Policy Sciences 22: 197-212, 1989. 9 1989 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Is there a third-world policy process?

DONALD

L. H O R O W I T Z

Law School and Political Science Department, Duke University, Durham, N C 27706, U.S.A.

Abstract. The introduction to this special issue asks what is distinctive about public policy making in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In field after field, some political scientists have argued for distinguishing Western polities from developing polities, whereas other have argued for inclusive treatment. The essay assesses these divergent perspectives as they relate to pubfic policy making. On the one hand, it is clear that the systemic frameworks of policy - the institutions, participants, resources, the weight of the state relative to the society, and the capacity of the state to work its will - all vary as between developing and Western countries. The same is true for the scope of policy activity, the configuration of issues, and the actual content of policy. On the other hand, the policy process - the constraints, the ripe moments that produce innovation, the tendency for policy to have unanticipated consequences, and so on - appears to display regularities that transcend the categories of Western or Third World state. The essay goes on to explain the divergences of policy in terms of disparate access to resources, levels of economic development, and social patterns. The convergence of process is explained in terms of the deeper exigencies of human problem solving in highly structured contexts.

C o m p a r a t i v e p u b l i c p o l i c y is a y o u n g field, e v e n y o u n g e r t h a n t h e s y s t e m a t i c s t u d y o f p o l i t i c s in t h e d e v e l o p i n g c o u n t r i e s o f A s i a , A f r i c a , a n d L a t i n A m e r i ca. T h e h y b r i d p r o d u c t o f t h e s e two fields - c o m p a r a t i v e p u b l i c p o l i c y in d e v e l o p i n g c o u n t r i e s - is y o u n g e r still. N e v e r t h e l e s s , e v e n b e f o r e s o m e b a s i c c o n c e p t u a l i s s u e s h a v e b e e n s o r t e d out, f i n d i n g s a r e b e g i n n i n g to a c c u m u l a t e r a t h e r q u i c k l y o n t h e p o l i c y p r o c e s s a n d t h e p o l i c y c o n f i g u r a t i o n in a significant number of Asian, African, and Latin American countries. Yet t h e r e is o n e q u e s t i o n that, w i t h g r o w i n g k n o w l e d g e , has b e c o m e m o r e r a t h e r t h a n less difficult to answer. It is, in s o m e ways, t h e c e n t r a l q u e s t i o n : W h a t , if a n y t h i n g , is d i s t i n c t i v e a b o u t p u b l i c p o l i c y m a k i n g in A s i a , A f r i c a , a n d L a t i n A m e r i c a ? T h e a n s w e r h a s b e c o m e m o r e elusive, b e c a u s e m a n y o f t h e f i n d i n g s o n h o w p o l i c y is m a d e a n d c a r r i e d o u t in d e v e l o p i n g c o u n t r i e s b e a r c o n s i d e r a b l e r e s e m b l a n c e to t h e s a m e f i n d i n g s f o r W e s t e r n c o u n t r i e s . S o m e d i f f e r e n c e s c a n b e d e t e c t e d , b u t it is n o t always c l e a r t h a t t h e y a r e c a t e g o r i c a l r a t h e r t h a n c o u n t r y - s p e c i f i c , a n d in a n y c a s e t h e d i f f e r e n c e s u s u a l l y a m o u n t to m a t t e r s o f d e g r e e r a t h e r t h a n k i n d . A l r e a d y it is o b v i o u s t h a t a n e f f o r t to p i n p o i n t t h e d i s t i n c t i v e n e s s o f p u b l i c p o l i c y in t h e T h i r d W o r l d q u i c k l y b e c o m e s a struggle o v e r n u a n c e s . T h a t d o e s n o t r e n d e r t h e e f f o r t insignificant, b e c a u s e s m a l l d i f f e r e n c e s in p o l i c y p r o c e s s c a n p r o d u c e l a r g e d i f f e r e n c e s in p o l i c y p r o d u c t a n d o u t c o m e . M o r e o v e r , t h e fact t h a t s o m e similarities h a v e m a n i f e s t e d t h e m s e l v e s , d e s p i t e the widely different political, economic, and cultural circumstances that

