Why Government Succeeds and Why It Fails. By Amihai Glazer and Lawrence S. Rothenberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 224p. $42.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

In a 1964 book review (“American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies, and Political Theory, World Politics 16 [4]: 677, 693–715), Theodore Lowi challenged the conventional wisdom that politics determined policy. The causal relationship, he argued, ran in the opposite direction: “[F]or every type of policy there is likely to be a distinctive type of political relationship” (1964, 688). In their bold effort to explain why government succeeds (and why it fails), Amihai Glazer and Lawrence Rothenberg again prompt us to examine the relationship between politics and policy, this time by setting the “political machinations” of politicians and interest groups to the side in order to ask: How do economic conditions impact the success or failure of a public policy? To try to determine the success or failure of a policy by examining “only the interaction between politicians and constituencies is like investigating the efficacy of medical treatment by looking only at the motives of physicians and ignoring the biology of different diseases” (p. 2). For Glazer and Rothenberg, an exclusive focus on politics ignores the “biology” (so to speak) of different policies that are best discovered by examining the ways in which rational economic actors respond to government actions. More specifically, they argue that an analysis of public policy based upon four economic constraints—credibility, rational expectations, crowding out or in, and multiple equilibria—will help reveal the kinds of problems that government is most likely able to solve, and why.