Reagan Administration's Policy Research Articles

The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War. By James Graham Wilson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 278 pp.

The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War. By James Graham Wilson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 278 pp. The relationship of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev defined the end of the Cold War era, but did either man pursue a coherent grand strategy? James Graham Wilson, a historian at the State Department, presents a nuanced study of the Reagan administration's foreign policy. He argues that men made history, most notably Gorbachev and Reagan, but also George P. Shultz, George H. W. Bush, and other key advisors in Washington and Moscow. Wilson's thesis is stated succinctly in the book's title, Triumph of Improvisation, indeed, as he demonstrates that the Reagan administration lacked a clear blueprint; that Reagan himself remained caught in incompatible objectives to eradicate communism and to reduce nuclear armaments, which required engagement with the Soviets; that Reagan's passive leadership style let fester divisions within his administration, which led to clashes between hawks like Caspar Weinberger and realists like Alexander Haig in 1981 and 1982 and between Secretary of State Shultz and hardliners in the national security establishment throughout the 1980s; that Gorbachev abandoned ideological dogma and ossified structures in domestic and foreign policy in pursuit of a better Soviet Union; and that the triumph of democracy, capitalism, and an open world order (p. 170) owed much to Bush's pragmatic statesmanship. Neither the Reagan administration nor Gorbachev's inner circle had an attainable grand strategy. Washington and Moscow acted more from recognition of weakness than assumptions of strength, and both Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev subscribed to variants of peace through strength, while Gorbachev and Reagan turned to engagement and summitry. Reagan's objectives were defined by missionary zeal to spread American values and by a deeply held religious faith. He reached instinctively for tough rhetoric, and he favored, emotionally, an ideological crusade, but he also feared the specter of nuclear war, and as early as spring 1981, he attempted to engage the Soviet leadership in constructive negotiations. Yet Reagan never recognized the fundamental tension between crusader rhetoric and a policy of engagement. Wilson concludes, for example, that the Strategic Defense Initiative was a bid for safety from nuclear holocaust by a president who did not believe in the lasting deterrent effect of Mutual Assured Destruction but who also did not comprehend the degree of suspicion and fear his project created among Soviet leaders. Despite the efforts of Shultz, from mid-1982, the point man for a policy of engagement based on insistence on reform of the Soviet system and emphasis on human rights, as well as arms control, Reagan found it impossible to win the trust of the ailing Brezhnev or his short-lived successors. …

Creating a science of homelessness during the Reagan era.

POLICY POINTS: A retrospective analysis of federally funded homeless research in the 1980s serves as a case study of how politics can influence social and behavioral science research agendas today in the United States. These studies of homeless populations, the first funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, demonstrated that only about a third of the homeless population was mentally ill and that a diverse group of people experienced homelessness. This groundbreaking research program set the mold for a generation of research and policy characterizing homelessness as primarily an individual-level problem rather than a problem with the social safety net. A decade after the nation's Skid Rows were razed, homelessness reemerged in the early 1980s as a health policy issue in the United States. While activists advocated for government-funded programs to address homelessness, officials of the Reagan administration questioned the need for a federal response to the problem. In this climate, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) launched a seminal program to investigate mental illness and substance abuse among homeless individuals. This program serves as a key case study of the social and behavioral sciences' role in the policy response to homelessness and how politics has shaped the federal research agenda. Drawing on interviews with former government officials, researchers, social activists, and others, along with archival material, news reports, scientific literature, and government publications, this article examines the emergence and impact of social and behavioral science research on homelessness. Research sponsored by the NIMH and other federal research bodies during the 1980s produced a rough picture of mental illness and substance abuse prevalence among the US homeless population, and private foundations supported projects that looked at this group's health care needs. The Reagan administration's opposition to funding "social research," together with the lack of private-sector support for such research, meant that few studies examined the relationship between homelessness and structural factors such as housing, employment, and social services. The NIMH's homelessness research program led to improved understanding of substance abuse and mental illness in homeless populations. Its primary research focus on behavioral disorders nevertheless unwittingly reinforced the erroneous notion that homelessness was rooted solely in individual pathology. These distortions, shaped by the Reagan administration's policies and reflecting social and behavioral scientists' long-standing tendencies to emphasize individual and cultural rather than structural aspects of poverty, fragmented homelessness research and policy in enduring ways.