198 separate Europe and North America from the Third World, has its advantages. If there really were complete discontinuity between the policy process in the two sets of countries, that would require starting all over again in thinking about policy in the Third World. Such an enterprise would be made much more difficult by the hard research conditions often encountered there: scarce data, difficult logistics, sometimes suspicious officials, regime instability, and the like. Instead, it has proved possible to understand many policy phenomena in terms of concepts already embedded in the emerging discourse on public policy in general. Still, the question of difference begs for an answer. If regime type bears on process, the prevalence of democratic institutions in the West and their relative scarcity elsewhere suggest that palpable process differences should appear. Unfortunately, perhaps, the issue was not cast early on in terms of democratic versus authoritarian politics but rather in terms of Western and non-Westeru politics, as the study of the post-colonial politics got underway in the 1950s and 1960s. A division was observable between those who underscored the commonality of Asian and African (and sometimes Latin American) politics - and therefore its divergence from politics in Europe and North America - and, on the other hand, those who emphasized the functions that all political systems perforce must perform. The argument for distinctiveness was made most powerfully in Lucian W. Pye's seminal (but contested) article, 'The Non-Western Political Process' (Pye, 1958; compare Diamant, 1959). The functionalist view was advanced in a systems-oriented model by Almond and Coleman (1960). Now, decades later, the issue they joined has not been resolved. 1 The issue of distinctiveness arises in subfield after subfield. In political parties, Giovanni Sartori (1976) has claimed that the party systems of Asian and African states are too 'fluid' even to be compared with Western systems, while others have engaged in the comparison (e.g., Huntington, 1968: ch. 7). In ethnicity, Martin Heisler (1988) has made a strong case for distinguishing the situation of Western countries from that of developing countries, whereas others have been more attuned to the global phenomenon (e.g., Glazer and Moynihan, 1975). In conflict management, Arend Lijphart (1977; 1985) has advocated the applicability of consociational democracy to cleavage-ridden societies everywhere; others have argued the opposite position (e.g., Horowitz, 1985). It is not only in public policy studies that the distinctive character of Third World political phenomena remains open to question. Nevertheless, in some ways, public policy studies have an advantage in disentangling this issue. For one thing, policy studies must inevitably give close scrutiny to normal politics, undistracted by subjects such as charismatic leadership, pretorianism, or nationalist ideology that attracted attention in the political development field and made it difficult to think about the policy process in ways that seemed to make sense in stable democracies. For

199 another, most of the functions Almond and Coleman enumerated are at such a high level of abstraction that they are identifiable in virtually all organized societies. In the main, public policy analysts will not be working at this level of abstraction but at a level of individual policy decisions or of policy configurations in a given subject-area. This is a level apt to reveal differences as well as similarities. And, finally, the political development field prepared a new generation of students, very much at home in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, ready to master the intricacies of politics there and to train its sights on policy, drawing on the insights - or at least the categories - of public policy studies in the West. I have said that findings are beginning to accumulate rapidly on policy in developing countries. The present collection provides as much excellent evidence of the truth of this proposition as can be found in any single place. What, then, do the findings show? How do they illuminate the vexing question of how distinctive the policy process and its products are in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? Speaking quite broadly, the contributions to this issue call attention to some important regularities of policy process that transcend the categories of Western or Third World state. As we shall see, the distinctiveness question appears to have a more complex answer than might have been thought.

I. There is no doubt whatever, of course, that the systemic frameworks for policy making in developing countries display marked differences from those of industrialized countries. The institutions, the participants, the resources available to the participants, the weight of state power in the society, and the capacity of the state to do its will all vary significantly. Moreover, the scope of state policy activity, the configuration of issues, and the actual content of policy all differ as between developing and industrialized states. Policy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America tends to be made in an environment characterized by several foundational elements - something close to givens - that differ sharply from those prevailing in advanced industrial societies. First, the legitimacy of many Third World regimes is in question. Second, policy concerns do not match those that predominate in the West. Third, the state structures of developing countries, whatever their weaknesses, are still relatively powerful vis-d-vis their societies. Fourth, the capacity of Third World states to make and effectuate policy is, in several respects, more imperfect than that of their counterparts in the West. Fifth, participants in the policy process are fewer in developing countries than in the West, and some sectors of the society are hardly participant at all. Sixth, the channels for participation are less well established and less clearly prescribed in developing countries.

