Ideas, Interests and Institutions
Review by Charles Richardson
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Why Universities Matter: A Conversation about Values, Means and Directions
edited by Tony Coady
Allen and Unwin, 2000, $24.95, 254pp. ISBN 1 86508 038 1

This book was controversial even before its publication. It was turned down by Melbourne University Press, a decision that in the circumstances appeared to be related to the bookÕs criticism of some of Melbourne UniversityÕs policy directions. (This controversy is reviewed in an afterword by Morag Fraser.) Boosted by the sort of publicity that many authors would kill for, it now appears under the imprint of Allen and Unwin.

Is it worthy of so much publicity? The book originated in a workshop at the Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues and, although it is more well-integrated than many such collections, the quality of the contributions is inevitably somewhat uneven. Nonetheless, the authors, who include some of AustraliaÕs most distinguished academics, are thoughtful and intelligent people, and they have some interesting things to say about the state of tertiary education in Australia.

Not many readers will quarrel with the general claim that there are serious problems in todayÕs universities. There is widespread agreement that present arrangements for governance and funding are not working well. Among economic liberalsÑoften called (mostly by their opponents) economic rationalistsÑthere is a rough consensus on the sort of change that is needed: funding to be directed to students rather than institutions, a reduction in government controls, decentralisation, deregulation, and privatisation.

These liberals will have difficulty recognising themselves in the chapters of this book. That fact, however, makes it more rather than less important that they should read it. It could almost be read as a case study in the degeneration of the reputation of Ôeconomic rationalismÕ.

Once upon a time, economic liberalism focused primarily on freedom. It opposed bureaucracy and centralisation, and exposed diseconomies of scale. Economic liberals defended the Hayekian idea of spontaneous order, as in Michael PolanyiÕs explanation of scientific progress, quoted approvingly in this book by Seamus Miller (p.127).

But if this is still what economic liberalism is about, then the authors represented here are not its enemies. Listen to Tony CoadyÕs shortlist of problems in the universities: Ôincreased bureaucratisation . . . The cult of innovation . . . The Òbig is betterÓ mantra . . . increase in authoritarian, top-down, cursorily discussed decision-making . . . uniformity . . . obsession with status, stratification and hierarchy . . . industrialisationÕ (pp.17-23). He identifies the causes as Ôthe financial control of universities made possible by . . . direct federal funding [and] the treatment of universities as branches of the public service,Õ leading to Ôsubordination of universities to political control to an alarming degreeÕ (xi-xiii).

Yet Coady and most of the other authors are positioning themselves as opponents of Ôeconomic rationalismÕ and the reforms associated with it. The lesson here is that hostility from academics towards market-based reforms cannot be attributed to any commitment to centralisation and government control. (Experience shows that even those who appear philosophically to have such a commitment often turn out not to in practice.)

What is driving the opposition is rather a quite understandable suspicion that reforms will only run one way: that controls that protect them from the market will be given up, but controls that impair their independence in other ways will be maintained.

Personally, I do not doubt the sincerity of many reformers, including some in the present federal government. But I can appreciate the doubts others have, since right-wing ÔreformsÕ have an unhappy record of pushing decentralisation only to a point where it does not threaten the central authorityÕs power to have its own way. The governmentÕs own legislation (stalled in the Senate) on student unionism is a classic example of this, trying to give prescriptions from Canberra for the structure and funding of student services.

Of course, the hypocrisy is not all on one side: academics who resent government control are much less happy at the idea of losing government funding. These authors, however, are not chiefly concerned about money. Miller remarks that Ônothing I have said is inconsistent with the notion of a privately funded universityÕ (p.113), and Peter Karmel presents a detailed plan that amounts to voucher funding in all but name. WhatÕs more, they do not believe that their opponents are either. As Judith Brett says, ÔThe interest of most of those pushing for university reform is in powerÕ (p.146).

Indeed, it is a depressing picture that emerges of Australian universities, mired in Ôinternal institutional incoherenceÕ (Miller p.125) and embroiled in what Coady calls a Ôcool warÕ between desperately burdened academics and virulently proliferating administrators. Bruce Langtry, after suggesting that universities should aim to Ôprovide a liberal education,Õ Ôengage in research aimed at . . . theoretical insight,Õ and Ôcontribute to their societyÕs critical self-evaluation,Õ notes that Ô[t]hese points would be platitudinous if they were not, at the end of the twentieth century, so controversialÕ (p.88). If he is right, then we have a real problem.

