MUDDLING THROUGH HARD TIMES
| Date | 01 June 2014 |
| Author | PHILIP ROCCO |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12079 |
| Published date | 01 June 2014 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12079
BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS
MUDDLING THROUGH HARD TIMES
PHILIP ROCCO
Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy
Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal
Princeton University Press, 2013, 368 pp., $29.95 (hb), ISBN: 9780691145013
Coping with Crisis: Government Reactions to the Great Recession
Nancy Bermeo and Jonas Pontusson (eds)
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012, 422 pp., $42.50 (pb), ISBN: 9780871540768
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
Ira Katznelson
Liveright Publications, 2013, 720 pp., $29.95 (hb), ISBN: 9780871404503
International economic crises ‘are to countries what reagents are to compounds in
chemistry: they provoke changes that reveal the connections between particularities and
the general’, according to Peter Gourevitch in his seminal Politics in Hard Times (Gourevitch
1986, p. 221). Central to this chemical metaphor for political and societal change is the
image of interaction. Crises may open ‘policy windows’ for addressing serious problems
in national political economies, but they alone may not create the conditions for broad
reforms. Rather, reformers may be constrained or enabled by the policy tools and political
debates that are in play before the crisis hits.
The 2008 subprime mortgage crisis disrupted the normal functioning of national political
economies. Yet changes to the political–economic status quo depended not only on the
crisis itself as a catalyst, but also on a set of political, institutional, and ideational factors
that long preceded the housing market’s crash. Recent work on the politics of responding
to crisis bears out this claim empirically, showing that even though cataclysmic economic
events can galvanize political leaders behind proposals for sweeping reforms, they cannot
alone generate raw materials for durable changes in public policy. Rather, changes in
policy – even in the midst of crisis – must be understood as the result of convergent forces
that sustain the political economy and the events that disrupt it. Together, the books
reviewed here present a fresh perspective about the political origins of crisis, the limits of
crisis as an opportunity for reform, and the role of organized conflict in shaping (and in
particular constraining) national policy responses. Far from dramatic policy shifts based
on policymakers’ updated beliefs about the state of the world, crisis response more closely
resembles a frustrated, politicized ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom 1959).
Philip Rocco is at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.
Public Administration Vol. 92, No. 2, 2014 (525–530)
©2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
To continue reading
Request your trial