INFRASTRUCTURE: A POLITICAL ANALYSIS by Theodore J. Lowi ...

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INFRASTRUCTURE: A POLITICAL ANALYSIS
by
Theodore J. Lowi
Department of Government
Cornell University
presented at
Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS)
Coordinated Renewal of the Civil Infrastructure Systems
for Sustainable Human Environments
April 21-22, 1999

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The enormous American national debt is perfectly
justifiable. We used it to pay for victory in World War II and
the Cold War. There was waste aplenty, but the need for
redundancy to sustain urgent projects through the unexpected is
almost always justifiable. Also justifiable is the financing of
hot war and cold war by long-term debt, because our children and
their children should help pay for the victories their parents
and grandparents gave them. The same goes for any large public
works, whose financing should be spread across a large portion of
its useful life. But $2-4 billion in accumulated and deferred
maintenance costs of the 45,744-mile U.S. Interstate Highway
system is evidence of the sheer idiocy of leaving infrastructure
to Congress, to cost benefit analysis, to civil engineers and to
consulting economists. Moreover, the unplanned and
unanticipated, and, mostly unwanted, social uses of public works,
especially arterial highways, have to be taken into account. If
"war is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the
military" (Clemenceau) we must add that "civil infrastructure is
too important to be entrusted to engineers."
If "civil infrastructure" is translated back into ordinary
language, it is part of what we have traditionally called public
works, and this translation reveals the oldest policy activity of
the national government of the United States. Moreover the
politics of this area of public policy is familiar and wellstudied.
Thus, it would seem that we ought to be able to draw

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some lessons from this literature that can be applied directly to
the phenomena of modern civil infrastructure. My task, as I see
it, is to explore what, if anything, a political analysis can
contribute to the understanding of infrastructure, how we got to
where we are with it, and how we might improve our chances of
getting to a more sustainable future.
WHAT IS INFRASTRUCTURE?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines infrastructure as "a
collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking;
substructure, foundation ... the permanent installations forming
a basis for military operations ...." William Safire in his
humorous but instructive Political Dictionary, defines it as
"skeleton; a political entity's internal administrative
apparatus." He correctly characterizes it as a "bit of jargon,"
because its origin and purpose can be specifically identified.
Oxford dates the first use with 1927, in a military context, and
then attaches it to World War II. By 1950, Churchill stood
before the House of Commons and denounced the word while
recognizing that it was probably impossible to expunge it from
the English language. It is still used most frequently in
military contexts.
Adding "civic" or "civil" to it as an adjective to
infrastructure focuses the phenomenon on most projects of
whatever sort are financed and built by governments, or in a

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mixed public/private endeavor in which the government role is
essential. Whatever the case, the general category can and
should be called public works. Infrastructure can be readily
classified as a sub-category of the generic category of public
works. I would venture to offer here a criterion for
distinguishing civil infrastructure as a category within public
works as follows: Civil infrastructure is a public works project
which occupies such a strategic place in a geographic area or an
economically definable one that the project produces intended and
unintended consequences out into the indefinite future, with an
influence not only on future public and private land uses but on
the virtual process of thinking and planning itself, for a large
but indefinite space around the project. Such strategically
located projects can be called paradigmatic public works, with
secondary and tertiary effects that not only influence investment
but thinking and design (i.e., planning) in concentric circles of
space and data around the given civil infrastructure project. We
can follow here what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said
about pornography: Though we cannot necessarily define civil
infrastructure to everybody's satisfaction, we know it when we
see it.
TOWARD A POLITICAL DEFINITION OF INFRASTRUCTURE POLICY
A point made in the previous section could well be
considered the governing premise of this endeavor:

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infrastructure policy is an organic part of the category of
public works policy and as such is part of the oldest continuing
category of public policy in the government of the United States.
Just after the conquest of the territory and the defense of the
new state, with a bit of an army and some taxation, public works
is probably the oldest definable public policy category
everywhere -- even before policies protecting private property.
(I would consider relevant infrastructure as one of the basic
prerequisites of an operating market economy.) Public works
policy is the cornerstone of government and of politics in the
United States.
To appreciate this, we need a short course in public policy,
in order to specify the various kinds of public policies to which
public works policies can be compared -- defining what public
works policy is and what it is not. I begin here with history
rather than with a direct definition. Table 1 is a
pictorialization of the public policy outputs of each of the
levels of government in the United States, from roughly 1800 to
1933. First examine Column 1, the domestic policy output of
Congress throughout the 19th century. The first notable
impression is that all these items share two common traits. The
first is common purpose: the promotion or husbandry of commerce.
So prominent and so well understood was this that many Europeans
referred to the early American government as a "commercial
republic." And indeed, the coup d'etat that moved us from the