Circumventing Apartheid: Racial Politics and the Issue of South Africa's Olympic Participation at the 1984 Los Angeles Games

Behind the shadows of an Olympiad replete with tales of Cold War acrimony and lavish commercial excess, emerges South Africa's bureaucratic attempt to achieve readmission to the Olympic Movement prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Games. In the backdrop of the Reagan administration's conciliatory policy of ‘constructive engagement’ towards Pretoria, the all-white South African National Olympic Committee aspired to cease its two-decade-long sporting isolation in the southern California metropolis. Drawing upon archival materials from the International Olympic Studies Center and public debates in the leading national and sporting newspapers and periodicals of the time, this paper will detail and analyse how International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch was forced to navigate a tight political tightrope over the South African issue. Any concession towards Pretoria would have likely agitated the African-bloc nations – a powerful constituency on the IOC with a proclivity for boycotting Olympic Games – as well as the global-nexus of anti-apartheid groups that vehemently opposed South Africa's participation in Los Angeles.

A More Effective Constructive Engagement: US Policy Towards South Africa after the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986

As it stands, much of the historical account of US foreign policy towards South Africa ends in the mid-1980s. Little academic literature looks beyond 1986, and the imposition of US sanctions underwritten by the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA). This article offers an analysis of US policy in the wake of the CAAA, covering the 1986–1994 period. It charts the adaption of the Reagan Administration's constructive engagement policy, and then considers how Washington DC engaged South Africa's negotiation process and this country's transition to a new non-racial democratic state. In contrast to US policy prior the CAAA, Washington DC's post-sanctions strategy proved effective. By building a working relationship across South African society, US diplomats were able to play a useful role in apartheid's endgame. The article does caution, however, that the impact of this US assistance can be overstated, as has occurred in diplomatic memoirs. It is argued that this foreign policy netted a significant but minor contribution.

La promoción de la democracia en América Latina

This paper is a review of Thomas Carothers' work on the Reagan administration's policy towards Latin America and his contribution to the democratization of the region (In the Name of Democracy. U.S. Policy Towards Latin America in the Reagan Years). What the book raises about political assistance and democracy promotion programs is mainly criticized. Reference is made to this matter highlighting the importance and validity of this type of programs. It is argued that although these point to formal aspects of democracy, they influence a series of other factors that effectively help its establishment and consolidation.

The Reagan Doctrine: Principle, Pragmatism, and Policy

Ronald Reagan never planned to announce what became known as the Reagan Doctrine. Two months after Reagan declared in his 1985 State of the Union address that the United States should not “break faith” with anti‐Communist resistance groups, a political commentator called that declaration the Reagan Doctrine. The Reagan administration's policies toward anti‐Communist resistance groups varied far more than the term “Reagan Doctrine” suggested. This article shows that differences in local conditions and U.S. security interests as well as sharp disputes between administration policy makers produced divergent policies toward “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, and Cambodia during Reagan's presidency.

L’évolution de la doctrine nucléaire américaine de contreforce

There has been a tendency lately in the United States to talk about the breakdown of the domestic consensus on the purpose of American nuclear strategy. The Reagan administration policies have been largely responsible for the growing felt need by many to question the doctrine and plans underlining that strategy. Why did the erosion of the strategic consensus take place ? One explanation examined in this paper is that the U.S. government has appeared in its nuclear strategy to emphasize more and more counterforce and limited nuclear war plans as its nuclear weapons policy, and therefore has become increasingly receptive to the idea that atomic bombs can be treated like conventional weapons and thought in ways characteristic of the pronuclear world. The central purpose of this article is to analyze how those two phenomenons - the attractiveness of counterforce and the erosion of the strategic consensus - are related to one another. The evolution of the doctrine of counterforce is assessed through a survey of the literature from 1974 to 1984, and particularly from 1980 with the coming to power of the Reagan administration.

