New Releases by Aaron Wildavsky

Political time is counted not in years, but in issues—the Depression defined the political era of the 1930s just as the Cold War did the 1950s and civil rights the 1960s. In the 1980s, the federal budget loomed as the dominant issue by which all others were considered and has become a concern that catalyzes debate in our nation's capital. In this definitive work, Joseph White and Aaron Wildavsky describe and analyze the struggles over taxing and spending from Carter's last year through the Reagan administration. The battle of the budget is largely about defining the role of the government and its relationship to the people. It involves congressional horse-trading, partisan posturing, and technical tricks that affect billions of dollars. It is also a story of politicians operating within constraints set by both public opinion and political interpretation of economic reality. Though budgeting has always been important, its impact on the national agenda has grown dramatically. Based on documentary sources and extensive interviews with participants, The Deficit and the Public Interest explains how budgeting works so the reader can see what is at stake in seemingly arcane disputes. It also explains the relationship of the budget to the media as well as to party and policy activists and explores the ways in which the deficit represents a crisis of confidence in our institutions, preeminently Congress and the presidency. Along the way, it provides a uniquely comprehensive account of the entire budget problem, exploring Gramm-Rudman, tax reform, and the continuing political gridlock. The authors demonstrate that institutions have performed better than their members and critics believe, and they contend that extreme solutions to the deficit would likely be much worse than the original problems. Redefining the problem as one of reducing interest costs so the deficit becomes manageable, they proffer political advice on how to make this approach politically acceptable, both at home and abroad. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Polsby and Wildavsky’s classic text argues that the institutional rules of the presidential nomination and election processes, in combination with the behavior of the mass electorate, structure the strategic choices faced by politicians in powerful and foreseeable ways. We can make sense of the decisions made by differently situated political actors—incumbents, challengers, Democrats, Republicans, consultants, party official, activists, delegates, journalists, and voters—by understanding the ways in which their world is organized by incentives, regulations, events, resources, customs, and opportunities.

As a result of a lifetime of incomparably wide-ranging investigations, Aaron Wildavsky concluded that politics in the United States and elsewhere was a patterned activity, exhibiting recurring regularities. Political values, beliefs, and institutions were neither endlessly varied, nor haphazardly organized. They tended to exhibit a limited range of variation, and were organized in discoverable, predictable ways. In Cultural Analysis, the fourth collection of his essays posthumously published by Transaction, Wildavsky argues that American politics, public law, and public administration are the contested terrain of rival, inescapable political cultures.Analysts of American politics distinguish liberals from conservatives and Democrats from Republicans, but do not explain how these categories of political allegiance develop, maintain themselves, or change. Wildavsky offers a cultural-functional explanation for ideological and partisan coherence and realignment. Wildavsky also felt that these dualisms did not adequately capture the ideological and partisan variation he observed on the political landscape. Like others, he detected another recurring strain of political allegiance: that of classical liberalism or libertarianism. People of this political stripe valued freedom more than equality (the primary political value of contemporary liberals), and also more than order, the primary political value of conservatives.The value of Wildavsky''s reconceptualization of the ideological and social foundations of political conflict, compromise, and coalition is assessed here by Wildavsky''s former colleagues and students at the University of California, Berkeley: Dennis Coyle, Richard Ellis, Robert Kagan, Austin Ranney, and Brendon Swedlow.

Protecting ourselves against the risks associated with modern technologies has emerged as a major public concern throughout the industrialized world. Searching for Safety is unique in its exposition of a theory that explains how and why risk taking makes life safer and exposes the high risk of avoiding change. The book covers a wide range, including how the human body, as well as plants, animals, and insects, cope with danger. Wildavsky asks whether piling on safety measures actually improves safety. While he agrees that society should sometimes try to prevent large-scale harm, he explains why a strategy of resilience—learning from error how to bounce back in better shape—is usually better. His intention is to shift the debate about risk from passive prevention of harm to an active search for safety. This book will be of special interest to those concerned with risk involving technology, health, safety, environmental protection, regulation, and more.