200 Seventh, information for policy making is much scarcer in Asia, Africa, and Latin America than it is in advanced industrial societies. Eighth, foreign models are therefore much more common. No doubt other differences in the framework of policy making could be adduced. It is not necessary to make this an exhaustive list in order to elucidate the main contrasts and to reflect upon their consequences for policy making. It is worthwhile reviewing the list in order. To begin with, most developing countries exhibit significantly less regime legitimacy than do most countries in the West. This means that one of the recurrent subjects of policy is the political formula itself. Developing countries are more frequently engaged than Western countries are in constitutional revision and policy making designed to shore up state and regime legitimacypolicy exercises of the sort depicted in Naomi Chazan's essay in this issue. The risks and stakes of policy making are greater when questions of legitimacy have not been settled and regimes are fragile. The modern Western state has also experienced a vast expansion in the scope and output of centrally directed policy (see Beer, 1974: 53). Few developing states are able to marshal the resources required for the extensive welfare state programs that command the attention of Western policy makers. There are, then, important differences in the scope of policy. The differences in policy coverage are not, however, all one-way. Some sectors of Western societies, or some spheres of activity, are more or less exempt from policy concern. Elaborate notions of privacy, with their origin in nineteenth-century liberalism, require the Western state to advance strong justification for intruding into areas where claims to a zone of immunity can be made. Whether government could legitimately intervene in matters of morality has been a much-contested issue in the West (see, e.g., Hart, 1963). Only fairly recently have categories been advanced that might encompass policy issues involving morality (Tatalovich and Daynes, 1988), and the categories do not, for the most part, travel well outside the West. The same goes for religious freedom and freedom of thought and expression. Precisely the same spheres of relative immunity in the West may be subjects of intense policy concern in the Third World. The social heterogeneity of most developing countries is regarded by many political leaders as a problem to be addressed by the policy process, and the measures adopted often touch on matters, such as religion, that, in the West, would be regarded as dubious candidates for state intervention. Attitude change and certain cultural practices, little touched by policy in the West and controversial when they are, are very often central targets of policy in countries where such matters are seen as integral to the development process. So in some ways governments in the developing world attempt less, but in some ways they attempt more, than governments do in the advanced industrial states. As a result, the coverage of policy is profoundly different. Although the burdens assumed by the Third World state are not consistently greater than those assumed by the Western state, the size and impact of

201 the state, in relation to the society, are far greater. Compared to Western state institutions, the state structures of developing countries may be weak, their legitimacy doubtful, their capacity to bring about change imperfect at best; yet what the state does may nevertheless be inordinately important for the developing society. The share of resources both invested and consumed by the state is typically larger than it is in advanced industrial societies. Mediating institutions - the sorts of organizations that can pursue their interests and activities in considerable measure apart from the state - are in general more developed in industrial than in non-industrial societies (see Diamond, 1989: 22-26). The balance between state and society is, therefore, fundamentally different in most of the developing world from what it is in the West. Claims to limit the sphere of state intervention can rarely be enforced where extrastate organizations lack autonomy and resources. That is not to say that, because of the absence of such restraints, the Third World state necessarily achieves its policy objectives. There are major differences in institutional capacity and policy effectiveness between advanced industrial states and developing states, as a comparative study of, for example, tax collections would readily show. On the whole, what was called in the literature on political development the 'penetrative capacity' of policy makers and executors - their ability to make their presence and policies felt throughout the territory (La Palombara, 1971) - is significantly greater in the West than it is in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It seems reasonable to suppose that such differences might impel political leaders in developing countries to fear for the effectiveness of their policy innovations and therefore to adopt rather heavyhanded methods of enforcement. Political participation in advanced industrial societies is also at a significantly higher level than it is in most developing countries (Huntington and Nelson, 1976: 80). In many Asian, African, and Latin American states - even those characterized by high levels of politicization in general - large sectors of the public are politically inactive and inarticulate (see, e.g., Moore, 1985: 119). A survey of Kenya found moderate or high levels of political information and participation in only 37 percent of the sample (Berg-Schlosser, 1982: 404-405). Of course, there are differences on this dimension within the category of Western countries or of Asian or African or Latin American countries, as the balance of participants shifts over time and across countries. Yet, overall, it is far more common in developing countries for significant sectors of the population (for example, Indians in much of Central America) to be politically inert, at least for the time being. The very significant differences in, for instance, agricultural policy between developed and developing countries with producer subsidies common in the former and consumer subsidies common in the latter (Bates, 1983) - reflect such differences in organization and participation. Not only are there differences in the identity of participants, but there are also differences in the mode of participation. As Charles W. Anderson has noted for Latin America, in terms that would apply to many Asian and Afri-

