Pathways of Power: The Dynamics of National Policymaking

Conventional treatments of the policy process portray a single, idealized model of "how a bill becomes law"; journalistic treatments tend to emphasize the role of special interests and campaign contributions to Congress; and many college textbooks describe a common set of stages through which all policies progress, from agenda setting to legitimation to implementation. While these approaches have their merits, they fail to convey--much less explain--the great diversity of political processes that shape specific policies in contemporary Washington. Rather than a single route along which all policies progress, this book argues that the policy process is best understood as a set of four distinctive pathways of public policymaking, each of which requires different political resources, appeals to particular actors in the system, and elicits its own unique set of strategies and styles of coalition building. The book analyzes 42 federal policy cases from 1980 to the present in eight domestic policy arenas. The cases represent the most important legislation, supplemented as needed by other cases to give adequate representation to each pathway.