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis is a classic work of the Public Policy discipline. Wildavsky’s emphasis on the values involved in public policies, as well as the need to build political understandings about the nature of policy, are as important for 21st century policymaking as they were in 1979. B. Guy Peters’ critical introduction provides the reader with context for the book, its main themes and contemporary relevance, and offers a guide to understanding a complex but crucial text.

Aaron Wildavsky's greatest concern, as expressed in his writings, is how people manage to live together. This concern may at first appear to have little to do with the study of budgeting, but for Wildavsky budgeting made living together possible. Indeed, as he argues in Budgeting and Governing, now available in paperback, if you cannot budget, you cannot govern. Wildavsky wrote about budgeting because, in his words, "when a process involves power, authority, culture, consensus, and conflict, it captures a great deal of national political life." Wildavsky was interested in budgeting because of what it could tell us about the classic questions of politics--who gets what, how, and why?--and ultimately, politics is about finding terms for living together in spite of ideological differences. "Brendon Swedlow and Transaction have rendered policy scholars, budget specialists, and public managers a tremendous service by pulling together this posthumous collection of Aaron Wildavsky's writings on the vital, if often politically tense, relationship between budgeting and governing. Those who have never read the 16 articles contained in the bookàare in for an intellectual treat. Those already well versed in the major arguments and themes of this work will be reminded of how much the public policy world lost when Wildavsky died in 1993."--Eric M. Patashnik, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management "[Wildavsky] was one of the few people in the field who took the word æscience,' as in political science, to mean precisely that: the scientific study of political behavior and its institutions. He was also one of the even rarer groups of people in the discipline who expressed his moral preferences and concerns in plain words."--Irving Louis Horowitz, Tributes Aaron Wildavsky was Class of 1940 Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, a chair of the political science department, founding dean of the policy school, and a president of the American Political Science Association. Brendon Swedlow is an assistant professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, a research fellow at Duke University's Center for Environmental Solutions, and a fellow of UCLA's Center for Governance. Joseph White is Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy, Case Western Reserve University.

The author of this stunning set of essays on politics and public policy makes crystal clear the meaning of the title. "The revolutionaries of contemporary America do not seek to redistribute privilege from those who have it to those who do not. These radicals wish to arrange a transfer of power from those elites who now exercise it to another elite, namely themselves, who do not. This aspiring elite is of the same race (white), the same class (upper middle and upper), and the same educational background (the best colleges and universities) as those they wish to displace." Wildavsky''s bracing work takes a close look at these elites, who probably make up little more than one percent of the population. He sees their common denominator as hostility toward the masses, anti-American attitudes, derision of authority, and a belief in participatory rather than representative politics. The author carries through these themes in a variety of essays on black-white racial relations, social work orientations and black militancy, the politics of budgetary reform, elite and mass trends in the political party system, and the substitution of bureaucratic for democratic modes of advancing the policy process. This work is, in short, vintage Wildavsky: tough minded, spirited, and plain-spoken political analysis. In his new Introduction, Irving Louis Horowitz examines what has changed and what continues to be salient in Wildavsky''s line of analysis. Essentially, the report card on The Revolt Against the Masses is that the situation described in these essays has changed somewhat in style but hardly at all in substance. The nuclear shield replaces the ABM treaty, and Afghanistan replaces Vietnam as centers of political gravity-but the same coalition of forces across party and economy still dominate the American political process. The justifiably famous essay on "The Two Presidencies" shows how persistent is the gap between the conflict over domestic priorities and the consensus on foreign policy-and why. This is, in short, a classic text that continues to merit careful study by all those interested in political life. Aaron Wildavsky was, until his death in 1993, professor of political science and public policy at the University of California in Berkeley. He was also director of its Survey Research Center. He served as director of the Russell-Sage Foundation, was a president of the American Political Science Association, and held a number of visiting professorships during his lifetime. Most recently, Transaction has posthumously published Wildavsky''s complete essays and papers in five volumes. Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt distinguished university professor emeritus at Rutgers, The State University, and longtime friend and associate of Aaron Wildavsky.

