Vol. 4 No. 1 (January, 1994) pp. 10-12
A KINDER, GENTLER RACISM? THE REAGAN-BUSH CIVIL RIGHTS LEGACY by
Steven A. Shull. Armonk and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. 256 pp.
Cloth $45. Paper $20.
Reviewed by Howard Gillman, Department of Political Science,
University of Southern California.
From the provocative title one might expect a lively polemic
against the civil rights record of the Reagan and Bush
administrations. Instead we are offered a comprehensive but
mostly dispassionate discussion of civil rights policymaking
during these presidencies, with a special emphasis on the
question of how much influence presidents have on the
policymaking process. Professor Shull's mastery of the
conventions of policy analysis are evident in the way he marshals
his eclectic evidence in support of his conclusions regarding the
power of presidential agenda setting and the centrifugal forces
that dominate later stages of the process. His thorough and
balanced overview of recent civil rights policymaking should
satisfy undergraduate instructors who are looking for a
supplemental text for courses on the presidency or public policy.
At the same time, because Shull chose to focus on the question of
how different players influence the process, he has little to say
about the more politically- charged question raised in the title
of his book, which is whether the Reagan-Bush civil rights legacy
represented a kinder, gentler form of racism. Caveat emptor.
Shull organizes his discussion around what he refers to as a
"stimulus-response model" of the policymaking process,
which is just a fancy way of saying that he starts by reviewing
presidential statements and actions and then examines how people
inside and outside the government reacted. This organization is
appropriate enough considering how the "primary
question" driving his analysis is "Can presidents
influence civil rights directly, and what factors limit their
influence?" (p.7). Shull breaks down the question even
further by focusing on policy debates surrounding three distinct
issue areas -- school desegregation, equal employment, and fair
housing -- as they relate to five different "target
groups" who are ostensibly served by these policies. He
justifies his selection of issue areas by noting that the
historical record suggests that in each case policy was driven by
different "significant actors": school desegregation
was driven by courts and interest groups, equal employment was
driven by the executive, and fair housing was driven by Congress.
While these differences make it possible to examine whether the
dynamics of the policy process vary depending on the political
origins of particular policies, little is made of this
opportunity. The "target group" categories he used to
organize data collection are blacks, women, Hispanics/Native
Americans, the elderly, and other (including disabled and
institutionalized persons) (p.26). One can see that at least one
of these categories is vulnerable to the charge that it includes
within it target groups with different experiences, agendas, and
relationships to the state; but as it turns out the problems that
could arise from this conflation do not call into question the
sort of analysis conducted by Shull in subsequent chapters.
Critical theorists who worry about how the culture constructs The
Other may regret that one of Shull's categories is
"other," but he means and does no harm by the use of
this convenience.
The book takes us sequentially through the various stages of the
policymaking process in order to demonstrate that (a) presidents
can have an important influence on agenda setting, but (b) other
agents within the government have significant roles to play
during the formulation, modification, adoption, and
implementation of policy, and (c) agents outside the government
"move to the forefront" when these policies are
subsequently evaluated (p.45). These points are so commonplace
that they are hardly worth making, but thankfully in this case
making these points gives Shull a chance to carefully catalogue
recent battles over civil rights policy, and Shull performs a
service by gathering this material in one volume. After a
twenty-page review of the history of civil rights policy debates
(from the slave-trade to the present) he begins his analysis with
some fairly comprehensive selections of Reagan and Bush
statements relating to the different issue areas and target
groups, and then supplements these by offering measurements of
different aspects of
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presidential statements from Eisenhower to Bush, including the
frequency and length of statements, whether they expressed
support for policy action (as opposed to being merely
rhetorical), whether they expressed support for
"liberal" civil rights positions, and whether they
addressed the issue areas and target groups on which Shull
focuses. The permutations produced by all these measures are
dizzying, but the findings Shull considers most important are
that Bush was more attentive to civil rights than Reagan and his
statements were less symbolic (i.e., more policy-oriented) than
his predecessor's (p.70). For Shull this means that, despite
initial hopes that Bush would be more moderate than Reagan on
civil rights, it turns out that he was more aggressive about
promoting a conservative civil rights agenda than was Reagan.
This review of presidential statements is followed by two
chapters that review presidential behavior relating to budget
requests, support for legislation, administrative actions
(including executive orders and nominations), and attempts to
influence the judiciary (e.g., nominations, filings of lawsuits,
amicus briefs). Among other things we learn that Reagan was quite
active about promoting his agenda but "his activity was
manifested primarily in budgetary and judicial action rather than
through direct legislation" (p.127). Bush, on the other
hand, was more assertive on legislation than administrative or
judicial actions. It is also during these chapters that Shull
supplements his measurements and his comprehensive lists of
statements and actions with four case studies, two relating to
battles over legislation (the 1988 Civil Rights Restoration Act
and the 1991 Civil Rights Act) and two relating to administrative
actions (Reagan's nomination of Pendleton to the Civil Rights
Commission and Bush's nomination of Lucas to head the Civil
Rights Division). These short narratives are rather conventional
but they provide a welcome break from the sort of information
processing that is triggered by our encounter with most of
Shull's data.