But if we are all willing to forego some of our buzzwords and our factional loyalties, there is good news in this book as well. The good news is that the real goals of economic liberalism (as distinct from the ruling misperceptions) have broad and insightful supportÑeven from among their supposed opponents. These authors have little time for the shibboleths of the radical left; Miller fingers postmodernism as a culprit in the decline of the university, and Tony Klein attacks the demand for equality of outcomes, while also pointing out that the Ôethos of short-term thinkingÕ is Ôall blamed on economic rationalism ø perhaps erroneouslyÕ (p.103). They suggest, in fact, that collectivism is more of an issue on the right:

The fundamental obligation of academics is to the truth, as opposed to its consequences . . . Moreover, in so far as consequences need to be taken into account, it is not the business of academics to give overriding weight to the interests of their country, or their community, or, indeed, their university (Miller, p.123).

Sympathy for the values and the methods of economic liberalism extends further than is sometimes thought. In this book, Langtry acknowledges the value of economic analysis in eminently sensible terms:

Just as economists may find it illuminating to treat marriage as an economic transaction, so they may find it illuminating to treat a university as a firm supplying services to individual consumers, or to the state. But marriage partners would typically be unwise to treat their relationship as primarily consisting in the trading of services in order to fulfil the mutually disinterested desires of each (p.93).

Karmel makes explicit the association of decentralisation with the market economy (pp.165-171). Economic method extends even to notorious leftists such as Simon Marginson, who unearths the unintended consequences of ÔmanagerialistÕ reforms.

The challenge now is for economic liberals to harness some of this unconscious goodwill, and produce reforms that will avoid crushing diversity and strengthening bureaucracy. The concerns of these authors should be taken on board, and the criticisms they make of economism run amok deserve to be heeded. Most of all, liberals of all stripes need to remember that centralisation and hierarchy are their enemy, not their friend. Let Jane Marceau have the last word:

The organisational form of the future in business will be dynamic and ever-changing networks. Universities need to figure out how to go down the same road
(p. 228).

Review by Andrew Norton

The Big Test: The Secret History of American Meritocracy
By Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999, 406pp, US$27, ISBN 0-374-29984-6

In the United States, university admissions are a major legal and political issue, the subject of disputes in the Supreme Court and state referendums. In Australia, by contrast, they cause only minor controversy. In 1997 the then federal Education Minister, Senator Amanda Vanstone, gave a speech decrying the Ôtyranny of the TER,Õ but the oppressed did not rise.

Nicholas LemannÕs The Big Test is a compelling narrative account of the changing ways in which Americans decide who goes to which university.

For much of the history of AmericaÕs elite colleges, academic merit was not the main criterion for admission. Their principal sources of new enrolments were students from a pool of elite WASP colleges and the children of past graduates, heavily overlapping groups.

In early 21st century hindsight this looks grossly unfair, but put back in its context it is less so. It is certainly not LemannÕs intention to defend the old way of doing things, but the history is useful for putting things into perspective.

In earlier times, the purpose in going to an Ivy League college was for most students not to get a good job, as that would be arranged by relatives or friends in any case. Nor was high academic achievement essential. The colleges were more concerned with leadership and character than either money making or intellectual success. In a search for students suited to these goals, to look for new enrolments among the children of alumni and schools with similar aims was not a foolish idea.

In the years around World War II, this idea of what universities were about changed, and with it their social composition. Academic achievement became more important and the universities needed some way of predicting who would do well when they arrived.

The method that emerged as dominant was the SAT, the letters standing originally for the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then Scholastic Achievement Test, and now nothing at all. The name changes reflect ongoing controversies about what it is that the test measures.

The SATÕs dominance was not a foregone conclusion, and how it became so is the first part of the book. Lemann saves this from being dry history by telling his story through the lives of the major players, especially Henry Chauncey who ran the Educational Testing Service, the administrator of the SAT, during the years in which it became the main means by which the major universities selected their students.