How to behave in the diaspora has been a central problem for Jews over the ages. They have debated whether to assimilate by adopting local customs or whether to remain a God-centered people loyal to their temporal rulers but maintaining the peculiar customs that separated them from their host nations. The question not only of survival, but of the basis for survival, is also a central problem in the Joseph stories of the Book of Genesis. The work shows its readers the grand alternatives of Judaism, instilled in two larger-than-life figures, so its readers can reassess for themselves the road Judaism did not take, and understand why Joseph though admirable in many respects, is left out of the rest of the Bible. The question is answered through the stories about how Joseph, the son of Jacob, saved his people/family from famine by becoming a high-ranking administrator to Pharaoh. By analyzing his behavior to the people over whom he exercises power, Joseph lords it over his brothers, grieves his father, takes lands from Egyptian farmers, and engages in forced deportation. Wildavsky explains why Joseph-the-assimilator is replaced in the Book of Exodus by Moses-the-lawgiver. The book ends by demonstrating that Joseph and Moses are, and are undoubtedly meant to be exact opposites. As in his earlier book on The Nursing Father: Moses as a Political Leader, Wildavsky combines analysis of political and administrative leadership with both traditional and modern study of texts: thematic linkages via plot, grammar, dreams, poetry, and religious doctrine. Thus the chapter on "Joseph the Administrator" is preceded by a chapter on Joseph as The Dream Lord" and followed by an analysis and explanation of why Jacob's obscure blessings to his sons are more like curses. Always the emphasis is on the reciprocal influence of religion and politics, on rival answers to questions about how Hebrews should relate to each other and to outsiders. New, in paperback, the book will be of interest to biblical scholars and readers as well as those concerned with the interaction of religion and political life.

La historia y la teoría de la profesión; Temas de organización y administración; Temas intergubernamentales y comparados; Metodología; La política pública.

Why does it matter is animals cancer studies are worthwhile or worthless or someplace in between? The answers to this question is that regulation of exposure to chemicals, including the intermittent exposure to trace elements to which the general public is subject, is largely based on interpretations of animal cancer bioassays. If these tests are reasonably accurate in predicting the probability, sites, and severity of human cancers, then regulation of chemicals suspected of causing cancer (carcinogens) is on firm ground. But if these animal cancer tests are weak or worse, so that one cannot reasonably predict human cancers from them, then regulation rests on quicksand.

Why do people want what they want? Why does one person see the world as a place to control, while another feels controlled by the world? A useful theory of culture, the authors contend, should start with these questions, and the answers, given different historical conditions, should apply equally well to people of all times, places, and walks of life.Taking their cue from the pioneering work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, the authors of Cultural Theory have created a typology of five ways of life—egalitarianism, fatalism, individualism, hierarchy, and autonomy—to serve as an analytic tool in examining people, culture, and politics. They then show how cultural theorists can develop large numbers of falsifiable propositions.Drawing on parables, poetry, case studies, fiction, and the Great Books, the authors illustrate how cultural biases and social relationships interact in particular ways to yield life patterns that are viable, sustainable, and ultimately, changeable under certain conditions. Figures throughout the book show the dynamic quality of these ways of life and specifically illustrate the role of surprise in effecting small- and large-scale change.The authors compare Cultural Theory with the thought of master social theorists from Montesquieu to Stinchcombe and then reanalyze the classic works in the political culture tradition from Almond and Verba to Pye. Demonstrating that there is more to social life than hierarchy and individualism, the authors offer evidence from earlier studies showing that the addition of egalitarianism and fatalism facilitates cross-national comparisons.

Why are humans one of the few species to have sex in private? Why are human females the only mammals to go through menopause? Why is the human penis so unnecessarily large? There is no more knowledgeable authority than the award-winning author of THE THIRD CHIMPANZEE to answer these intriguing questions. Here is a delightfully entertaining and enlightening look at the unique sex lives of humans. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.