Thomas E. Cavanagh, in Political Science Quarterly (Winter 1982/83), 2852 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10025-0148.
During the 1970s, a crop of eager newcomers dramatically overhauled the US. House of Representatives. The result, says Cavanagh, a Joint Center for Political Studies researcher, has been "institutional chaos."
Earlier, between 1863 and 1963, the House had become increasingly institutionalized: The average tenure of members rose from 1.75 to 5.65 terms; the proportion of freshmen...
Leonard
The Bureaucracy Reed, in Harper's (Nov. 1982), Subscrip- tion Service Dept., P.O. BOX 2620, BOU~-
Wins Again der, Colo. 80321.
President Jimmy Carter's 1978 Civil Service Reform Act was hailed as a
major overhaul of the federal bureaucracy. But Reed, a Washington
Monthly contributing editor, says the reforms have changed little.
The U.S. Civil Service, established under the 1883 Pendleton Act, has become an increasingly secure haven even for incompetent employees. In 1974, the Supreme...
Nathaniel Beck,
and the Fed in American .lourna~ of Political science
(Aug. 19821, University of Texas Press,
P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Tex. 78712.
The Federal Reserve Board is often accused of manipulating U.S. mone- tary policy to aid Presidents' re-election bids. Beck, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, disputes the charge.
Critics of the Fed, led Yale's Edward Tufte and Fortune magazine's Sanford Rose, focus on increases in the money supply that stimulated...
a major shift in monetary policy. But there was little change at the Fed when Demo- crat Jimmy Carter replaced Ford. Even the post-Nixon shift was af- fected the need to adapt to outside economic conditions: the 1973 abandonment of fixed international exchange rates and the 1973-74 OPEC oil price hikes.
Indeed, looking back to long-term money supply growth rates since the 1950s, Beck finds no partisan pattern in Fed policy. The highest growth rate occurred under Lyndon Johnson, followed by Kennedy,...
confusing executive and legislative authorities, Congress's veto power has diminished the government's accountability to the public.
FOREIGN POLICY &DEFENSE
Hope for Poland? "Crisis in Poland" Richard Spieiman,
in Foreign Policy (Winter 1982/83), P.O.
Box 984, Farmingdale, N.Y. 11737.
When Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in Po- land and suppressed the Solidarity trade union movement in December 1981, the Reagan administration responded with trade sanctions and...
Wen- IS Victory dell John Coats, Jr., in Journal of
Obsolete? Contemporary Studies (Summer 1982),
Transaction Periodicals Consortium,
Dept. 541, Rutgers University, New
Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
To antinuclear activists, the United States appears to face a stark choice between peace and nuclear apocalypse. Coats, a Kenyon politi- cal scientist, contends that this view is a logical outcome of misguided
U.S. policies since the early 1960s, when Washington abandoned the idea of achieving victory,...
ensuring that neither side could win. The chief goal of U.S. policy-makers became avoiding any move that might disturb the nu- clear "balance of terror."
Moreover, the "ideology of arms control" was soon extended to con- ventional warfare, Coats says. To win the land war in Indochina, for example, would have invited Soviet or Chinese intervention, it was thought; field commanders were ordered instead to kill as many of the enemy as possible in South Vietnam to bring Hanoi to...
wide margins on the importance of the
U.S. commitment to NATO and on the need at times to support foreign dictators. But "influentials" were twice as likely to support U.S. arms sales abroad; 64 percent of the public favored strong U.S. efforts to contain communism, while only 45 percent of the leaders did.
The authors also found the public more "chauvinistic" than its lead- ers. More than 88 percent of the public but only 26 percent of the leadership group believed America's...
increasing the incentive to strike first, such weapons destabilize the military balance and are a particular threat to NATO, whose defense lines are long and relatively lightly defended.
1990, Brown argues, conventional weapons will be even more deadly. NATO leaders will have to rethink their strategy and con-template talks with Moscow to defuse the high-tech threat.
ECONOMICS, LABOR &BUSINESS
"What to Do About the U.S.-Japan Eco-
Japan's Edge nomic Conflict" by C. Fred Bergsten, in...
Bill Keller, in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report
Bouncing Back? (AU~.28 & Sept. 4, 1982), 1414 22nd st. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037.
The decades-long decline in organized labor's strength continues, but union leaders today are beginning to revitalize their organizations.
Keller, a Congressional Quarterly reporter, notes that news is grim on the membership front: In 1945, unions represented one-third of all U.S. workers; today, fewer than 25 percent. And while membership rolls grew...