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Articles of Confederation to the Constitution was precisely
driven by frustration with the barriers to regional and national
commerce under the first American republic. The second common
trait is that all of these items of policy use government in same
way: In the promotion of commerce, there is no involvement of
direct coercion over individuals. All policies are coercive,
because they are governmental; but, as we shall see, there are
different kinds of coercion.
Column 1 is better appreciated in the context of Column 2,
policy outputs of state governments. State governments did a lot
of the same kind of promotion of commerce that the national
government did, especially through their local creatures, called
cities, counties, etc. But the distinctive feature of state
policy outputs, as shown on Column 2, is something else entirely.
It does not take much reflection on the items in that long
column to find what that is. And I should emphasize that each of
these items is a basket of policies represented by at least one
volume in state codes of legislation. The common trait through
those items is referred to in constitutional history as "the
police power." The modern rendering of that concept is:
regulatory policy. This is a particular and distinctive use of
state coercion, which involves the imposition of obligations on
conduct, backed by sanctions.
From that distinction alone, I think we can gain a clear
picture of the nature of "public works" as a distinct category of

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policy. (This, by the way, gives also a clear picture of the
true nature of federalism, as a form of functional division of
power.) The classic examples of such policies are housed in a
classic agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, possibly the oldest
continuing agency in the national government, with the possible
exception of the Postal Service. [PROVIDE DATES OF FOUNDING]
The original assignment of the Corps of Engineers, "Rivers and
Harbors," became the trade name for the whole category of public
works, whose affectionate popular name became "pork barrel." And
this brings us closer to a functional definition of the whole
category, because the best guess is that "pork barrel" comes from
the ante-bellum practice of distributing chunks of salt pork to
slaves in large barrels, permitting them to fight over the barrel
and grab as many chunks as they could possibly carry away. Like
the pieces of pork in the barrel, promotional policies are
policies that actually distribute valued resources to individuals
in order to expand their alternatives or enable them to do
something they were otherwise not able to do. And these valued
resources can be disaggregated into larger and larger numbers of
smaller and smaller chunks, like pork in the barrel. Table 2
labels these "distributive policies," a term chosen in order to
distinguish these from regulatory policies and from
"redistributive" policies (of which more in a moment). But the
best way to understand the distributive policies is to understand
them as a particular use of the state called patronage.

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Patronage has been vulgarized to refer only to the public jobs
and other individual privileges that the victorious political
party can distribute to the faithful as incentives to work or as
rewards for past services. The jobs, construction contracts, and
licenses and other sorts of small chunks of government resources
are a small part of the resources available as patronage
(distributive policy) by government. The importance of patronage
as a category of policy, or use of the state, can best be
conveyed by identifying the practice that gave patronage its
name: The feudal lord was patron to the vassals and serfs who
occupied the lord's or baron's or monarch's domain, and these
resources were distributed to each dependent individual on a
personal, individualized basis, in return for services, loyalty,
and reputation for the goodness of the chieftain. The "patron of
the arts" is one of the derivations, seen in the dowager lady or
retired philanthropist who distributes his or her resources on a
personal basis to deserving artists, performers or other
claimants. It is this subdivision of resources and their
distribution on an individualized, personal basis that defines
the character of patronage historically and the character of
"distributive policy" in the logical scheme of Table 2.
Table 2 places this one category in the context of other
possible categories of policy, defined logically on the basis of
my own conceptualization of the different types of coercion, or
"uses of government." Regulatory policy already introduced, is

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also implemented on an individualized basis (see upper axis), but
in this case the resources and incentives are not what is being
distributed but actually obligations, mainly in the form of rules
limiting and restricting individual conduct. Regulatory policy
obviously establishes a relationship between citizen and
government far different from the relationship prevailing under
conditions of patronage policy. That is, each is a different way
of using government, and therefore each creates the conditions
for a very different kind of politics. This is the basis for a
principle guiding my analysis of policy for the past 30 and more
years: Policies cause politics.
Two other categories, redistributive and constituent,
complete the matrix and exhaust the types of policy governments
can produce and the types of politics flowing therefrom. It is
important also to note that this means political systems are not
comprised of a single "political process" but are comprised of at
least four different political processes, each with its own power
structure and political behavior patterns among participants.
The four boxes containing the four types of public policy are
defined by the two major axes: policies are characterized by
whether the "likelihood of coercion" is remote or immediate (or
indirect versus direct). This readily distinguishes the
distributive or patronage policy from the regulatory policy, as
shown in the two respective boxes. The second axis looks at
policy in terms of whether the policy seeks to influence conduct