Using the SAT did diversify the social and ethnic backgrounds of students at the elite American colleges. In the 1960s, however, the SAT began to incur widespread criticism, as the exclusion of American blacks from universities became an issue. The SAT was itself colour-blind, but blacks performed significantly worse on the SAT than other ethnic groups, as they still do today. In the 1999 SAT, blacks scored an average of 856, compared to 1055 for whites and 1058 for Asians.

The response to this problem was affirmative action, letting in blacks and other minorities on SAT scores below their white peers. While not abandoning academic merit as a principle, affirmative action was a partial reversion to the pre-SAT practice of taking into account social background, though this time privileging low rather than high social status.

Predictably, affirmative action prompted opposition from those who thought colour-blind academic merit should be used for university admissions. A white man named Alan Bakke, who had been rejected for medical school enrolment despite doing better on the medical school aptitude test than all the sixteen black quota students, challenged this decision in the Supreme Court. He scored a partial victory in 1978, when the Court ruled against quotas, but said that universities could take race into account in their admissions practices.

The Bakke case did not satisfy opponents of affirmative action. In 1996 the issue was put to the Californian voters in Proposition 209, a referendum on whether or not affirmative action in admissions should be allowed. By a margin of 54-46 the voters decided to outlaw affirmative action.

Proposition 209 has not ended the issue of race in education, in California or elsewhere. Universities can still find ways to increase the numbers of minority students on campus, such as by offering a place to a percentage of every graduating class in each high school in their state, the de facto racial segregation of schooling ensuring this will provide minority students.

Australia has been spared all this controversy. One reason is that the stakes are lower. We do not have a tier of universities that are so dramatically different from the others that there is a hugely competitive race to get in. There are a dozen or so major American universities that admit fewer than 25% of applicants, and places like Harvard, Princeton or Stanford admit only 12 or 13%. The University of Melbourne, in the top handful of Australian institutions, offers places to around half its applicants, four times the proportion of Harvard.

Australia has benefited from less fraught race relations, and people of non-English speaking background (NESB) do not have systematically lower participation in higher education. In fact, research done a few years ago shows that they have higher participation than those with an English speaking background, though with significant variationsÑpeople from the Middle East and southern Europe are much less likely to attend university than people from Asia. Nor are NESB students confined to less prestigious institutions. Four of the Group of Eight ÔsandstoneÕ universities have NESB proportions above the national average, massively so in the case of UNSW and Sydney, and only the ANU is well below, reflecting the ethnic composition of Canberra.

Apart from the case of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, I am not aware of calls for affirmative action in Australia. There is no evidence that there is a significant pool of students of any background being excluded from universities, with the number of qualified applicants who miss out being quite low in recent years. The small affirmative action schemes for Indigenous people show the problems these programmes can face, with admissions being roughly equivalent to their proportion of the population, but graduation rates being much lower.

This is not to say that the Ôtyranny of the TERÕ should be imposed to stop universities enrolling students without a strong school background. Rankings based on school performance are used not because they are the only way of assessing merit, but because they are a relatively cheap way of allocating university places. Other methods can be used to find people who are likely to be competent students.

In fact, about a quarter of commencing students each year are admitted on some basis other than the TER or previous university study. The only system-wide data, based on the 1992 commencing students, shows that non-TER students do worse than those who came in via a TER score, with about 60% of female non-TER students completing by 1997, compared to 72% of TER students. Nevertheless, the diverse admissions policy ensures that every year thousands of people who would otherwise be excluded gain a degree.

Universities also admit students who have had some disadvantage on lower TER scores than normal. Where they get appropriate support this need not be a problem. In a very successful UNSW programme, lower-TER students actually outperformed their normal entry colleagues.

Both the Right and the Left in America have become very excited by university admissions, which helps make The Big Test that rare thing, a serious scholarly book that also tells a page-turning story. In Australia, by quietly letting university admissions officers get on with their job, we seem to have arrived at a better outcome. Or maybe that is too optimistic a conclusion. Perhaps it is just that our funding system means we donÕt have any universities worth fighting about.

