Running the Good Race, Part 1: High Anxiety: Some Lessons for Graduate Students Entering the Profession
Year: 1991
Type: article
Abstract: Political Scientists and Public Policy ResearchIy, then the institutions are not performing as they should.By that criterion, the preeminent instance of government failure is now, and has been for a decade or more, our outrageous budget deficit.What has been wrong with our institutions on this question?Why can't we do better than a Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act and a summit meeting that only papers over the problem?Why has the government been so impotent?What are the institutional remedies?What about divided government?That has seemed to me to be at the bottom of most of our problems, as I have written elsewhere, because it not only makes for deadlock and delay but destroys the responsibility and accountability that unified party government offers.Mayhew doesn't find the record of divided government to be all that bad, but he admits to methodological difficulties in making his assessment.Anyway, the appraisal, reform, and redesign of institutions is the great challenge for political science today, in my view, and especially for those in our discipline who live and work at or near our national capital.I hope we will rise to the challenge and bear down on these questions of institutional performance and institutional failures and inadequacies.And, when we do, let's have those concluding chapters setting forth our recommendations.
Source: PS Political Science & Politics
Author: John D. Harman
Institution: St. John Fisher University
Language: English
Subfield: General Health Professions
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1966789335