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by working on or through individuals or whether it seeks to
influence conduct by manipulating the environment of that conduct
or the conditions of its exercise. (Think of micro v. macro.)
For example, on this axis distributive and regulatory policies
are in the same dimension -- because both work through the
individual (through individual incentives or through individual
obligations). The "redistributive" policies can be just as
coercive as the regulatory, but a change in the tax structure or
a slight increase or cut in interest rates can seriously alter
conduct by altering the conditions of that conduct without ever
having to recognize or find out the identity of any individual on
whom the impact is influential. Likewise, the creation of new
budgeting methods or central purchasing, or laws having to do
with elections or with the re-division of powers among
institutions or Branches, are important policies but they are
policies concerned with the internal workings of government and
how these reforms create new environments for citizens. Then the
linkage from these categories of policy to the most likely
political process patterns are visualized on Diagram 2 by the
lines running across the matrix to illustrative adjectives
outside the matrix.
This will be the context and source of criteria for
examining and exploring the politics of infrastructure policy.
My hope also is that they will help provide a basis for making
normative judgments and actual policy recommendations.

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THE POLITICS OF INFRASTRUCTURE POLICY
Some Case Studies
New Haven: It's Not WHO GOVERNS?, Stupid; It's WHAT GOVERNS?
Robert Dahl's classic study of New Haven, Who Governs?, was
virtually the birth of the empirically-grounded pluralist theory
of politics in America. Pluralist theory describes a special
form of democracy, not directly of the people but one in which
power is kept open and relatively decentralized by competition
and bargaining among leaders, especially leaders of groups,
making for multiple elites, based in pluralities of independent
power centers or "nuclei." Governments were conducted, policies
got made, and political equilibrium of sorts was maintained
through bargaining. And those bargains between major private
interest groups and other qualified players and public officials
were formally inscribed as the public policies that were more
likely to serve the public interest than any other realistic
alternative. (This is directly inspired by the "invisible hand"
dynamic of classical economics.) Dahl found the motherlode of
pluralist political theory in the actual practices of the city of
New Haven and the policies of urban development and redevelopment
by carefully studying them for several years during
the height of federal aid to urban infrastructure in the 1950s.
By the mid-60s, New Haven had spend $790.25 in federal funds

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per capita on urban redevelopment, compared to the average for
all cities of $453.51 [Wolfinger, The Politics of Progress, 1974,
p. 195]. And the energy of its progress and the placement
decisions in New Haven were being made by a plurastic process
centered on the mayor. All this is well-documented by books and
articles arising out of the best-studied city in America. But
the bomb that started all this came not from within the city at
all ("as a political system") but from a single decision made by
the lobbying efforts of the mayor of New Haven and the governor
of Connecticut, concentrating on the federal highway authorities
and their Connecticut congressional delegation to add one exit
off the new Interstate Highway 95. It came off just adjacent to
an interchange already planned and in construction, and it was
designed and built to run directly through the dead center of
downtown New Haven, ending abruptly at a dead end intersection
with a normal cross-street just a few blocks beyond the downtown.
Why? Because the interchange ran through and wiped out the
worst slum in the city, a neighborhood of dilapidated, low-rent
flats and shops sprawled out between Yale University/New Haven
Common on the one side and Grace-New Haven/Yale University
Hospital on the other.
Leaving aside the wisdom of that particular piece of
infrastructure, its role in driving the New Haven re-development
story for its decade as the most admired as well as the most
studied city bring severe doubt on the whole theory and practice

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of pluralism in cities. The whole story of New Haven redevelopment
could be re-told as a story of "national power
structure" with cities as dependent units, far from the
autonomous political systems by which they are usually
characterized.
This is not offered as a reversal or disconfirmation of
Dahl's pluralistic heaven, but an amendment: When public works
programs (and other programs too, but especially public works)
are devolved from national or state governments, leaving
discretion in the hands of city officials as to how to implement
the programs and use the grants-in-aid money, the officials can
build coalitions around these resources to carry out local plans
and objectives they already had but didn't otherwise have the
means. Two important points need to be added here. First,
cities are inherently conservative -- in the sense that their
obligations under state "police power" are "to maintain the
health, safety and morals of the community," largely through
keeping different classes, races and ethnic groups apart from
each other. Second, the use of development money and discretion
devolved from above is, in consequence, conservative.
Conservatives are the best planners because their plans are for
maintenance and conservation of existing social values and social
structures, not, as with liberals, for their alteration. This
constitutes Lesson #1, or the moral, of the story: When you
commit to a piece of public works, especially if it is

