SPECIAL INTERESTS AND THE POLICY PROCESS

Books reviewed in this article:
Jeffrey M. Berry, Feeding Hungry People: Rulemaking in the Food Stamp Program
Peter Navarro, The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America
Richard K. Scotch, From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy
Paul Y. Watanabe, Ethnic Groups, Congress, and American Foreign Policy: The Politics of the Turkish Arms Embargo     

POLICY ISSUES IN AMERICAN SECURITY POLICY AND POLICY-MAKING USING AND CONTROLLING NEW WEAPONS

NATO may be confronting a crisis over the cruise missiles. Some allies may seek longer-range, nuclear-armed missile which could enable them to strike at Soviet MR/IRBMs and at other targets inside the USSR; others (along with many Americans) aim at restricting both the range and the missions of cruise missiles. The first option could jeopardize detente, inhibit further progress in SALT and conceivably weaken American control over the uses of nuclear weapons in time of war. The second could cause strains between the United States and its European allies. The best policy would seem to be to (1) delay any decision on cruise missile development and deployment in Europe; (2) seek a two-year freeze on all deployment of new nuclear delivery vehicles in Central Europe and of additional Soviet SS-20 IRBMs; (3) use this “breathing space” to seek agreement on the limitation of cruise missiles, MR/IRBMs and other “gray area” weapons in the region “from the Atlantic to the Urals.”     

PROBLEMS IN POLICY ANALYSIS AND URBAN GOVERNMENT

Malcolm C. Getz, The Economics of the Urban Fire Department
Robert K. Yin, Changing Urban Bureaucracies
Pietro S. Nivola, The Urban Service Problem     

THE ECOSYSTEM HEALTH METAPHOR IN SCIENCE AND POLICY

Ecosystem health' is an increasingly common metaphor in the langauge of science and policy. Given the prominence of both the ecosystem and health concepts within geography, this paper examines the meanings generated by the adoption of the metaphor for scientific research and for environmental policy on the North American Great Lakes. 'Ecosystem' can be characterized as an entity, an abstract concept, or a perspective. As perspective, ecosystem shares many features of postmodern science, emphasizing complexity and holism and calling for the inclusion of human beings in our considerations of nature. The ecosystem health metaphor is politically powerful in its ability to evoke action and concern for the environment with an appeal to the universal experiences of human ill-health. The organismic ecosystem health metaphor provides a new, relevant way of thinking about the natural world. In policy discourse, however, metaphor can be problematic in that there is potential for the author or speaker to hide behind the nonliteral language. Moreover, the acceptance of the ecosystem health metaphor which can draw upon widely held beliefs and norms implies that other ways of knowing the world are necessarily omitted. We highlight some of these issues in a case study of a policy document prepared by the Ecological Committee of the Great Lakes International Joint Commission. To continue to know how to study nature in new ways, metaphors must be encouraged, but their meanings must also be widely explored     

ETHICS AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE IN PLANNING AND RELATED POLICY PROFESSIONS*

Ethical principles in professions can be related either to ends or to means. This article explores attitudes about the ethics of means among urban planners. A variety of means are classified into a hierarchy, from the most to the least ethical, and differences in responses to this hierarchy are explored. Implications for other public policy fields are also discussed.     

POLITICAL RISKS IN AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT AND FOOD POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

This article analyses agricultural and food policies in the Middle East. The author finds that they are inescapably political. He attributes them primarily to governmental decisional styles that are impatient with incremental solutions yet wedded to minimal risk strategies.     

DEPRECIATION PROFILES AND DEPRECIATION POLICY IN A SPATIAL CONTEXT*

This paper demonstrates that the treatment of depreciation in the federal tax code is nonneutral not only with respect to assets and industries, as demonstrated in a number of recent studies, but also with respect to location. Using a unique set of data for manufacturing plants in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, the paper shows that the 1981 Tax Act's reduction of equipment lives to five years is likely to create differences in effective tax rates and wedges between the sample metropolitan areas for groups of plants with the same two-digit industrial classification. These are attributable to spatial differences in corporate tax rates and the type and quality of assets used. The paper concludes by explaining how the results can be generalized to other sectors and metropolitan areas, and by noting some implications for policy.