Review by Gregory Melleuish

National and Permanent?
The Federal Organisation of the Liberal Party of Australia 1944Ñ1965
By Ian Hancock
Melbourne University Press, 2000, 317 pp, $49.95, ISBN 0 522 84873 7

Robert Menzies: A Life, Volume 2 1944Ñ1978
By A.W. Martin
Melbourne University Press, 1999, 596pp, $49.95, ISBN 0 52284864 8

These two new books cover what was an extraordinary period of Australian history, the seventeen years of the rule of Robert Menzies as Prime Minister, from two quite different, and yet ultimately complementary, perspectives. They provide insights and clues into what can be seen as the central problem involved in understanding the party founded by Menzies in 1944: what exactly was meant by the term liberalism after which the party was named, and how this liberalism informed its practice of government.

For Martin the focus is Menzies himself, his rocky road through the 1940s as he re-established his political reputation (as well as helping to found the Liberal Party) through to the triumph of 1949 and his many years at the helm. There is a lot about Menzies and his trips overseas (usually by boat and often extended), his interest in cricket, his family, how often he felt fatigued and his holidays. There is also politics, and how Menzies dealt with his colleagues and underlings. But the picture that tends to emerge is of a titan who inhabited the calm above the storm, and who, in his own way, embodied the domestic ideals of the average Australian. Perhaps this emphasis reflects the sources that Martin used in writing the volume, including MenziesÕ correspondence with members of his family and friends, including Lionel Lindsay.

It also indicates that for Menzies liberalism as an abstract political theory did not count for a lot. What mattered to him was the almost instinctual inheritance of Britishness as embodied in a way of life that enabled and encouraged people to pursue their particular, usually domestic, goals.

Liberalism meant an inherited way of doing things and conducting oneÕs life. If supporting such a way of life meant a degree of state paternalism, then so be it. The enemy was the collectivism of communism and socialism because they represented an alien and repressive way of life; and it might be necessary to curb some liberal freedoms to defeat them. Martin demonstrates that Menzies genuinely believed that the Cold War in the early 1950s was a real war and demanded an appropriate response.

HancockÕs study of the Liberal Party organisation confirms this view. Despite the unpromising title this book is both a good read and revealing of the outlook pervading Liberal circles during those years.

Again, what emerges is that the liberals of that era were not defending an abstract creed but a particular way of life in which an inherited Britishness loomed large. This is demonstrated by the overwhelming Protestant nature of the party membership, and the hostility shown by a retiring Liberal member to the young Phillip Lynch when he was initially pre-selected for Flinders in 1966. Hancock puts it nicely when he writes that at the core of the Liberals there were Ôunspoken assumptionsÕ and Ôtreasured beliefsÕ
(p. 235).

This is not to be disparaging of these Liberals but merely to point out that their liberalism owed more to Burkean ÔprejudicesÕ than to explicit doctrinal statements, such as those favoured by an advocate of a more collectivist approach such as B.A. Santamaria. Nor did this prevent the post-war generation from being inspired by a genuine spirit of idealism. They were at one with Menzies on the need to combat the excesses of collectivism as expressed in the attempt by the Chifley government to implement a policy of bank nationalisation. It was not a reactionary backlash but a desire to create a better Australia that drove the Liberals to victory in 1949.

Of course, over the years this idealism, and the number of Liberal Party members, declined as the party organisation became essentially a device for re-electing Mr Menzies. The party organisation wanted to have some influence over policy but never succeeded, partly because in their hearts Liberals knew that party ÔdemocracyÕ on the Labor Party model is subversive of the ideal of responsible government. Liberal Party organisers sometimes looked wistfully at what appeared to be the superior organisation of the Labor Party, but Hancock rightly points out that the Liberal Party should not be judged in terms of the Labor model. It was its own model with its peculiar strengths and weaknesses. It was sui generis.

Nevertheless he does point out how much the Labor Party loomed in the thinking of the Liberal organisers of the 1950s. Today we tend to think in terms of the invincibility of the Liberal/Country Party governments of those years, especially after the Labor split. From the inside, however, there emerges a picture that is coloured by a constant anxiety that the party will implode, just as the United Australia Party had before it. And it is worth recalling that veterans of the party expressed similar fears in 1994 as it underwent serious difficulties.

This anxiety was accompanied by a questioning about what the Liberal Party actually stood for, fuelled by the fact that even at the worst of times the Labor Party seemed to attract half of the votes of the Australian people, a figure that the Liberals could not approach. From that point of view the party was a failure; it governed because of an alliance with the Country Party that it resented and which it saw as largely opportunistic. In many Liberal eyes the Labor Party remained, in the 1950s, the Ônatural party of governmentÕ, and it was a party that stood for certain principles. The Liberals stood for Ôanti-LaborÕ rather than anything positive; in the final analysis they existed to keep Menzies in power.

