Vol. 2 No. 6 (June, 1992) pp. 91-92
DISABILITY, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND PUBLIC POLICY: THE POLITICS OF
IMPLEMENTATION by Stephen L. Percy. Tuscaloosa: The University of
Alabama Press, 1989. 309 pp.
Reviewed by Henry R. Glick, Department of Political Science and
the Institute on Aging, The Florida State University.
This book describes the details of the adoption and
implementation of federal laws written primarily since 1965 which
are designed to benefit the disabled. Legislation dealing with
the removal architectural barriers, access to public
transportation, public education, and employment are dealt with
in seven chapters rich in the detail of political competition and
outcome uncertainty in various institutional arenas. Disability
policy has received very little attention in political science
and the author provides a complete description of intriguing
politics related to their development. It also is an interesting
story of how disability policy became linked to civil rights and
the politics of translating sometimes detailed, confusing and
ambiguous legislative language into substantive public policy.
The research also sensitizes the reader to the significance of
public policies which often are invisible to the casual observer
or which are overshadowed by other more controversial issues such
as abortion, race relations, the economy, and foreign affairs,
but which nevertheless are crucial for improving or hindering the
daily lives of millions of citizens.
Besides the interesting and unusual subject, probably the main
importance of this book for judicial and legal scholars is that
it applies the concept of policy implementation to legislative
policy in a way that approximates how political scientists have
conceived of the implementation of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions.
Familiar themes including the ambiguity of legislative language
(like judicial language), lack of clear responsibility for policy
implementation, the options of administrators who are expected to
create more specific policies (termed policy refinement), and
lobbying by the affected public -- all are reminiscent of
numerous impact and implementation studies of the U.S. Supreme
Court.
While the study includes discussion of court cases which have
influenced policy, it concentrates on other matters.
Nevertheless, the inclusion of the courts demonstrates that
policy making and implementation cut across many political
institutions and involve various official and unofficial
political actors. The author states "...the results of
implementation can best be understood by tracing the flow of
policy decisions across and through institutional arenas, where
interested parties in issue networks interact, in a
self-interested manner, to affect the distribution of costs and
benefits in their favor." (p. 36).
Although the sub-title is "The Politics of
Implementation," most of the book actually concentrates on
policy refinement: how high level executives view general
legislative language and translate broad mandates into
administrative rules which will be put into place by lower level
officials. Relatively little space is devoted to the impact of
new laws and administrative rules on the people who ultimately
benefit or suffer from governmental decisions. Borrowing from the
literature on agenda setting, the author emphasizes organizing
principles which serve as symbolic guidelines for carrying out a
law and which shape thinking about how future policy should look.
The organizing principles then become operating principles which
are the practical mechanisms for putting policy into effect. This
too is similar to judicial impact research in which most
attention is given to a variety of political actors who
inevitably must translate and refine the general language of the
courts into local policies and actions.
However, the language of public administration and agenda setting
normally have not been applied to judicial research. An important
contribution of the book is that the author relies on concepts
from many different parts of political science and public
administration and indicates that policy research can benefit
from applying
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similar concepts to many institutions and policies. The author
calls on political scientists to develop a general theory of
policy implementation which could be applied to all political
institutions. Presumably, broader research on policy implemen-
tation could produce richer theory, lead to studies which bridge
narrow institutional analyses and, for judicial research in
particular, decrease the isolation or distinctiveness that
frequently characterizes the judicial subfield.
But, the theoretical introduction in Chapter 2 is a bit thin for
suggesting hypotheses or focusing the research on particular
political processes, or for guiding more precise theory building,
comparative case studies or broader aggregate research which
could cumulate and lead to general conclusions about policy
implementation. It primarily describes major concepts used in re-
search on agenda setting and implementation but does not build
toward a set of general propositions or a specific set of
behaviors which need to be examined. The following chapters also
fail to explicitly employ the general theory presented earlier.
The concluding chapter explicitly compares the policy
implementation process across all of the disability policies but
it too does not explicitly indicate how future research on policy
implementation should be done or how to build bridges to theory
and concepts developed in different parts of the discipline.
Since the book concentrates on federal decision making, rather
than on local implementation, it also cannot suggest political or
social variables which might affect policy implementation
differently in various settings or for different policies. This
limitation is not a fault of the book, but rather reflects the
author's decision to concentrate on policy refinement by higher
level officials and institutions.
Despite these qualifications, the book is rich in detail and
provides many illustrations of ambiguity and uncertainty in
policy development. It also underscores the difficulty in
developing general theory that can explain a variety of policy
outcomes, even in the same general area. It will be useful to
researchers in judicial politics as well as other areas of policy
who wish to build toward general and more inclusive theory about
how legislative, judicial and executive policies are translated
or refined into rules, regulations and procedures which affect
Americans in their daily lives.
Copyright 1992