Cultivating Congress: constituents, issues, and interests in agricultural policymaking

Abstract

Browne, William P. (1995). Cultivating Congress: Constituents, Issues, and Interests in Agricultural Policymaking. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 295 pages, $14.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-7006-0701-3 OVERVIEW AND CRITIQUE Cultivating Congress is an incisive, creative, thought-provoking work about growing good policy. this book, Browne probes how legislators react to constituents cultivate Congress--to wit, how legislators assimilate interests with their own in the pursuit of policymaking. Set against a backdrop of agricultural policymaking, Browne analyzes the role of interest politics. He draws his commentary from interview data, demographic data, history, and the scholarly insight of others. Browne carefully blends these ingredients and delivers a first-rate account of how agriculture policy is made today and how it has evolved over time. the process, he also provides the reader with an excellent overview of the roles that legislators, committees, interest groups, bureaucrats, and constituents play in cultivating policy. Browne adds a handful of new or improved metaphors to a body of knowledge already rich with such similitudes of reality--specifically, member enterprises, home-style work, and policy games and players, just to name a few. Each new portraiture adds fresh insight and clarity and therefore is a major contribution to the literature. The member enterprise metaphor depicts Congress as an agglomerate of small businesses, each in competition with one another to become proponents and advocates of particular public policies--especially vying for those most likely to keep the home folks happy. Browne (8-10) suggests that the best entrepreneurs are those who seize the opportunity provided by postreform rules to work their attentive publics and maintain popularity. Home-style work refers to the efforts of congressional enterprises to cater to home or state in order to promote a favorable image with local constituents. Members of Congress perform their work under uncertain circumstances which stem from an interplay of forces at home and Capitol Hill. effect, members need to judge a melee of competing demands and expectations (district constituents, committee chairs, subcommittee members, interest groups, public agencies, etc.) and hope that they attend the issues with the most personal payoff. Browne (4) submits that members of Congress resolve their uncertainties by seeking safety in the home district or, as one policymaker is reported to have said, In case of disagreement, choose your local voter. Policy games are ongoing contests over well-defined, commonly understood issues by rival policy players (xx). Policy players are those who play in the game: political actors capable of rational thought; whose interests are served by influencing public policy; and who take an active role in the policy process (xxi). Strategy is a principal concept of the policy game. The game strategies of one player affect the game strategies of all others and vice versa. Policy games exist only when interests are apparent and understood to be key to the continued allocation of the domain's public policy benefits (xx). Certainly the notion of policymaking as a game is not new.l What Browne has done is to enlarge the concept. Typically, game theory is a speculation tool used to highlight and analyze policy choices in a conflict situation. It is a deductive model of policymaking that describes how people would go about making decisions in competitive situations given that they are completely rational, rather than how they actually make decisions (Dye, 1987:38). Thus, the outcomes are speculative because game theory conditions are seldom approximated in real life. Customary game scenarios include decisions about war and peace, the use of nuclear weapons, and other abstractions that are not readily testable. When applied to agriculture policy domain as Browne has done in this book, the result is a fairly accurate portrayal of what goes on within the policy area. …

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