Regulatory Politics in Transition.

Marc Eisner has written a comprehensive and readable history of regulatory politics in the United States. It will be an excellent supplementary text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, and it also provides much perspective for scholars of regulatory policy and politics.

The field needs such a book. David Vogel's 1989 Fluctuating Fortunes is admirable but covers only the past few decades. Eisner's scope compares with Thomas McCraw's Prophets of Regulation, the only comprehensive regulatory history, but McCraw focused more on business and economic issues than on political and institutional interactions.

Another similarity is that while Eisner focuses on four "regime" to analyze important eras of American regulation, McCraw used four "prophets," a perspective that tended to overemphasize the role of "great figures" in history, although it made for interesting bibliography. Eisner places himself explicitly in the "statist" school through his use of regimes, and one of his major goals is to illuminate the increasingly important role of administrative capacity in the regulatory process. He does a superb job analyzing the interactions of interest groups, legislatures, executives, courts and bureaucrats in each regime, although he underemphasizes the role of state governments in the historical development of American regulation.

The four regimes -- market (1880s-1920s), associational (1930s), societal (1960s-1970s) -- provide a rich and descriptively accurate picture of American regulation. They may be overly general, however, as not all regulatory trends can be classified as moving in the same direction in these periods. For example, as Derthick and Quirk noted in their 1985 Politics of Deregulation, several industries have not been not deregulated under the efficiency regime.

A greater concern is that while the book title and introduction emphasize an explanation of policy transitions, Eisner does far better explaining the static regimes than the dynamic transitions in-between. He does not employ a central theoretical approach to policy change. Neither does our discipline, yet, but Baumgartner and Jones in their 1993 Agendas and Instability in American Politics and others are developing a basic model. Eisner seems to reject a cyclic model, but he does not make clear how one regulatory regime's failure (or success) leads to the next form. Thus, his regime models are not helpful for prediction. For the next regulatory regime, should we expect a re-regulatory backlash caused by the perceived failure of deregulation of savings and loans, or tighter social regulations given an increasingly more technologically complex society, or more deregulation in industries not yet affected by the efficiency regime as technocratic bureaucrats gain more power? Consider communications regulation, for example, in which deregulation of traditional price and entry controls seems likely given growing competition among several delivery modes, but tighter regulation of content, privacy and other concerns are also likely. What type of regime will develop next and can a single regime type really explain most regulatory developments?

It is almost certainly unfair to expect an historical book to help predict the future, but I trust that the potential reader will recognize the interesting questions that Eisner's book stimulates even when it does not provide all the answers.

Paul Teske
SUNY Stony Brook