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infrastructure (having a strong paradigmatic element) you have to
have a social as well as a construction plan -- or someone else,
unauthorized, will use the resources to make their own social
plan, usually contrary to the one the planners would have had if
they had developed one.
This goes well beyond New Haven. All we have to do is look
at the typical big city, as well as the middle size one. For
example, the arterial highways in and around Chicago, built also
in the 1950s and 60s, were definitely the engine for much of
urban re-development in that city, which came to be called "Negro
removal," "slum renewal," and "white and black, shoulder to
shoulder, again the working classes." Nationally financed Dan
Ryan Expressway (I-90 and I-94) plus the state-financed
University of Illinois/Chicago campus, shoulder to shoulder,
wiped out Chicago's largest downtown slum, the Maxwell Street
slum. The University of Illinois/Chicago campus is called "the
circle campus" because it was built on lands acquired and cleared
in a stretch far beyond the gigantic interchange itself,
comprised of concentric circles where north-bound Ryan meets
west-bound I-290 (the Eisenhower Expressway). Another East-West
connector had been planned to cut across one of the largest black
neighborhoods in Chicago -- south of 63rd Street, Woodlawn,
bordering on the University of Chicago; but by the 1960s, when
construction and removal were to begin, the all-black Woodlawn
Organization had developed sufficient strength and popular

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support to block it. Chicago is more segregated along race and
class lines after the urban re-development/Interstate Highway era
than before.
Iron City: Another Look at Why Conservatives Make the Best
Planners
Iron City is a middle-size southern industrial city, near
Birmingham and a small clone of Birmingham. 1
What happened to
infrastructure there happened almost everywhere else, but it is
easier to see and to document in a smaller city, especially one
that was so explicit about its own plan for how it would use the
resources it would get from federal programs involving grants-inaid
for urban infrastructure.
In 1950, 20 percent of Iron City's population was black,
but, unlike northern cities, blacks did not live in those
concentrated neighborhoods that came to be called black ghettos.
Like most southern cities, mainly because of slow general growth
and slow and steady black immigration from nearby rural areas,
and particularly because so many, especially the women, worked as
domestic servants in white households (before the universality of
the automobile), white neighborhoods were interlarded with black.
"Close quarters" it was often called. This was altogether
stable and comfortable until the whole system of legal
1 This account is drawn entirely from Lowi, The End of
Liberalism, 1969, revisited 1979.

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segregation came into crisis, and then it became clear to the
local elites that there would be no possible way Iron City could
keep its public schools racially segregated by drawing school
district lines that would pass judicial review or administrative
review by the grant givers. The local planners were visionary in
this, because they stepped into the crisis by forming the Iron
City Planning Commission in 1951, and by 1952 the Commission had
a handsome master plan, in full color, with transparent overlays
and all the fancy design that mark professional planning. It
laid out quite explicitly a five-point plan. (1) An all black
neighborhood but with too small a population to warrant proper
recreational, school or social services. (2) An all black
neighborhood also with blighted and substandard housing but
occupied by people not eligible for relocation in public housing
or who personally preferred single-family homes. (3) An area
also of "blighted and depreciating" housing but "growing as the
focal point of Negro life." (4) An all black neighborhood
sparsely filled by shacks with outside toilets but strung along
the river on prime property slated for civic development. It
happened also that #1 was located just behind the white
neighborhood with the highest assess valued white housing and
also abutting the largest all-white junior high school. Area
designated #2 was located directly behind the central (white)
high school. Area #3 was an all-black neighborhood, sparsely
filled by shacks with outside toilets but strung along the river

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on property designated as prime property slated for civic
development. Area #4 was "across the tracks;" it was the largest
all-black neighborhood and also "blighted and depreciated" but
was "growing as the focal point of Negro life." It happened also
to be located next to the one all-black high school, junior high
school and primary school.
Area #1 was completely "urban renewed." A regular street
plan replaced the dead-end alleys, and middle-class single-family
homes replaced the shacks. This project more than met the
planning criteria of federal urban policy, inasmuch as slums were
cleared and a very significant amount of property was returned to
the city tax base. The increased white population in the new
area was accommodated by the expansion of the next-door junior
high school and the addition of an elementary school with new
playgrounds. Urban re-development and community facilities
money.
Area #2, directly behind the Central High School, was wiped
out and replaced by public housing, all-white. Area #4 was also
completely wiped out; part of the cleared land became the site
for the new city hall and city jail, beautifully overlooking the
river, and the rest was landscaped for "city beautiful." The
community facilities money. Area #3 did indeed expand as "the
focal point of Negro life," with public housing and with singlefamily
homes financed by federal public housing grants-in-aid and
federal urban re-development grants-in-aid keeping the cost of