202 can countries as well, there is no single technique for mobilizing power, no specific resources that are deemed qualitatively more appropriate to political activity than others are. Various contenders resort to quite different sources of power, including the possession of armed force or the capacity for disruption: '... democratic processes are [merely] alternative to other means of mobilizing power' (Anderson, 1967: 232; emphasis in the original). As democratic consent is not the only test of power - indeed, as no one source is the only test of power - regimes are unable to claim incontestable normative sanction for the policy that issues from them. Nor are regimes in developing countries generally able to claim the ability to marshal superior levels of knowledge and analytical capacity on questions related to policy. The modern state is characterized by its access to prodigious quantities of information. For many decades, systematic data collection has been an important activity of Western governments, and often, documentation became a veritable obsession (see Lacey and Furner, forthcoming). It has come to be accepted that policy must be based on expert knowledge supported by specialized information - that is, information beyond what can be derived from everyday experience or intuition. The propensity to rely on differentiated expertise is, of course, part of the elaborate division of labor that characterizes advanced industrial societies. In many developing countries, functional differentiation is much less pronounced. In some, there is a shortage of trained personnel, and in many data collection is far from adequate for policy making. The European colonial powers did foster data collection in some of their territories, perhaps most notably in India. Nevertheless, it is still generally true that in developing countries, as Hirschman (1975: 392) writes, 'motivation to solve a problem may arise in advance of adequate understanding.' The result is the frequent reliance on foreign experts and transplantation of ' "solutions" from the outside in the form of the most up-to-date central banking legislation, economic planning agencies, or common market schemes' (Hirschman, 1975: 392), among many others. Advanced industrial societies borrow ideas and institutions as well, but with much less frequency (see, e.g., Watson, 1974). By and large, the combination of these structural features in Asia, Africa, and Latin America produces a tendency to policy making under threat. Policy problems often seem urgent. Policy is often addressed to issues that threaten the regime. Indeed, a wrong turn in policy can have the effect of triggering the overthrow of a regime. Since data for policy making is not always adequate, since sometimes-inapt foreign models are imported, and since enforcement capacities are limited, the results of policy can be quite disappointing and can increase the cynicism with which the regime is viewed and the chance that it will not survive. Since regimes have dubious legitimacy but their actions are inordinately important in their societies, the stakes of policy are great and the challenges to regimes that are provoked by policy may also be great. Policy in

203 developing countries has a high-risk quality that is less commonly present in the West.

II. Despite all of this, as I remarked earlier, there remain regularities of the policy process that appear to transcend the categories of Western or Third World state. Despite important differences in the starting attributes and endowments built into policy making systems, once policy begins to get made, powerful process imperatives seem to take hold. For all the systemic differences that are so readily apparent, commonalities of process extend to the constraints inherent in the policy process, to the freedom from those constraints that is available at certain moments ripe for innovation, and to the adventitious character of the events that produce those moments. In the Third World, as in the West, earlier decisions form a matrix of policy, into which new decisions must fit or which they must somehow transcend. Earlier commitments mark the boundaries of what seems plausible, even possible. No regime writes on a clean slate. The decision making habits and the style of the polity shape decisions by limiting what options are considered and what decisions might be accepted. To t a k e one of many examples: Ghana's later policies of redemocratization resemble its earlier policies on the same subject, as, equally, Nigeria's later redemocratization policies resemble its earlier policies on that subject. Policies made in an area fresh in the experience of decision makers and the relevant public stand a good chance of being cut in the same groove (see, e.g., Moore, 1985: 84). There may be national ways of doing things, but there are also new departures. The first Nigerian return to civilian rule, in 1979, was one of those, and the impulses that drove policy at that time were by no means habitual. On the contrary, the aim of both military and civilian decision makers was to avoid repeating the Nigerian past, and at this point the policy models that proved most influential were foreign rather than Nigerian. In short, there are conditions that seem to call out for innovation. To move beyond merely proclaiming the variability that is undoubtedly present and to move toward explaining it, public policy theory will need to specify those conditions. This will be a formidable task. In democratic or democratizing polities, there are limits to policy innovation that derive from the character of democratic politics or the aspiration to democracy, as several contributions to this issue make clear. But these limits are variable. 2 Where interests are well organized, they can skew the policy process or alter the policy outcome at the point of impact. Writers on Latin America have emphasized the importance of interest groups in making - or frequently blocking - policy far more than writers on Asia and Africa have. Yet, organized interest group pressure is hardly universal within any region and seems to be less frequently present, or