The US–Europe technology gap in space transportation: the view from the USA

This paper examines the debate within the USA over how to meet the perceived competition from the successful European Ariane launcher and the loss of US market share for space launch services that it represented. In particular, it explores the origins of the 1983 Reagan Administration policy to turn over expendable launch vehicle production and operation to private industry. The Administration's other decisions to: (1) use the Space Shuttle to fly all government payloads, and (2) allow NASA to market Space Shuttle services commercially, conflicted with this commercialization policy. These policies effectively caused US industry to delay entry into the international competition for launch services until after the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986.

Saving the planet: the American response to the environment in the twentieth century

Part 1 INTRODUCTION: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND ITS MANY VISIONS 3 Chapter 2 From conservation to environmentalism-continuities and contradictions. Part 3 SETTING THE STAGE: THE DIVERSE CURRENTS OF THE 1890s 11 Chapter 4 Industrialization and reform. John Muir, the Sierra Club, and the preservation of nature. Federal legislation. Part 5 PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATION 34 Chapter 6 Theodore Roosevelt and the new approach to conservation. Addressing water pollution. Gifford Pinchot and scientific forestry. Implementing Progressive conservation. The Hetch-Hetchy controversy. Part 7 CONSERVATION AS BUSINESS AND LABOR POLICY 60 Chapter 8 Jazz Age values. Water in the West. New Deal projects. Effects of the Great Depression. Part 9 THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF CONSERVATION 85 Chapter 10 Post-World War II social changes. The problems of growth. Conservation revived. The Echo Park Dam battle. Part 11 THE RISE OF AESTHETIC ENVIRONMENTALISM 108 Chapter 12 The mood of the 1960s. Calls to action. Perils of atomic testing. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. Environmentalism as a new center of consensus. The Santa Barbara oil spill. Part 13 THE LIMITS OF QUALITY OF LIFE 131 Chapter 14 The dangerous bargain between industry and its workers. A legal revolution. The federal response to environmental concerns. Environmental Impact Statements. The Alaska Pipeline. Earth Day. Toxic wastes. Part 15 BACKLASH: FULL STOMACHS AND EMPTY POCKETS 158 Chapter 16 Impact of the oil crisis and the Vietnam War. The Sagebrush Rebellion. James Watt. Swelling ranks of environmental groups. Reagan administration policies. The Wise Use movement. Part 17 A NEW ENVIRONMENTALISM 184 Chapter 18 Three Mile Island. Hazardous waste and Love Canal. New grassroots activism. Dumping in Nevada. Part 19 A Note on Sources 206 Part 20 Index 210

Historical Analogies and the Definition of Interests: The Iranian Hostage Crisis and Ronald Reagan’s Policy Toward the Hostages in Lebanon

Students of political psychology have long shown an interest in exploring how analogical reasoning affects decision‐making. However, the existing literature on analogical reasoning has remained within the rationalist explanatory framework by assuming that an actor's interests can be deduced from that actor's position in a certain material structure, thus treating those interests as unaffected by the process of analogical reasoning. This assumption unduly restricts the role that analogies may play. Analogies can do more than simply allow decision‐makers to figure out what specific policies will advance their preexisting interests—they can also determine the interests themselves. To demonstrate the benefits of moving the analogical literature beyond rationalism, this article explores the Reagan administration's policy toward American hostages in Lebanon, which culminated in the Iran‐Contra scandal.

