Medicaid and the limits of state health reform; and governing health: The politics of health policy

✍ Scribed by Jacob S. Hacker

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 125 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0276-8739
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-6688(199723)16:4<630::aid-pam8>3.0.co;2-h

✦ Synopsis

The study of public policy has long occupied a nebulous place in American political science. In the decades after World War II, the behavioral revolution shifted the focus of the discipline away from concrete features of governing institutions and policies and toward political behavior and action. Political scientists concentrated on such behavioral aspects of political life as interest group formation and tactics, congressional motives and action, presidential leadership and success, voting trends and behavior, and popular attitudes and participation. In those rare instances in which scholars examined the substantive details of government policies, their aim was not to explain the policies per se but to answer larger questions about the nature of political behavior and influence. If, as Harold Lasswell [1936] famously claimed, political science is the study of ''who gets what, when, how,'' postwar political science was far more concerned with the who, the when, and the how of political conflict than with the what of public policy outcomes.

In the past two decades, however, the disciplinary barriers separating policy analysis and political science have begun to crumble as political scientists in a range of fields have increasingly placed public policy and its effects at the center of their analyses. Some scholars have sought to explain the massive, 20th century expansion of the welfare state [