204 at least effective, at the time of major policy departures. Democratic regimes in the developing world do not appear to experience a uniform pattern of pressure. To confotmd matters further, popular pressure on policy is by no means unknown in undemocratic regimes. Even where states are authoritarian and where the organization of interests is weak, some policies may have to contend with hostile popular reaction; and because legitimacy is frequently in question, popular hostility to policy can be fatal. 3 So, in some limited ways, the fragility of the disproportionately authoritarian Third World regimes operates to reduce the differences between them and the disproportionately democratic Western regimes. 4 As all this implies, timing is an important element of explanation. As I shall suggest, fortuitous timing - in the sense of the simultaneity of events - can open up the policy process. But timing is also an important constraint. Events and conditions accidentally synchronized with a decision can turn that decision in a direction different from the one it might otherwise have taken. In Sri Lanka, the massive Mahaweli dam irrigation scheme was pursued even to the point where it hurt policies of economic liberalization, to which the government was also committed, because the Mahaweli project offered the prospect of employment at a time when unemployment was unusually high. This is, of course, another way of saying that, if a regime has two or more policy goals, their interaction can produce an uncontemplated configuration of policy. It is often suggested that a constraint on policy present to an unusual degree in the Third World derives from the international economy. Certainly there is evidence of this in the case of Latin American structural adjustment policies. But in several of the studies, there is just as much evidence that Third World governments manipulated international aid donors or used the advice of international agencies for their own purposes in framing policy. So this constraint, too, appears to be highly variable. Even so, this list of constraints looks formidable. Given the range of constraints, it is, in some ways, remarkable that any new policy is made at all. If policy issues are divided into a few simple categories - what to decide and when, who should be included in the decision process, what means will be used to effectuate the decision, and what results are contemplated - it is clear that there is plenty of r o o m for slippage at each stage. Many questions will not find their way to the table; some times will not be propitious for innovation; some participants will not prove adept at resolving issues; some policy problems will prove intractable; some means will be ineffective to attain the desired ends, some environments inhospitable to change, some organizations skillful at thwarting or defeating or undoing what decision makers have resolved. A n d yet the evidence is that policy often does get made. Constraints do not inhibit policy making altogether, but they require that policy be made at an irregular, even dysrhythmic, pace. As I have already suggested, one reason policy does get made, despite con-

205 straints, is that many decisions are made at times when such constraints are not operating. A disproportionate number of policies are adopted at exceptional times - times of crisis, times when there is a strong demand for change, times when unusual events have immobilized obstacles to new policy or drastically changed the composition of the decision making bodies. At such times, organized interests are frequently ineffective. Ideas for policy become important forces, and elites have a good deal of freedom to put their ideas into operation. Dramatic departures in Indian agricultural policy and Malaysian ethnic policy are excellent examples. Often policy ideas have been in circulation before; often they have foreign pedigrees. At later points, organized interests may reappear to thwart comparable policy departures. But, for the time being, prospects for taking the policy initiative and producing significant change are bright. Paradoxically, perhaps, some of the most important events in a political system - major policy departures - occur when the system is not functioning as it usually does. It is difficult to categorize exactly those times which provide large amounts of leadership leeway. Economic collapse gave some Central American elites the ability to produce stabilization programs without popular revolt. The death of Nehru and a change in the ruling Congress Party in favor of state-level politicians created a new context in which a strong-minded Food and Agriculture Minister could, almost single-handedly, reorient Indian agricultural policy toward market pricing and high-yield inputs. The traumatic ethnic riots of 1969 in Malaysia provided the opportunity for pro-Malay politicians to push for new departures in ethnic policy, a massive affirmative action program called the New Economic Policy. Some such events neutralize or silence the likely opposition; some subtly change power balances among participants at the center; some make longstanding proponents of the new policies - often local technocrats, or foreign advisers, or international agencies - suddenly sound more credible. Whatever the mechanisms, these are frequent occasions for the most radical new directions in policy. Policy has a life cycle, and at some times the possibilities are far more openended than at others. When these occasions have passed, policy can also be made, but under different conditions, much less conducive to broad departures, less hospitable to new ideas, less likely to involve elites acting alone, without interest groups or affected bureaucrats having a significant say. In this connection, Grindle and Thomas speak of crisis-driven policy versus policy that arises in times of politics-as-usual, but, of course, viewing the matter over time, policy making is not a one-shot venture; there are always further decisions to be made, especially for those major departures that come in times of crisis. In routine times, they will have to be fleshed out, pruned, amended, and adjusted; some branches of the policy will be expanded, but others will not be. By the time this happens, the conditions that facilitated the major innovation will have changed. The interests affected by or created by the innovation will make

