The policy state: An American predicament Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, Harvard University Press, 2017, 272 pp., (pbk, 2019), £12.95, ISBN: 9780674237872
| Author | Cyril Benoît,Philippe Bezes |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12621 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
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The policy state: An American predicament
Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek
Harvard University Press, 2017, 272 pp., (pbk, 2019), £12.95, ISBN: 9780674237872
Students of public policy and administration should take a close look at The Policy State, authored by Karen Orren
and Stephen Skowronek. An original study of US political development, The Policy State is neither a piece about a
particular set of public policies in a given sector, nor a contribution on policy-makers or policy processes. More fun-
damentally, it argues in a challenging manner that in the United States publicpolicy and policy-making have been his-
torically developed as an idiosyncratic art of governing. According to the authors, the massive expansion of public
policies in many domains has gradually set up a specific mode of governance that has triumphed gradually since the
early twentieth century and the progressive era, over earlier forms of governing. In an age when research on public
administration and policy is increasingly fragmented and diversified, they make the case that the many features of
modern-day governance could be rooted in the same soil, namely that of the so-called Policy State.
Orren and Skowronek's central thesis can be summarized as follows: policy-making, over a hundred years, has dis-
lodged other forms of governing within the American state. These prior forms of governing were essentially characterized
by a robust regime of rights circumscribed to family relations, property and contracts. From the beginning of the Republic,
this regime was solidly entrenched within a constitutional structure maintaining ‘balance between authorizing policy mak-
ing and checking its spread’(p. 7). Since the end of the Civil War, however, policy has gradually ‘infiltrated every aspect of
American life’, reconfiguring this ‘prior state of affairs’(p. 10) by substituting the ‘rights regime’, compact though limited in
scope, with a ‘policy regime’, potentially infinite in scope though much more unstable and precarious in its outcomes. In
turn, the rise of programmatic governance has many consequences for the state and for state–society relationships.
The causal claim made by the authors is built around the notion of motives. States, they argue in chapter 2, may have
a range of different motives—‘animating premises or themes’(p. 19)—such as law and order, civil liberties, separation of
powers, amongst others. Policies are obviously one of these motives, but they sharply contrast with those other ones that
are more explicitly rights-based. While policies imply commitments, decisions, choices, goals, coordinated actors and
guidelines, rights are stable, indisputable ‘claims’, possessed by individuals and enforceable in a court of law (pp. 27–31).
In chapters 3 to 5, the book explores the various processes through which the policy motive triumphed over the
inherited institutional framework. This ambitious overview is based on detailed and precise analyses of major histori-
cal developments and, more unexpectedly, on a thorough examination of Supreme Court decisions.
Chapter 3 (‘Rights in the Policy State’) describes how the extension of the policy-making authority has trans-
formed the very nature of original rights. In its initial setting, the American Constitution promoted but also organized
and somewhat prioritized different government motives while establishing the basic relationships between them.
Deeply rooted within constitutional provisions, rights were thus the main form of governing at that time, con-
straining all other forms of government. They were ‘trumps’in the sense that they relied on well-defined and stable
arrangements. The scope of policies was limited to a very narrow range of (mostly commercial) affairs (pp. 39–41).
From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the policy motive expanded progressively: the program-
matic form of governing diffused to social relations previously configured by rights, such as labour or racial issues.
Policies by-passed entrenched constitutional provisions, dissolving established relationships between rights and poli-
cies. These initiatives certainly distributed some rights too, but as their number increased and as they were animated
by the policy motive, they soon converted existing ones into ‘chips’—‘tokens’or ‘vouchers’with a definite legal or
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12621
962 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Public Administration. 2019;97:962–964.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
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