Chief Justices' Perceptions of News Coverage of State Supreme Courts

Although numerous scholars have examined the issue of news coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court, researchers have virtually ignored the parallel and equally significant issue of media coverage of state supreme courts. A few earlier studies examined newspaper coverage of specific state supreme courts, but no studies have examined broadcast and newspaper coverage of all of the nation's state supreme courts. This study therefore evaluates newspaper and television coverage of state supreme courts by surveying the chief justices of those courts. Justices were surveyed about their demographics, public information activities of courts, and perceptions of the overall news coverage and newspaper and broadcast coverage of their courts. Review of literature Relevant to this survey are the numerous books and articles that have scrutinized press coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court, the limited number of commentaries and studies that have evaluated press coverage of state appellate courts, and one study that examined newspaper coverage of the U.S. Court of Appeals. The communication of U.S. Supreme Court decisions to the public received serious attention from scholars in the late 1960s in books by David Grey, Stephen Wasby and Richard Johnson.(1) Those works underscored the uniqueness of the Supreme Court as a news source. The court largely operates in secret and shuns media attention. Fred Graham, who covered the court for CBS and the New York Times, observed: In a world in which everybody else wanted to be on television, only the justices and the Mafia avoided it.(2) Most of the court's operations are invisible. It accepts for review only three percent of the cases appealed to it; and it provides no explanation for either accepting or rejecting a case. Between the time that a case is accepted by the court and the release of a court decision, only one public event occurs. Attorneys for both sides appear in a public session of the court for one hour of oral arguments. The Supreme Court is most newsworthy when it files a written decision that decides a case, which in the 1990's occurs about 100 times a year. The filing of Supreme Court decisions is unlike other news events in Washington, D.C. There is no advanced warning of when a specific case will be decided. And the written decisions must stand on their own as sources about the court's actions; neither judges nor court personnel will interpret the decisions. Also unlike other Washington, D.C., institutions, there are very few news leaks at the Supreme Court. Any conjecture about court decisions must come from legal authorities outside of the court. Most studies of news coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court have examined the quality and quantity of the content of newspaper stories, editorials and opinion columns. However, one study by Ethan Katsh examined network television coverage of the court.(3) The study of the last five court terms of the 1970's found that networks covered 20 percent of court decisions, with half of those covered by the networks' legal affairs specialists who had law degrees. Another study examined Supreme Court coverage by the three U.S. newsmagazines. Dorothy Bowles and Rebekah Bromley(4) measured coverage of eight court terms in the 1980's and found that 10 percent of decisions were covered, down from 15 percent in a 1970's study. They also found that the decision stories were quite thorough. For example, 89 percent of the stories discussed the reasoning of the majority court opinion. The issue of the quality and quantity of Supreme Court coverage continues to attract attention from scholars, media commentators and even members of the court. A 1993 study by Elizabeth Atwood-Gailey evaluated editorial coverage of the controversial Rust v. Sullivan decision in which the court upheld a Reagan Administration policy that prevented medical clinics that received federal funds from informing patients about the option of abortion. …

Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement

An analysis of the US Central America peace movement. This work explains why more than 100,000 US citizens marched in the streets, illegally housed refugees, travelled to Central American war zones, committed civil disobedience, and hounded their political representatives to contest the Reagan administration's policy of sponsoring wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Focusing on the movement's three most important national campaigns - Witness for Peace, Sanctuary, and the Pledge of Resistance - this work demonstrates the centrality of morality as a political motivator, highlights the importance of political opportunities in movement outcomes, and examines the social structuring of insurgent consciousness. Based on extensive surveys, interviews, and research, the book aims to increase understanding of the formation of individual activist identities, of national movement dynamics, and of religious resources for political activism.

An Investigation of Religious Support of Public and Private Agencies in One Community in an Era of Retrenchment

This article examines the ways in which religious congregations in Greensboro, North Carolina support the efforts of local social service agencies. Findings from a survey of 147 agency directors, 2 focus groups (one with congregational volunteers, and one with clergy and agency directors), and extensive interviews with 6 agency directors, are reported. It is noted that the religious community and the social service community broadened their relationships as a result of the Reagan administration's domestic policies and that there is a surprising set of interconnections between the two systems.

The relative bargaining power of public transit labor

Has government involvement in the transit industry enhanced the relative bargaining power of its labor? This question is investigated by comparing the wages of public transit bus drivers with those of private motor bus drivers and public nontransport operatives. The estimation results suggest that public transit bus drivers earned less than comparable labor groups in the private and public sectors in the pre-reform period (1977, 1979 and 1981), but their wages surpassed or equaled those of comparable labor groups in the post-reform period (1985 and 1990). Ironically, it was only after the advent of the Reagan Administration's policies to reduce transit labor costs that public transit bus drivers enjoyed a marked improvement in their relative wage status.