206 themselves heard at the later stfiges. Old constraints are joined by some new ones. The policy innovation itself can be a fundamental source of change in the whole system. As policy decisions get implemented down the line, there is room for a good bit of slippage. Implementing bureaucrats do not always have the same interests or preferences as the elites who made the policy; they may be subject to influences in the course of administration that did not appear earlier. Tradeoffs will also have to be made, and one set of policies will have to be reconciled with another. There is plenty of opportunity for unintended consequences, including some that may threaten the regime itself. Some outcomes that are not planned may nevertheless please influential constituencies, as some segments of the Sri Lankan ruling party were pleased by the incomplete success of economic liberalization - which explains why they may not have pressed hard for a different policy. In this account, ideas and political leadership emerge in a more prominent way for policy innovation than they would in an account grounded in the importance of interest groups or bureaucratic politics or culturally conditioned ways of operating. That is not to denigrate the role of interests or bureaucrats or established routines. Quite the opposite: it suggests that they are so important that they are able to inhibit action at all but exceptional times, but that they are less consistently active in promoting action than might have been supposed. In some ways, too, all that this says is that an account of policy innovation will pay less attention to some equally important questions: why policies fail to get adopted and what happens toward the end of the life of a policy that has been adopted (why does it expand or contract, stay alive or lapse?).

III. To return, then, to the question with which we began, how does the portrait of Third World policy processes painted here differ from policy processes in the West? In some ways, this depends on whose view of Western policy is preferred. There are certainly accounts that stress the important role of organized interests and of bureaucratic politics, particularly in the United States, although there has been significant disagreement about the influence of both on policy (see Schlozman and Tierney, 1986; Rourke, 1976: 81-106). Most early accounts of politics in developing countries, such as Pye's (1958: 480), concluded that there were relatively few 'organized interests with functionally specific roles.' From what we have already seen, interest groups appear to be variably active and influential, but organized interests are by no means absent in developing countries. Bates, for example, speaks of the impact of political majorities as being 'repeatedly overborne by the impact of organized minor-

207 ities' (1987: 181). Parallel conclusions can be drawn about bureaucratic politics in the Third World. Where some writers attribute decisive policy influence to bureaucrats (e.g., Feit, 1973), others decribe bureaucracies in developing countries as politically subordinated bodies (e.g., Kearney, 1973: 68-84). Perhaps the Western studies would, on the whole, attribute greater weight to interest-group and bureaucratic organizations in the policy process, but it is a closer call than one might have thought. Western accounts have been moving toward a more skeptical view of such organizations, while accounts of developing countries have moved in the opposite direction, discovering influence where none was thought to exist. There is a newer literature on policy innovation in the West that bears more striking similarities to the developing-country findings reported here. Just as I have stressed the timing of major policy change, these studies, too, emphasize policy making at exceptional times. A good many innovations are adopted during crises. Consider, for example, the large number of policy changes that occurred in the United States during the Great Depression and after the assassination of President Kennedy. The innovations often come from preexisting ideas outside the realm of the policy makers (see, e.g., Moynihan, 1969: 56); 'crisis evokes search behavior from decision-makers' (Polsby, 1984: 168). At such times, leadership is called into play; the usual constraints are off. (Since this is so, participants seeking freedom of action try to invent crises or to ride the crest of a crisis to a preferred outcome.) Elite latitude is present, and there is a 'politics of ideas,' with which leadership attentive to broad publics can take action even against economically powerful interests (Derthick and Quirk, 1985). In spite of the persisting concern in some of the literature with the impact of organized interests in policy making (e.g., Schlozman and Tierney, 1986), it is often the case that the beneficiaries of policy innovation become an organized interest group created by the policy and are active later (Katzmann, 1986: 76-77). In this model, innovation, sometimes even during routine times, is often the work of political entrepreneurs holding policy making positions and convictions about the direction policy should take in areas of interest to them (Melnick, n.d.: 38-40; see Derthick, 1979: 46). All of this suggests some significant autonomy for policy makers, rather along the lines of the Third World findings we have discussed. To be sure, at the point of implementation, interests are frequently influential, as they are in developing countries. The literature on bureaucratic capture in the United States, for example, is not so dissimilar to Third World phenomena (compare Schlozman and Tierney, 1986: 339-46, with Migdal, 1987: 424-27). Even the impact of external forces, including world markets and international aid donors, is by no means confined to the weaker countries in the international system. There are strong suggestions that international relations can play a major role in central policy issues that appear to be of wholly domestic import in Western countries as well (Dudziak, 1988). In short, the