Given the ÔinstinctiveÕ nature of their beliefs this is too hard a judgement, but it does indicate a certain hollowness at the core of the liberalism of the Liberal Party. Part of the problem was that the period of Liberal dominance in the 1950s coincided with a period when collectivist ideas were still powerful and it was generally accepted that planning and state intervention in the name of the individual were both good things. Liberals tended to believe that service to the state was the way to fulfil their true nature as individuals. It is one of the great paradoxes of Australian political history that the Liberals presided over the collectivist 1950s and that Labor was to implement many of the policies of the revived liberalism of the 1980s.

In the 1950s the Liberal Party could rely on a mixture of anti-socialism and its instinctive British heritage to create an ethos that did not require an excess of liberal philosophy. Unfortunately this left it somewhat exposed once the communist threat receded and the British liberal tradition began to erode in Australia. Once instinct had gone it was necessary to articulate a more coherent liberal philosophy that defined what the party stood for in a new age in which individualism had, almost by stealth, vanquished older collectivist ideals.

Australia has made a significant transition since the 1950s. We live in an age that is individualist rather than collectivist and, despite occasional outbreaks of nostalgia, there can be no going back to the 1940s and 1950s. That world no longer exists.

Economic liberalism has been the major attempt to articulate a coherent liberal philosophy for this new age. It has striven to fill the void left by the erosion of instinctive traditionalism. It may not be perfect, and I believe that those who criticise it for its excessive emphasis on economic efficiency have a valid point, but it is up to those who find it inadequate to come up with something better. It is simply illegitimate to wish that the good old days of a supposedly more ÔhumaneÕ liberalism might yet return. ÔUnspoken assumptionsÕ are no longer good enough, partly because the transmission of Burkean ÔprejudicesÕ that underpinned those assumptions has effectively broken down. We live in an age of articulated political ideas that need to be spelled out explicitly. Liberalism cannot survive without intellectual substance.

It is the virtue of both these books, and they are both very good books, that they carry us back to a time when this was not the case in Australia. Discussing the 1954 Royal Tour, Martin states that many of the attitudes of the time are not fully appreciated by younger historians. This emphasises the gulf that exists between that age and our own. At the same time it also indicates that there can beÊ no going back to the values of that time. In the new millenium there has to be articulated a version of liberalism that is more than anti-Labor, more than instinctive traditionalism and which self-consciously spells out what liberalism means today.

Review by Richard Salmons

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
By Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown & Co., New York, 2000, 279pp, US$24.95, ISBN 0316316962

It takes a perceptive mind to connect a craze for Hush Puppies shoes with the dramatic decline in crime in New York City. But this is what Malcolm Gladwell has done in his book, which argues that social trends and behaviour patterns are similar to medical epidemics in one sense: they can suddenly expand or contract due to events that create what he calls a Ôtipping pointÕ.

Based on a 1996 article in The New Yorker, Gladwell draws from a wide range of texts in history, sociology and psychology to make his case. In doing so, he has written an interesting work of sociology, which also raises questions about what sociology should set out to achieve.

Gladwell defines trends in shoes and crime alike as epidemics for three reasons. He says the fashion craze and the crime rate are both examples
of contagious behaviour; in
both cases, marginal changes had disproportionately large effects, and both times the changes occurred quickly.

To organise the case studies he draws from the social science literature, Gladwell talks about tipping points in terms of three rules. First, a few people drive the trend. They may be Ôsocial connectorsÕ, with big social networksÑthough they may range in personality from one Darnell ÔBoss ManÕ McGee, an inhabitant of mid-1990s East St. Louis pool halls who infected 30 women with HIV, to Paul Revere, the American revolutionary who rode at night to warn his many contacts of the approaching British.

They could be ÔmavensÕ, avid collectors of information, such as GladwellÕs example of a Jewish man who always knows the best prices for ham. Or they might be ÔsalesmenÕ, such as a financial planner
who appears to conform to the psychological literatureÕs reasons for why some people are more persuasive than others.