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single-family homes and duplexes at rock bottom prices.
Thus, the apartheid plan was a complete success. Iron City
had its ghetto and the almost complete racial segregation of the
population. And it was all done legally, explicitly, and with
federal assistance. In fact it had not been possible without
federal assistance. Between 1957 and 1961, when the plan was
virtually complete, federal grants-in-aid came to almost exactly
20 percent of Iron City's annual government budget. And this
does not count an undetermined amount of federal highway
assistance that had contributed to the removal of smaller and
separated black neighborhoods that were not part of the original
Iron City plan. It also does not count FHA and VA private
financing for the lovely homes built in Area #1 or some of the
homes built in the all-black area. It does count the building of
the new all-black auditorium and the church that had been picked
up from Area #1 and moved, with the black population, over to
Area #3 to join the other focal points of Negro life.
Moral to the story: If you want to be sure your city plan
is a success, use the secondary and tertiary effects of
infrastructure, and be sure there is plenty of money outside the
local tax base.
Death of a Village: Do Pure Scientists Make Good Planners?
This story took place in the 1960s, and at that time we
looked at it as an intimation of the future, because it involved

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pure scientists as planners and builders. It was a look at the
future because more and more scientists were going to be
involved, either as builders and planners themselves or as
analysts and consultants to builders who would increasingly need
a research and analysis base for any large project, especially
one that was likely to be a paradigmatic, infrastructure project.
It was clear by the time we finished the research and writing
for the book that we were already living our future. Thirty
years and a second edition have passed since then, and we are
certainly living our future now. 2
The National Accelerator
Laboratory, FermiLab is located on 6800-acre site, 30 miles due
west of the center of Chicago on what used to be 71 farms
occupied by 71 farm families. It was, until recent years, the
world's largest atom smasher, and it was a proud and comfortable
location in DuPage County, one of America's most prosperous
counties, near wealthy suburbs and also near mansion and horse
country where, at least until recently, people still got together
for fox hunts.
Our story begins in 1959, when one farm owner decided to
sell her 420-acre farm to a developer, who immediately sought
permits from the county to subdivide the property and build 100
low-cost single family homes at prices accessible to working-
2 This account is based entirely on Lowi et al., Poliscide --
Big Government, Big Science, Lilliputian Politics (Macmillan,
1976; 2nd ed., University Press of America, 1990).

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class people. All hell broke loose. This was seen as a tipping
point, because the baby boom growth was in this direction, and
many other farmers were caught in a vise: unable to make a
living without an outside job to supplement farm income, and
suffering a rate of taxation at suburban rather open-country
levels. Every device available to local government was used to
stop the developer, who was already beginning to advertise the
new village of Weston, Illinois, for the good, solid working
classes. Following some court victories, and the meeting of the
stiff county criteria for access roads, plumbing and sewerage,
construction codes, etc., the Weston developers found themselves
unable to beat the conspiracy of banks and other private
interests to block local financing. The developer persevered,
finding outside financing -- which turned out to be Mafia money,
but this only came out later, with the publication of our book.
In order to meet the local construction criteria, each
Weston home would have to be marketed at $30,000-plus, far above
working-class capacity in 1959. 3
But the county planner knew
3 And there was still another impediment that would push the
Weston home financing upwards: The Federal Housing Administration
(FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) officials refused to
provide insured mortgages for Weston homeowners. This is
consistent with FHA and VA policy, first to cooperate with local
authorities, and second, to refuse to insure home investments in
urban slums. Another impediment was the refusal that the county
got from the U.S. Post Office to make house-to-house delivery to
the Weston homes, thus requiring that nearly a hundred mailboxes
would be strung along the county highway, several hundred feet
from the entrance to the village.

