The argument that the rigid institutional arrangements of the past, namely subgovernments, have given way to decentralized, more open and informal policy issue networks is increasingly supported by a burgeoning body of case study literature. Paul Hallacher's book is an example of one such study that attempts to go beyond this observation and hypothesize the causal connections between policy subsystem structure and policy outcomes in the area of American cooperative technology policy. The United States provides a suitable environment for examining the hypothetical link between policy subsystem and outcome in this policy area because of the differences in political culture at the federal and state levels with regards to government in assisting industry. These differences have manifested themselves as open conflict between Democrats and Republicans over interventionist policy.
The two programmes under consideration—the Advanced Technology Partnership (ATP) and the Manufacturing Extension Program (MEP)—are introduced within the context of declining American industrial productivity and GDP growth rates in the 1970s and the breakdown of the Cold War consensus around state funding of science and technology research. Chapter 1 describes the policy subsystem approach, which attempts to move beyond description and provide verifiable models, capable of predicting outcomes. Hallacher briefly outlines the historical development of policy subsystem theories, describing the salient points of the institutional approach and Lasswell's policy cycle model. The inability of these approaches to provide causal explanations for policy outcomes is the consequence of a lack of a role given to interest groups and the bureaucracy in the former, and the latter's reliance upon a process that does not reflect the reality of policy creation. The subgovernment model is seen as a way of addressing these inadequacies and countering the pluralist argument with respect to the diffusion of control over the policy process. The salient features of the policy issue network approach, including agenda setting and the roles of policy learning, policy entrepreneurs and intergovernmental networks are briefly outlined with the goal of providing the reader sufficient background in the theoretical context within which the case studies are situated.
Chapters 2 and 3 chronicle the origins and development of the Advanced Technology Partnership and Manufacturing Extension Program, respectively. The ATP was launched in the late 1980s with the intention of providing development assistance for high-risk technologies. This programme was made possible by the convergence of a number of factors, including the persistent efforts of senators such as Ernest Hollings, the return of Senate control to the Democrats in 1986, and a general epistemological change favouring policy solutions to address the problems of declining American technological leadership, productivity and competitiveness. The ATP, structurally a subgovernment, was launched and driven largely through congressional efforts, with little involvement by outside constituencies and was subjected immediately to political pressure to redirect funding to other areas or faced objections by more conservative Republicans that government funds should not be used to fund civilian industrial development. Conflict over the role of the ATP has continued through its elevation as a primary policy instrument by the Clinton administration, challenges by a Republican Congress, and the Bush administration.
In comparison to the ATP, the MEP was developed through the efforts of a number of state officials and representatives in conjunction with the private sector. This broader level of involvement occurred over time and only in response to challenges concerning the programme's legitimacy. Like the ATP, the MEP benefited from a change in policy makers' attitudes, permitting a greater public role in managing the conversion of American industrial and technological capacity from defence to civilian production. After an initially supportive nascent period under the Bush and Clinton administrations, the MEP came under scrutiny during the Republican-dominated 104th Congress and the George W. Bush administration. These assaults against the MEP were successfully countered by the MEP's peak organization, the Modernization Forum, and concerted industrial association and state-level representative lobbying, respectively. The MEP was initially structured like a subgovernment. However, in later stages of its development (in particular after the Republicans gained control of Congress and began to actively oppose both the MEP and the ATP) it assumed more features of a policy issue network, as membership in the policy subsystem expanded to include congressional and state officials from a wide range of committees and states.
Hallacher reinforces the claims arising from the qualitative approach utilized in earlier chapters with a quantitative comparison between the two programmes across eight descriptive variables. He concludes, based upon the MEP's larger number and scope of subsystem actors (including a larger number of congressional members), the MEP's higher rate of interaction between subsystem members, and a lower rate of conflict between subsystem members in the ATP, among other factors, that the ATP is characteristically a subgovernment, and the MEP a policy issue network. Hallacher also emphasizes the consistency of his findings across all variables under consideration in order to claim that the theoretical distinctions between subgovernment and policy issue network are empirically supported.
To meet his goals of explaining the differences between the two subsystems, and the cause-effect relationships between subsystem structure and policy learning and subsystem stability, Hallacher relies upon a number of analytical variables, including the role of policy entrepreneurs, policy design methods, policy learning and subsystem stability. He concludes that the involvement of knowledgeable state officials in the MEP context was largely responsible for an increase in the level of expertise and discourse that attracted policy entrepreneurs and drove an expansion of the programme (and its associated funding). The demand for policy entrepreneurs is, in Hallacher's opinion, what moves the policy subsystem closer to a policy issue network. The central role for policy learning is also supported by the empirical evidence that policy learning is most effective when conflict across coalitions is maintained at an intermediate level; this is consistent with the advocacy coalition approach. The policy issue network facilitates learning and knowledge transfer, giving it a competitive advantage against subgovernments in securing resources. In combination, these factors contributed to the MEP's better ability to deal with political challenges.
Paul Hallacher has made a valuable contribution to the corpus of policy network case studies with his soundly reasoned book. However, his work may have benefited from being situated better within the existing policy literature. This reviewer's only other criticism is not levelled at Hallacher's work specifically, but the policy issue network literature in general. Without more studies from which a set of generalized theories about the relationships between policy issue network structure and policy outcomes can be derived, Hallacher's work risks remaining an idiosyncratic, albeit well-researched and empirically supported, study.