GladwellÕs second rule relates to the way ÔcontagiousÕ messages are memorable. He compares the ÔstickyÕ impact of a memorable message with studies that compared apparent HIV outbreaks in the 1950s with the epidemic in the 1980s. In the earlier case, the virus did not remain with the carriers and the outbreaks were contained; later, it changed and ÔstuckÕ to the victims. Gladwell compares this with the way information is presented on a television programme such as ÔSesame StreetÕ, and argues that the literature shows how small changes in the format of the programme made its messages much more memorable.

The third rule is Ôthe power of contextÕ, which leads Gladwell to a more detailed discussion of New YorkÕs declining crime. He discusses the case of the 1984 Ôsubway vigilanteÕ, Bernhard Goetz, in the light of James Q. Wilson and George KellingÕs Ôbroken windowsÕ theory. Gladwell summarises their argument:

If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.

Gladwell also draws from some famous experiments in psychology
to illustrate the effect of context
on behaviour. In a 1973 test, psychologists arranged for seminary students to walk past a person in need. Even those who had just re-read the story of the Good Samaritan were most likely to decide whether to help the person on the basis of whether or not they were running late. In another test of the same year, the so-called Stanford prison experiment, ordinary students suddenly became sadists when cast into a brutal prison scenario.

I am reluctant to be critical of a book that brings together such a wonderful variety of learning. (Want to know the story behind the phrase Ôsix degrees of separationÕ? Turn to p.34.) But GladwellÕs boosterism for his argument started to grate after a while. The pleasure of reading such clearly presented prose gave way to a feeling I was reading a Strunk & White-style formula about how to write. (ÔFirst say what you are going to say, say it, then say what you just said.Õ)

The product of my misgiving was a serious doubt about whether GladwellÕs three ÔlawsÕ of Tipping Points were little more than three chapter headings. In the case of ÔstickinessÕ, I could not see any real connection between the behaviour of HIV and the effectiveness of Sesame Street.

Similarly, I donÕt think there is much of a link between the context effects that may have reduced New York crime and the role of social connectors. I suspect that on further examination some of GladwellÕs examples of Ôtipping pointsÕ may not turn out to be anything of the kind. In other cases, it may turn out that social trends such as fashion crazes and crime rates may work for the reasons Gladwell has described, but apart from the ÔtipÕ itself, each really has nothing to do with the other.

Having said this, Gladwell still deserves credit for producing an important book about sociology for the general reader. It fits well with the school of perceptive journalism that included David Riesman and Daniel Bell and produced many of the classics of the field.

Yet it is also a way of doing sociology that has fallen from
favour, as the discipline has been divided between strict social scientists on one hand, and politically motivated Ôcritical theoristsÕ on the other. (BellÕs own sociology programme, at Harvard, was described by a prominent academic as: Ôwhat hard-boiled sociologists in the mainstream would call a department full of brilliant journalists. They do soft, perceptive, intelligent work, but it isnÕt science.Õ)

GladwellÕs journalistic approach has, if nothing else, helped put a label on a variety of events that hadnÕt been given a single name before. As Richard Bernstein has written, one of the great roles of sociology has been the way it Ôhas given the world phrases and concepts that crystallised new and blinding insights into the conditions of individuals in societyÕ, such as ÔcharismaÕ, ÔlifestyleÕ and Ôpower eliteÕ. By popularising the term Ôtipping pointÕ, Gladwell could have a durable impact at this level at least.

In addition, while I was suspicious of GladwellÕs bullet-point writing style, I do not want to sound too churlish about what is still the rare virtue of clear prose. Even if his overarching argument is weak, Gladwell succeeds in the vital task of giving us the information. In a market not overly receptive to new books about serious social science, The Tipping Point has been widely reviewed and recommended by the likes of the main business books page of Amazon.com.

If just a few business people read about the psychology case studies in the book then Gladwell will have succeeded in telling people something new. This sums up the merit of the book: the way it reports the existence of a great deal of research that fits a common pattern. The experts already knew this; Gladwell is the first to tell everyone else about it. That may be journalism, but it is also bringing a new idea in sociology to many people who had never heard it before.

