for potentially important factors shaping party behavior and test them with a multivariate model. Our results support the argument that the variation in the behavioral gap between the two parties in Congress can be explained as rational party responses to internal and external stimuli.     

LON FULLER’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

This essay retrieves Lon Fuller’s theory of language and the role of experience in such a theory. The essay distinguishes meaning from signification. A sign signifies or represents an object. Meaning is experienced before one ever signifies an object. Signification is cognitive. Meaning is bodily. Fuller locates meaning in what Hart excluded from legality as “pre-legal”. In the pre-legal realm, meant objects draw from memories and expectations. The memories may have been personally or collectively experienced. The analysis of rules takes signification for granted, however. When meaning is privileged, we appreciate why interpretation figures importantly in the role of the lawyer/official. So too, shared meanings, ‚located’ in experienced time, explain understanding and communication between members of a group. As a consequence of Fuller’s insights, meaning pre-conditions communication as well as the analysis of the signified rule. Since traditional analytical jurisprudence holds out that lawyers/officials analyse rules, both jurisprudence and the analytic project, Fuller cautions, risk being estranged from the lived meanings of the pre-legal realm. Instead, jurisprudes, lawyers and officials risk locking themselves into a fictitious world of dead concepts which are better known as rules.An earlier draft of this paper was given to the Cambridge Forum for Legal and Political Philosophy, Cambridge UK. I am grateful to the participants for feed-back. I am also grateful for the research facilities of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, where the essay was researched and written, and to the anonymous referees of this journal.     

Policy Networks, Policy Communities and the Problems of Governance

This article reviews and evaluates the literature on policy networks and policy communities that has emerged in the comparative public policy field. It argues that these concepts are important innovations because they suggest a renewed attempt to be both encompassing and discriminating in describing the policy process: encompassing because they refer to actors and relationships in the policy process that take us beyond political-bureaucratic relationships; discriminating because they suggest the presence of many communities and different types of networks. Yet if the concepts are going to continue to make a contribution, some problems must be resolved. The article suggests three that are particularly important: network and community concepts encounter obstacles in incorporating the influence of ma-cropolitical institutions and the power of political discourse; they have some difficulty in accommodating the internationalization of many policy domains; they have not addressed well the issues of policy innovation and policy change.     

After Independence in East Africa

This talk by the Director of the Overseas Development Institutewas given to a joint meeting of the Royal African Society andthe Royal Commonwealth Society on February 1, 1962. Sir JamesRobertson, G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O., K.B.E., took the chair.     

Studies in War-time Organisation: (6) East African Command.

This is an abridgement of a lecture which Gen. Platt gave onthe 31st October at a combined meeting with the Royal EmpireSociety. It has been included in the series on wartime organisationbecause the East Africa Command is possibly the most remarkableexample of the impact of war in the whole of the African Continent.Gen. Platt was, of course, G.O.C., 1941–44.