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that, once Weston got its incorporation, it would have power to
carve 3 60-foot lots out of each pair of 90-foot lots, enabling
the developers to offer Weston homes well below the regulated
county housing market.
By 1965, Weston was an operating community, with almost all
of their houses occupied and fully financed. It appeared that
the private developers had beaten the gigantic DuPage county
government, despite all of its own formidable authority and
despite the collateral help it had gotten in conspiracy with
local private developers, banks, gentlemen farmers, and the like.
But help was on the way. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was
engaged in a nationwide search for the site for what was to be
the world's largest atom smasher. Immediately the AEC was
deluged with over 200 proposals from 46 states, and the
competition was intense, because the stakes were high: The 200-
billion electronvolt (BeV) accelerator would be a highly
desirable "clean industry," whose construction would cost over $1
billion, whose operating needs would lead to the employment of an
indeterminate but very large number of quality workers in stable,
quality jobs -- not to count the large number of resident
scientists and technicians, many of whom were expected to live in
that vicinity.
On December 15, 1966, Chicagoans learned they would soon be
the proud neighbor of the world's largest atom smasher. It was
to be located virtually on top of the village of Weston, whose

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inhabitants had been promised that their homes would be picked up
bodily and moved to a nearby location and would become the
"service city" for the science installation. The mayor even
arranged for the construction of an enormous billboard sign
pointing attention to Weston, the country's first "atomic
village." Almost exactly 20 months after the announcement that
the Weston site could be selected by the AEC, no legal trace of
the village or the farms remained. National Accelerator
Laboratory (NAL) personnel occupied the village homes and the
farmhouses while supervising construction of the underground
ring, two miles in diameter. This was the village that was to
have been moved with all of its occupants intact. And it was to
be moved because the villagers had been told that the accelerator
ring, for geological reasons, would have to be put directly on
top of the village itself.
This was a conspiracy to beat all conspiracies. It was a
conspiracy with DuPage county officials at the center, with the
State of Illinois Department of Business and Economic Development
(DBED) as a key ax-wielder, with Mayor Daley's political troops
in Chicago dealing directly with Chicago banks, with Chicago and
county newspapers agreeing to have their real estate editors
refuse advertisements promoting the Weston development, and
several agencies of the U.S. national government, whose enormous
largess for "science infrastructure" was being made available at
the discretion of the local authorities on the scene.

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What is even more significant is the fact that the
scientists -- both the visionary designers of the accelerator,
including Cornell's most famous Robert Wilson -- and the science
planners at AEC and at the National Academy of Science, and all
the other sciences in the mid-West who had sought so hard to
bring the great accelerator there instead of losing out once
again to the East Coast or the West Coast scientists -- all of
these people, one and together, singly and collectively, were
totally ignorant of the secondary and tertiary uses to which the
accelerator opportunity was being put. Judging from scores of
interviews prior to publication, and almost as many reactions to
our book when it was sent directly to a great number of the
participants, the scientists never knew what hit them. Professor
Robert Wilson, who had years earlier proposed a much cheaper
alternative that could meet most of the needs of the giant atom
smasher was, as a consequence, made the designer, supervisor and
first director of FermiLab. And this very humane, very
humanistic scientist-poet not only provided for the building of
the accelerator at the lowest possible cost, but also engaged in
a most enlightened hiring policy, in terms of race as well as
class. And since the county had granted the NAL more than twice
as much land as the original specifications required (6800
instead of 3,000 acres, in order to include all the likely farms
that would tip over into development), Dr. Wilson dedicated
several acres of the surplus property to the construction of a

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model farm to be run by "Farmer Bob," a farm manager with a
Ph.D., to help preserve "the only vestige of rural living in this
area ...." They even installed a small herd of buffalo on the
land that had been cleared from every vestige of natural rural
life.
Moral to the story: Scientists, just like highway
developers, tend to be so project-oriented that they say to local
planners, in effect, "Give us our toy, but don't tell us how you
got it." When the center doesn't plan, the periphery will,
usually with the imposition of local values, no matter how far
removed they are from central values. When central planners
plan, they are socialists. When local planners plan, they are
"city fathers." You cannot have a strategic public work, any
public work, without a plan. If you don't make the plan,
somebody else will. With your dough.
Back to the Twelfth Century: International Airports, the Modern
Cathedrals
[In the interest of time and space, this case will be added
after the Conference, for the final draft.]
REFLECTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
My reflections have been anticipated in the moral at the end
of each of the cases. By the very nature of public works
policies -- especially infrastructure policies, if the

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paradigmatic element is understood to be present -- there will be
secondary and tertiary effects. These will always be social and
political as well as economic and technical. And the social and
political will be the most extensive and will involve the largest
range of "unanticipated consequences." Infrastructure -- again
by its very nature -- will always be inhabited by local
interests, and local interests will be far more intensely pursued
than the regional, national, or other broader "public interests."
Table 2 is reproduced from Poliscide and, as in the book, it
is designed to be generalizable in large part to all large public
works projects, especially those involving all three levels of
government in the federal system. In fact, the larger the scale
and cost of a public works project, the more likely all the
levels of government in the federal system will be involved, with
greater money provided from above and more discretion in
implementation devolved downward. That is, the greater the
distance from the money provider, the more discretion in the
hands of the money distributor. The names of the players will
not be the same as those on Table 2, but the roles and the
perspectives flowing from each role remain about the same.
Now back to the policy scheme introduced earlier. Putting
this together within the federal system, we are well-advised to
attach a label to all public works projects: Beware: This
project can be harmful to your health. Public works policies
make resources available on a highly disaggregable basis. That