208 nature of the constraints, the role of timing in innovation, and the respective parts played by interests and ideas in policy making all have analogues in the Third World and the West. Needless to say, as I mentioned at the outset, the question of convergence and divergence has been framed in homogeneous terms - the Third World, on the one hand, and the West, on the other - so that differences within the two categories are necessarily suppressed. Other cuts at this problem need to be taken that will disaggregate the categories to test for differences along other lines of variation and to inquire whether some prominent divergences, even between the two major categories, are not obscured by the presence of deviant cases. To take one obvious example, the last word has certainly not been heard on the relation between political system-type (at the crudest level, democratic versus authoritarian) and policy process. There are also methodological questions lurking. Perhaps more prominent contrasts in processes would emerge if this or other collections contained explicitly comparative studies of both Western and developing countries. Then, too, there is a possibility that some of the manifest similarity of process is an artifact of the intellectual categories employed by researchers on developing countries, particularly of their ability to make use of the earlier work in public policy in the West. By contrast, much of work that began the field of political development represented a conscious departure from models of politics developed in the West, and much of that work has therefore emphasized the differences in politics that prevail in developing countries. If public policy researchers in the Third World had followed in the conceptual footsteps of political development, rather than of comparative public policy, would their findings suggest a wholly distinctive Third World policy process? It is an intriguing thought. Still, it is only a speculative possibility, and it does not obviate the fact that the field of comparative public policy seems to provide some useful categories that travel reasonably well. If we cannot wholly rule out such speculations, they nevertheless do not relieve us of the need to work with the emerging findings and to try and fit the pieces together. The divergences between Western and Third World policy are perhaps easier to explain than the process similarities are. Disparate access to resources, disparate levels of economic development, and disparate social patterns easily account for strong policy-framework and policy-content differences between developing and advanced industrial societies. The convergence of process is what requires explanation. Since the developing countries derived many of their formal institutions from Western models, it may not be altogether surprising that their informal processes, which take place within such institutions, bear some resemblance to Western processes. Nevertheless, we know perfectly well the formidable human capacity to fill similar forms with dissimilar content. Explanations predicated on tendencies to emulation or to institutional determinism seem unlikely to carry us far in explaining process similarities around the world.

