Book Reviews : Policy Analysis in the Federal Aviation Administration. By STEVEN E. RHOADS. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1974. Pp. xi, 161. $15.00.) The Politics of Broadcast Regulation. ERWIN G. KRASNOW and LAWRENCE D. LONGLEY, Preface by NEWTON MINOW. (New York: St. Martins, 1973. Pp. 148. $3.95.)
| Author | Paul Sabatier |
| Date | 01 December 1974 |
| Published date | 01 December 1974 |
| DOI | 10.1177/106591297402700416 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
738
judges
will
be
just
as
prone
as
ever
to
side
with
those
litigants
with
resources
to
defend
their
interests
persistently
rather
than
intermittently
and
to
hire
the
ablest
lawyers.
(For
some
judges,
as
for
some
administrators,
it
may
also
be
relevant
that
those
litigants
share the
judges’
social
background
and
class
orientation.)
The
failure
of
administrative
regulation
is
documented
well
enough,
and
most
political
scientists
did
not
need
Lazarus
to
inform
them
of
this
fact.
(His
patroniz-
ing
attitude
toward
political
scientists
would
be harder
to
take
if
he
were
not
equally
patronizing
toward
scholars
in
his
own
field,
law.)
But
the
problem
is
more
complex
than
Lazarus
has
grasped,
and
the
solution
is
not
simply
to
turn
the
entire
operation
over
to
the
learned
and
disinterested
members
of
the
bench.
They
are
just
as
prone
as
the
rest
of
us
to
reach
decisions
in
terms
of
their
own
values,
and
for
most
judges
those
values
include
only
a
small
component,
and
that
largely
at
a
verbal
level,
of
commitment
to
defending
weak,
ill
expressed,
and
ephemeral
in-
terests
against
those
that
are
powerful,
sophisticated,
and
persistent.
The
first
225
pages
of
this
book
are
not
altogether
relevant
to
the
conclusions
reached
but
are
in
places
provocative
and
worthwhile.
Specific
episodes
in
the
regulatory
process
are
described
with
flair
and
are
very
much
to
the
point.
I
applaud
the
effort
to
rescue
the
reputation
of
the
original
Populists
from
the
nadir
to
which
it
fell
in
the
aftermath
of Hofstadter’s
work.
I
am
more
dubious
about
the
assumption
that
many
of
the
architects
of
the
New
Deal
regulatory
measures
were
intentionally
protecting
the
major
economic
interests
against
the
threat
of
genuine
public
control
and
that
the
regulatory
agencies
have
been
performing
much
as
their
planners
expected
them
to
do.
But
I
share
Lazarus’s
doubts
about
the
feasibility
of
participatory
democracy
and
his
realistic
awareness
of
the
weak-
ness
of
the
position
of
the
&dquo;new
populists&dquo;
-
the
scholars,
lawyers,
journalists,
and
politicians
who
would
defend
the
unorganized
and
unorganizable
from
those
who
are
all
too
well
organized.
It
is
too
bad
that
Lazarus,
with
whose
political
role
I
am
very
much
in
sympathy,
should
have
taken
as
his
basic
thesis
for
this
book
a
proposition
that
is
both
doubtful
and
naive.
Texas
Tech
University
MURRAY
CLARK
HAVENS
Policy
Analysis
in
the
Federal
Aviation
Administration.
By
STEVEN
E.
RHOADS.
(Lexington,
Mass.:
D.
C.
Heath,
1974.
Pp.
xi,
161.
$15.00.)
The
Politics
of
Broadcast
Regulation.
ERWIN
G.
KRASNOW
and
LAWRENCE
D.
LONGLEY,
Preface
by
NEWTON
MINOW.
(New
York:
St.
Martins,
1973.
Pp.
148.
$3.95.)
In
a
1961
essay,
Marver
Berstein
complained
that
&dquo;policy-making
processes
in
regulatory
agencies
have
scarcely
been
studied,
and
the
forces
influencing
policy-
making
have
not
been
identified
in
specific
regulatory
programs.&dquo;
Instead,
law-
yers
had
concentrated
on
the
minutiae
of
administrative
procedures,
economists
on
the
pernicious
ineff-lciencies
of
government
regulation,
and
political
scientists
(with
the
exception
of
pre-WW
II
studies
by
Herring
and
Leiserson)
on
impressionistic
To continue reading
Request your trial