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is, they can be subdivided into units and the units can be
exchanged, traded and cumulated in a relatively fluid,
individualized basis. Picture once again the pork barrel. But
more. As observed earlier, this kind of policy uses government
power in a promotional way, with a minimum of coercion and
therefore produces a special relationship between government and
citizen. This facilitates in turn a special kind of political
process, one in which a very special kind of coalition prevails:
logrolling. Logrolling is a vulgar, slang term for one of the
fundamental types of political relationship. Logrolling can be
defined as an agreement of mutual support between two or more
people who have absolutely nothing in common -- except the
agreement of mutual support. In contrast, coalitions in the
struggle for regulatory policy are the classic compromise-type
coalition in which all participants must make their respective
interests known and then examine each others' interests,
softening their respective demands until genuine accommodations
are reached. Coalitions for redistributive policy also require
mutual knowledge but demand broader knowledge than material
interest -- reaching levels of broad social class, socio-economic
principle, and, in a word, ideology.
Logrolling, the only coalition type concerning us here, is
the easiest to form and in many ways the most stable, because
participants say to each other, in effect, "You support me on X
and I'll support you on any issue -- don't tell me about it; just

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tell me when and how to support you." John Ferejohn, in his
important book-length study of the politics of "pork barrel
policies," written many years after my original characterization,
emphasizes the same thing:
If a bill calling for improvements in a
single district is put [forward], it will not
pass, since all the districts must pay and
only one will benefit. Consequently, only an
omnibus bill proposing expenditures in at
least a majority of the districts has a
chance of passage. 4
But Ferejohn limits his observation to single pieces of
traditional "rivers and harbors" type legislation (omnibus) in
which dozens of individual projects are added up until a majority
of districts are represented. But logrolling coalitions are also
formed across several different projects in several different
bills in the same session of the legislature or in later
sessions, where payoffs of mutual support are made at later
times. In fact, it is one of the major functions of the parties,
or party leaders, to keep records of logrolls and to help
facilitate later payoffs.
Now I move to the immediate and highly predictable
consequences of this kind of coalition: The projects and other
items involved in the logrolling coalition are units of exchange
that are intensely concentrated on the projects themselves and on
the mutual assistance agreed upon. Little if any room is left
4 John Ferejohn, Pork Barrel Politics, full citation to be
provided.

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for considerations of secondary and tertiary effects and for
"public goods" beyond the items involved in the transactions,
because these introduce other interests and ideologies that
interfere with logrolling. Logrolling coalitions are almost on
principle antagonistic to larger public goods (say, in the realm
of regulatory policy or redistributive policy) because the types
of coalitions involved in those public goods tend to be
incompatible with logrolling coalitions.
Now add the other tendency identified above, that in our
federal system greater discretion is devolved to the local
implementing agencies because greater geographic and juridical
distances are involved due to the fact that more intervening
layers of delegation are involved. Now, any type of policy --
distributive (patronage), regulatory, or redistributive -- that
leaves maximum discretion to the local implementors must leave
open, virtually absent, the guidelines and standards that are
supposed to keep all implementors relatively close to the law's
original intent. In other words, maximum discretion equals
minimum rule of law. When the local implementors have this
degree of discretion, they can convert almost any law, program,
project into something close to patronage and therefore to
logrolling coalitions, because they can disaggregate the policy
into units of decision, and therefore units of logrolling in a
logrolling coalition. Go back to Diagram 1 or Diagram 2 and draw
a broad, curving arrow through all four boxes, starting with the

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regulation box and curving round to end with the distributive (or
patronage) policy box. I call this the "entropic tendency" in
politics, the tendency of any and all types of politics to
deteriorate or drain downward toward the logrolling type of
political process that prevails in the distributive or patronage
policy category.
To reveal the nature and dynamics of this peculiar type of
coalition politics is not only to reveal the risk, indeed the
danger, to society of the highly compartmentalized commitment to
public works projects merely based on a positive cost-benefit
analysis. It also provides some insight into ways we may combat
the danger and have our infrastructure without the undue social
costs and other unanticipated consequences we always seem to have
to endure. We jolly well need a large proportion of the public
works projects proposed. For the sake of argument, our society
may well need all the infrastructure projects proposed. Yet, we
cannot outlaw the narrow-minded logrolling coalitions that form
in support of these projects and militate against broader
considerations of social good. And we cannot preach our way out
by stressing the goodness of the broader, ecology or justice
oriented considerations. The logrolling coalition will always
rollover those humane and philanthropic sentiments. We have to
find a way out that is ruggedly equivalent to the way in,
fighting fire with fire.
First, it seems to me we have to recognize immediately that