Review by Dr Nigel Ashford

Public Policy and Political Ideas
Dietmar Braun and Andreas Busch
Cheltenham, UK, Edward ElgarÊ 1999,Ê £49.95, ISBN 1 8064 182 7

Anyone concerned with influencing public policy has to address the question of what determines policy: ideas, interests or institutions? The existence of
think tanks shows that some people believe in the significance of ideas, and that beliefs about society and government affect policy outcomes.

Yet the resources devoted to ideas-based institutions such as think tanks is miniscule compared to those devoted to political parties and interest groups. This reflects a post-war consensus among political scientists that interests are the driving force of politics, mediated through specific institutions.

This consensus was undermined by the rise ofÊ Thatcherism, Reaganism and economic rationalism, which were not and could not have been predicted by conventional political science. This has led to a major resurgence in academic literature emphasising the central role of ideas, as reflected in this volume.

The editors claim that they Ôdid not intend to demonstrate that ideas matter. This has been demonstrated beyond doubt by the existing literature. Instead, it endeavoured to answer the question when and how ideas might matter in comparison with the more common analytical frameworks of interests and institutionsÕ (p.190).

It does this in two parts: three theoretical chapters which explain the many different ideational theories that exist before comparing them to rational choice theories of interests; and seven empirical chapters that seek to test these theories. They cover a wide range of topics: higher education, new public management, tax harmonisation, drug policy, European regional policy, health,
and welfare states. A wide range of countries are considered, but they are almost exclusively taken from Europe. The US literature is ignored. There is no case study taken from Australia, although one of the authors, Janet Lewis on health, is from the University of Melbourne.

Unfortunately the book is written in the turgid prose that covers for academic writing, so it is difficult to recommend the book to anyone except academic specialists in this area, or policy experts with a particular interest in the policies studied. Nonetheless, the book does raise some interesting questions for readers of Policy.

First, how do ideas influence policy? In a variety of ways: as resources, legitimisers, cognitive frames, catalysts, inhibitors, learning processes, and perceptions of interests. Braun identifies those theories that see ideas as a means of power-seeking versus those based on argumentation. While the ideational theories are multitudinous, the book concentrates on three main ones.

First is the neo-marxist referential theory based on Gramsci, who sought to save marxism from refutation by introducing the idea of ideological hegemony. In this view, ideas are used as a means of defending interests. How many of us defenders of the market have been met, not with argument and refutation but dismissal as simply the paid hacks of business interests. This reflects the referential theory.

The second school, formulated by Paul Sabatier, is known as advocacy coalitions, which are policy networks of actors sharing a common policy project based on shared principles. The third is Peter HallÕs paradigmatic model, which explains the rise and fall of Keynesianism using the cohesive quality of ideas to explain how Keynesianism came to be embraced by a wide variety of interests. It is Hall who emerges strongest from all the empirical studies.

The second interesting question is whether ideas can be reconciled with rational choice models that emphasise interests. One of the foundations of modern liberalism has been rational (or public) choice theories which explain policies as the result of narrow special interests, thus tending to downplay the impact of ideas.

In one sense public choice is self-refuting in that its advocates clearly believe that if everyone shared their perception of the political process, policymaking would improve. Busch shows that ideas are more than ÔhooksÕ for interests, as some rational choice theorists claim; however, ideas as Ôfocal pointsÕ is compatible with the insights of rational choice.

Third, there is the question as to why liberalism has had a dramatic affect on economic policy, while the welfare state has proved to be highly resilient in the face of the liberal onslaught. The explanations for welfare resilience include the legacy of path-dependency, the lock-in of interests and electoral hazard. I think the considerable literature on this subject underestimates the dynamic effects of the reforms that have been put in place. Reform does not require the crisis or ÔruptureÕ that one saw with macroeconomic policy.

Liberals have failed to develop a compelling narrative that explains the weaknesses of the welfare state as structural rather than being due to resources, a story that articulates alternatives for overcoming uncertainty, and that convinces that the status quo is a recipe for disaster in the future. Welfare reform in the United States would be a useful model. We need a storyteller such as Charles Murray to transform the debate.

This volume may not be exciting reading, but it left me more optimistic about the prospects of moving the policy paradigm in a more liberal direction. It would be helpful to have additional resources for those who contribute the most to the ideational debate. Just as every academic book ends with a demand for more research, so perhaps every article in Policy should end with a call for more donations to CIS!

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