Incomplete Engagement: Reagan's South Africa policy Revisited

Events in Southern Africa during the early 1990s have re-opened a debate over the effectiveness of the Reagan Administration's policy of ‘Constructive Engagement’. This was a controversy that had previously been laid to rest with the US Congress passing its Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in October 1986, since the ensuing punitive sanctions imposed by the enactment of this legislation scuttled Ronald Reagan's strategy of using friendly persuasion to encourage the South African Government away from its practice of apartheid. Yet, with hindsight, it may appear that the President's method of drawing the Pretoria regime into the international community, through offering recognition and encouragement in exchange for reform, has been triumphantly vindicated. After all, has not the African National Congress (ANC) come to power via a democratic process, thereby avoiding a bloodbath on the scale that so many had predicted?

Economic vulnerability in international relations: the case of East-West trade, investment, and finance

In providing aid to the ailing economies of the former USSR and Eastern Europe, many Western governments fear that they may be leaving themselves vulnerable to fierce economic competition in the future. This study examines claims that vulnerability existed in Western economic relations with the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from 1970 to 1990, and shows how the historical evidence undercuts the vulnerability assumptions that fueled the Reagan administration's foreign policy and were never systematically tested.

The us congress and the Reagan administration's policy of constructive engagement with South Africa

The us congress and the Reagan administration's policy of constructive engagement with South Africa

Partisanship, Policy and Performance: The Reagan Legacy in the 1988 Election

Various journalistic and academic accounts of the 1988 election suggest that George Bush's victory over Michael Dukakis should be primarily attributed to Bush's advantage in voters' comparative evaluations of the two candidates' personal qualities, or to citizens' demands to hold the line against any tax increase or to white voters' attitudes towards blacks and policies designed to assist blacks. This article, based on the 1988 National Election Study, presents evidence which contradicts all three of these conventional conclusions. Based on a multi-stage explanatory model, the authors emphasize instead the substantial roles in determining individual vote decisions that were played by preferences concerning policy direction, in arenas other than those about taxes or race, and by voters' evaluations of the Reagan administration's performance. The authors also emphasize the difference between distinguishing Bush voters from Dukakis voters and explaining the aggregate outcome of the election. In their analysis, the relatively modest size of George Bush's victory (in comparison with Reagan's margin in 1984) is given added significance by documenting the continuing role played by approval of the Reagan administration's policies, the virtual disappearance between 1984 and 1988 of the Democrats' advantage in party identification among voters and the increase in the preponderance of self-designated conservatives over liberals that took place during the same four-year interval.

UNEMPLOYMENT IS NOT A FATE

The policy of the 80's was based on the “no‐nonsense” rule. Everyone focused on the Reagan administration's conservative policy and its solutions were copied elsewhere. In this way the situation of the unemployed — and we are talking about millions of human beings — got worse instead of improving.

Discrepant Responses to Falling Dictators: Presidential Belief Systems and the Mediating Effects of the Senior Advisory Process

Cognitive and advisory process theories usually are cast as competing explanations of decision-making in U.S. foreign policy. They are more appropriately approached as complementary components of a single explanation, in which the independent variable of the President's belief system is mediated by the intervening variable of the senior advisory process. The extent of the mediating effect is afunction of the degree and nature of senior advisor unity: weakest when there is senior advisor disunity, and strongest when there is dissenting unity. The cases of the Carter administration policy toward the Shah of Iran and the Reagan administration policy toward President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines bear out these hypotheses. In the CarterIran case the initial dissenting unity of Carter's top advisors caused support for the Shah to be much greater than predicted by the president's belief system propensities. The senior advisor disunity which emerged as the crisis worsened had much less of a mediating effect, and thus decisions came to more closely reflect the non-interventionist strategic view at the core of Carter's belief system. In the Reagan-Philippines case, initially the president's propensities to support Marcos were reinforced by the unanimity of his top advisors. The key decisions in 1985-86 which culminated in abandoning Marcos were the result of the transformation of the advisory process to dissenting unity and the consequent strong mediating effect. In thus demonstrating the interactive relationship between beliefs and process, these cases help establish the need for integrative theory.