209 Rather, the similarities go deeper. They reflect the exigencies of human problem solving in structured contexts. Policy intervention is usually necessary because something has gone wrong or, less often, because there is a danger that something will go wrong in the future. But if something has gone wrong, there is probably considerable complexity to the problem and uncertainty about the consequences of alternative solutions. The decision setting has its own complex of properties, variable from country to country but likely involving multiple actors, competing interpretations, conflicting goals and preferences, and some standard operating procedures through which issues must pass. The heterogeneity of the participants and their views means that the very identification or characterization of the problem in need of solution will vary. Political generations that lack common experiences (or interpret common experiences differently) may entertain different ideas about policy. Officeholders may be subject on any issue to role-induced behavior, along the lines of Miles' Law: where I stand depends on where I sit. Inevitably, the standard procedures and routines employed by any process are considerably less differentiated than the array of problems that travels through that process. Consequently, the procedures are not necessarily well adapted to the shifting contours of those problems. Bad fit of process and problem is an ever-present possibility (see Horowitz, 1977: 151-53). When such considerations are taken into account, it is easy to see why the common result is a large measure of indecision, stalemate, and overload. To emphasize the kaleidoscopic properties of such ingredients - and their interplay - is to abandon conceptions of the policy process that start with a defined 'policy problem' (as a given) and ask how obstacles to solving it were overcome. Overcoming some obstacles can actually reinforce others. Brewer and de Leon (1983: 91-101) describe the imperatives of the policy process in terms of simplifying the complexity of problems, reducing the uncertainty attending solutions, and limiting conflict among participants. The first two, they note, involve a tradeoff: the more simplification, the greater the uncertainty, and vice versa. If we look a little more closely, then, at the similarities enumerated earlier, we can see that they lie heavily in the realm of the irregular cadences of the policy process: its stop-start quality, the extent to which it is ruled by the variable weight of a shifting complex of constraints, and the ability of participants to deflect policy, to create feedback effects, and to turn implementation into yet another policy forum. To see these participants and conditions in tension at any given moment is also to recognize that underlying the irregular cadences of the process are the multiple permutations of such forces in tension and their changing relative importance over time. For the West and the Third World, the policy process needs to be seen in terms of this changing constellation of external events and conditions and of internal forces influential in that process. The plurality of forces in combination makes it difficult to model the policy

210 process, especially to d o so p a r s i m o n i o u s l y over space and time. But it does point the way to m o r e valuable a p p r o a c h e s , a b o v e all b y emphasizing the time element. If timing is i n d e e d as i m p o r t a n t as it seems in m a j o r policy innovations, in the developing world a n d in the West, there are p r o f o u n d implications for the study of policy making. Clearly, it b e c o m e s necessary to take c o n c e p t i o n s o f the life cycle o f policies m u c h m o r e seriously and to follow policy - n o t m e r e l y to study implementation, but to trace h o w a policy works out m o r e broadly, h o w it is altered, h o w it lapses, h o w it intersects with o t h e r policies at various stages. H e r e the political d e v e l o p m e n t school h a d (precisely b e c a u s e o f its d e v e l o p m e n t a l focus) the right instincts: it was c o n c e r n e d , early on, with 'crises and sequences' in the d e v e l o p m e n t p r o c e s s (Binder et al., 1971; Nordlinger, 1968). T h e i m p o r t a n c e o f timing calls out for m o r e longitudinal studies and fewer cross-sectional studies. In the West, the snapshot study, along the lines of Congress Makes a L a w (Bailey, 1950), has b e e n very c o m m o n . E v e n straightforward i m p l e m e n t a t i o n studies c a m e m u c h later (e.g., Hargrove, 1975). Given w h a t we n o w know, it w o u l d be far better for policy studies in Asia, Africa, and Latin A m e r i c a n o t to follow the s a m e course.

Acknowledgments I a m i n d e b t e d to William A s c h e r for very helpful c o m m e n t s o n the m a n u script and to the E u g e n e T. Bost R e s e a r c h F u n d , which facilitated the writing.

Notes 1. The whole question was complicated by the concern with political development and political modernization, which dominated discourse during the 1960s and which implied that Asian, African, and Latin American political systems, although perhaps different from those in Europe and North America, might come to resemble the latter in time (Lerner, 1958; Eisenstadt, 1966; Deutsch and Foltz, 1963). 2. Compare, for example, the disparate effects (and non-effects) of democratic politics described in this issue by Kaufman, Levy, Varshney, and Horowitz. 3. Sometimes the hostile reaction can come even from the intended beneficiaries of policies, depending on how costs and benefits are distributed over time -- an important point made by Lindenberg in his contribution to this issue. 4. Despite the power of military regimes, popular forces in Nigeria have, more than once, forced the pace of the transition from military to civilian rule. Twice, in fact, there have been military coups made against military rulers who seemed, contrary to popular expectations, to be defaulting on their promise to return to civilian rule (Murtala Mohammed against Gowon in 1975 and Babangida against Buhari in 1985). But popular pressure does not consitute the same sort of limitation on the freedom of the military regime in Ghana to pursue its own policy at its own pace. See Chazan's contribution to this issue.

211

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