In the next two chapters Shull moves from "stimuli" to
"responses," first by looking at congressional and
agency reaction and then by examining judicial and
nongovernmental responses. Shull's measurements indicate that, at
least until recently, "Congress lets presidents get away
with much of what they want," but that Congress has
frequently blocked liberal presidential initiatives and has
frequently disregarded presidential budgetary requests (p.153).
Interestingly he finds that "enforcement efforts were
greater during Republican than Democratic administrations,"
but unfortunately it is unclear what we should make of this
statement since agency actions were merely counted rather than
evaluated and thus "no judgment is made whether such agency
actions are pro- or anti-civil rights" (p.149). It is also
unfortunate that much of the discussion on judicial responses to
presidential actions is limited to the Supreme Court and even
then draws on an interesting but dated (fourteen-year-old)
unpublished manuscript by Larry Baum and Herbert Weisberg; beyond
that Shull mostly provides one sentence summaries of Reagan-Bush
era Supreme Court cases arranged according to his target groups
and issue areas, and then observes that in general both
presidents appointed justices who shared their views on civil
rights (p.166). The review of responses from nongovernmental
actors does not produce any particularly interesting conclusions
since "actors outside government varied in their responses
to Reagan's and Bush's civil rights policies" (p.179).
In the final two chapters Shull attempts to evaluate the impact
of Reagan-Bush civil rights policies and draw some conclusions
about the nature of presidential power. Shull notes that it is
difficult to establish connections between particular policy
decisions and their societal impact, but nevertheless he does
point out that many members of his target groups were worse off
after the Reagan-Bush years in terms of income, employment, and
segregation in housing and education. One senses that Shull wants
to make more of this, but his emphasis, evidence, and (alas)
social science sensibilities prevent him from doing so. These
same limitations also prevent him from making more of the claim
that the Reagan-Bush civil rights record had as much to do with
the
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perceived political benefits to be gained from exploiting racial
conflict as with an interest in promoting actual policy change.
One can tell that his heart is in this conclusion as well, since
at one point he writes that "the Reagan and Bush
administrations were successful in exploiting and intensifying
partisan differences over quotas," and more generally that
they "clearly benefited politically from their conservative
civil rights statements, actions, and results" (p.205). More
tellingly he ends the book with an indictment, namely that
"By playing on the fear and frustration of lower-class
whites, particularly, both Presidents Reagan and Bush left a
substantial civil rights legacy, but it was not a kinder, gentler
one" (p.229). But unfortunately these remarks, like the
title, seem to belong to an entirely different book. The style of
argumentation that would service these conclusions is not to be
found in this volume. Instead, Shull's measurements and case
studies are designed to support less provocative findings, such
as the claim that while Bush was in many ways more assertive than
his predecessor in the promotion of his conservative civil rights
agenda he "was not able to get the kind of responses from
other government institutions that other assertive presidents had
obtained" (p.225).
Shull is confident when he is reporting the facts, and he does a
good job linking the material in this book with general lessons
about the political system; for example, he argues that
"Congress's preference for general and symbolic policies
explains its outrage over President Reagan's efforts to
politicize the Civil Rights Commission" and its more muted
responses to other administration assaults on established
policies (p.192). At the same time Shull sometimes falters when
he reaches for generalizations or conclusions that lie beyond the
dynamics of the policymaking process. His opening chapter
includes an obligatory review of various ways other scholars have
conceptualized "presidential leadership" and
"policy change," but as is typical for many
undergraduate texts these reviews are fairly shallow, and they
are unconnected to his assertion that "the major bases of
presidential leadership are ideological commitment and
assertiveness" (p.8). In explaining why the issue of civil
rights is particularly useful for public policy research he makes
some puzzling claims, such as that "foreign, economic, and
domestic policy may be too general to identify patterns of
change" and "are often interrelated," unlike civil
rights policy which he thinks "is not likely to be tied to
economic issues, the business cycle, or the election cycle"
(p.5). This statement seems to fly in the face of Shull's own
convictions about how Reagan and Bush exploited the racial
tensions produced by hard economic times and deteriorating urban
conditions in order to achieve electoral benefits. It is also
unclear why he thinks that "Civil rights policies are not as
critical to life as most foreign policies, particularly national
security, but they are more changeable" (p.6), since at
first glance it would seem that most civil rights issues have a
more direct impact on the quality of life of average people than
most diplomatic and military adventures. Shull also veers too
close to melodrama when he claims that partisan conflicts over
contemporary civil rights issues "prevents either leadership
or policy change and could ultimately threaten the ability of
government to govern" (p.6).
Still, despite these minor shortcomings, and despite the
misleading title, there is much to be admired in the way that
Shull goes about his task of describing and cataloguing modern
struggles over civil rights policymaking. One will not find many
innovative lessons about the political system or any provocative
arguments about racism and American politics, but one will find a
rigorous and comprehensive overview of how the policymaking
process has addressed recent controversies over civil rights, and
of the steps taken by Reagan and Bush to usher in a retrenchment
of federal protection for civil rights.
Copyright 1994