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cost-benefit approaches are a trap. In the hands of projectoriented
interests and their technologist consultants, it is a
means of foreclosing debate, not a route toward enlightened
policy. We can move the project away from the project mentality
only by requiring that every project embody a genuine and clear
policy -- rule of law -- to govern it. If the origin and the
authorization and financing (all or part) are national, the
policy must also be national. (If Americans no longer want a
national government or trust a national government, then let the
locals finance and construct their own highways and segregate
their own populations without federal help.) And the policy
governing the project must be a rule of law carefully oriented
toward governing the secondary and tertiary (and broader
spillover) effects of the project. We must require this not only
because real policies embodying real rules of law are necessary
if we are ever to improve our chances to attain the goals of
sustainable development and social equality. Rules of law are
necessary because we are supposed to be a constitutional
democracy. Every public works project is freighted with social
policy. The question is not whether public works should embody a
social policy but who shall make the policy -- the law makers or
the local elites. When project designers admit that they should
be governed by the social policies of higher political
authorities, they are doing more than behaving responsibly toward
their positions. They are also setting limits on the extent to

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which local project recipients can abuse, misuse and misdirect
these resources. This involves recognition that policy has to be
a standard of responsible conduct for local authorities that are
above and beyond their own immediate manipulation.
There is still another advantage to attaching explicit
social policies to each and every public works project. The
larger policy works as a limit on the designers and the
congressional budget makers themselves. The introduction of a
larger social policy changes immediately the type of political
process involved, and that is precisely the best way out of the
danger of project-oriented decision making. This is the only way
to put an end to such policy barons as Bud Shuster, chairman of
the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, who has
put his congressional district under about six feet of concrete.
Exit: the institutionalization of second thoughts:
Public works projects, even including important
infrastructure projects, are distinguished by decisions that
embody no rule of conduct, because when each unit is discreet and
treated discreetly, this is tantamount to saying that no rule or
condition binds any of the recipients. It does not matter much
whether the decision makers are political hacks, career
bureaucrats, politically appointed lawyers, members of Congress,
or high-energy physicists. Once the patronage policy process is
set in train, the behavior series is predictable. On the other
hand, a drastic and immediate change can be made in the decision

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series and the political process by the introduction of an
important public policy that guides and sets limits on the goals
and secondary and tertiary effects of the project. For example,
when some Senators from some northeastern states sought to apply
civil rights considerations to the selection of the national
accelerator site, Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen replied:
There are 20 states that have open occupancy
laws. There are 30 states that have no such
laws. If Congress in its wisdom undertakes
at any time to draw that line [applying a
civil rights condition to a specific public
works project], then I want to say ... that
line is going to be firmly drawn, and it is
going to be equally firmly held.
Since no one at that time wanted advances in civil rights badly
enough to put an end to the pork barrel process, they withdrew
their efforts to impose a civil rights policy on the accelerator.
But it is nevertheless extremely important to set up a process
whereby law makers are forced to be explicit about the absence of
policies governing projects and the fact that policies ought to
govern selected aspects of the impact of the project. And if law
makers recognized honestly that the absence of a governing rule
established by them will simply leave open the opportunity for
local units to make their own governing policies, perhaps they
will be more determined to establish their own policies rather
than leave all that to the locals.
The public works process is certainly one of the worst
processes in the American system from almost any and every

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perspective. It is bad in terms of the absence of the rule of
law. It is bad in terms of the narrowness with which decision
makers can allocate public resources. And it is measurably the
worst to the extent that it enables locals to make social
policies that would be definitively rejected if those policies
were put before the public as a referendum.
A worthy and pregnant conclusion is the simple proposition
that it is the rule that makes the difference. When a policy is
attached to a project, the "public works political process" is
immediately transformed. The transformed process is a better one
because it requires more "search behavior" on the part of the
specialized agencies, search behavior beyond the immediateness of
the project. It imposes -- without of course guaranteeing -- a
more regular and nationally consistent consideration of social
issues. And it institutionalizes second thoughts. Let the
technologies be decided by technological specialists. But give
them an institution that provides them with the opportunity for
second thoughts.