RESEARCH

25 Years of Research

WHAT MAKES RESEARCH at the Kennedy School different from that carried out in other parts of the university or at other schools of public policy? According to Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye, Jr., research at the Kennedy School is distinct because it joins analytical excellence with policy relevance. Through books, articles, and working papers, as well as through presentations at legislative committees and public forums, research at the Kennedy School provides actionable ideas and methods for public policy practitioners to implement. The school’s research output also includes fundamental contributions to the social sciences, providing new tools for analysis.

Many such examples exist of the interplay between the school’s work and its policy relevance. As an expert on civil liberties issues, for example, Kennedy School researcher Juliette Kayyem is helping advise the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office Anti-Terrorism Task Force. Recently, Ash Carter, based on research carried out at the Kennedy School’s Preventive Defense Project on ways to prevent North Korea from posing a greater nuclear danger, gave the lead testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Clearly,” says Nye in the introduction to the school’s most recent research report, “the work of the school’s faculty reaches beyond the institution itself, allowing in some instances for it to be realized and tested anew in the arena of policymaking and implementation worldwide.”

...

The following reflects a sampling of the school’s research accomplishments during the last 25 years. Dean Nye; former Dean Graham Allison; Julie Wilson, director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy; Mark Moore MPP 1971, PhD 1973, director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations; and Richard Zeckhauser, professor of political economy, were interviewed for this article.

1 l Tools for Understanding In Micromotives and Macrobehavior, Thomas Schelling demonstrates how individual choices produce collective outcomes, not always in ways the choosers desire. The 1978 volume’s simple yet elegant models are employed by Schelling and his followers to explain broad swaths of policy-relevant behavior, from patterns of residential segregation and economic stagnation, to the propagation of disorder and disease.

2 l Policy Analysis Codified In 1978, Edith Stokey and Richard Zeckhauser offer a comprehensive introduction to the tools of prediction and decision appropriate for determining public policies. Their book, A Primer for Policy Analysis, becomes the major text defining the field, serving as a reference for students of policy in both the United States and abroad.

3 l Case Program: An Education Tool Established in 1981, the school’s Case Program, designed for teaching about how government works and how public policy is made, takes on real-world topics from police corruption in Hong Kong to the Bay of Pigs debacle. Now consisting of almost 2,000 cases, the Case Program is used by colleges and universities worldwide for teaching about government and public policy.

4 l Academics and Practitioners Collaborate In 1982, Mark Moore and Frank Hartmann develop the first Executive Session, a program that brings academics and leading practitioners together to search for answers to important public problems. This method has been used to deal with topics such as the juvenile justice system, domestic preparedness for terrorism, errors in medicine, and public service.

5 l Community Policing Established Beginning in 1985, a community policing effort led by Frank Hartmann and Mark Moore, to form partnerships between community and police for ensuring greater public safety, helps revolutionize the way police departments across the country operate.

6 l Market-Based Environmental Policy Instruments Beginning in 1988, and in the years since, economist Robert Stavins has advanced environmental protection by devising tradable permit systems and other market-based instruments that work with the market rather than against it to protect the environment at minimum cost. Such innovative policy tools have been used with great success in the pollution control realm, such as for the reduction of acid rain in the United States, and are now being developed and applied in other domains, ranging from achieving sustainable fisheries to reducing the risk of global
climate change.

7 l State of Housing In 1988, publication begins on the State of the Nation Housing Report, a widely referenced account published annually of housing problems confronting the nation’s low- and moderate-income households. Former Assistant Secretary of Housing at HUD William Apgar of the Joint Center for Housing Studies institutes the new publication.

8 l Discretion and Government Procurement Steven Kelman, in Procurement and Public Management: The Fear of Discretion and the Quality of Government Performance, published in 1990, argues that cumbersome purchasing rules force public employees to pay too much and take too long to buy needed goods and services. Kelman later puts many of his ideas for reforming this system into practice as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the mid-1990s.

9 l Reform in Developing Countries In 1991, Merilee Grindle and John Thomas, in Public Choices and Policy Change, developed on the basis of real-world cases, provide an analytic framework for helping leaders in underdeveloped countries understand and manage difficult problems of policy decision making and implementation.

10 l Post-Soviet Nuclear Danger In 1991, CSIA Director Ash Carter, working with a team from the center, writes a report warning of “loose nukes” after the fall of the Soviet Union and describing a sweeping program for the U.S. government to undertake to contain Soviet nuclear weapons and fissile materials. The report became the basis for drafting the Nunn-Lugar legislation. A year later, Carter went to work for the Pentagon, where he ran the Nunn-Lugar program. It resulted in the elimination of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Kazakstan, and Belarus, and — so far — no “loose nukes” in Russia.

11 l Electricity Regulation For the past decade, William Hogan has researched the economics of electricity based on the costs of transmission, congestion, and pricing. Called locational marginal pricing (LMP), his work is helping to improve competitive wholesale electricity markets in the United States and around the world.

12 l Welfare Overhauled In a series of books and papers including Poor Support (1988) and Welfare Realities (1994), David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane make recommendations for reforming the system of public assistance in the United States. Their ideas play a central role in the Clinton administration’s efforts to overhaul the welfare system, and in state level reforms, and in later reforms in Great Britain and elsewhere.

13 l Visions of Governance In 1995, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., launches Visions of Governance in the 21st Century to concentrate on issues vital to the school’s evolving mission. Directed since 2000 by John Donahue MPP 1982, PhD 1988, the project’s focus has progressed from declining trust in government; to the eclipse of the central state and the rise of “distributed governance”; to the implications for governance of the information revolution, globalization, and the growing reach and sophistication of market forces; to the future of public service. Six edited volumes have emerged directly from Visions faculty symposia, along with another six books inspired or supported by Visions, two executive sessions, and other intellectual products.

14 l A Look at Poverty Research conducted by sociologist William Julius Wilson on poor Chicago neighborhoods, the results of which are published in 1996 in When Work Disappears, shows that the problems endemic to America’s inner cities stem from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy and not from a lack of initiative among the nation’s urban poor.

15 l Economic Challenges International economist Dani Rodrik develops guidelines for developing countries grappling with the challenges created by the new openness in global trade. In Making Openness Work: The New Global Economy
and the Developing Countries, published in 1999, Rodrik asserts that for developing countries to integrate successfully into the world economy they must develop a strong set of policies and institutions at home.

16 l The Essence of Decision In 1999, Graham Allison issues an updated and revised edition of Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missle Crisis, a seminal book first published in 1971, which spawned the discipline of public policy by laying the foundation for new analytical approaches to undertanding the behavior of governments and other institutions.

17 l The Decline and Revival of Social Capital Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, published in 2000, sparks an international debate with its argument that we increasingly are disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and communities and its suggestions for why and how we should reverse these trends.

18 l Vanishing Voter In 2000, political scientist Thomas Patterson and his research team interview nearly 100,000 Americans to determine why electoral participation has fallen so sharply. In The Vanishing Voter, published in 2002, Patterson explains the decline and suggests policies and practices that could lead to renewed interest in elections.

19 l Reshaping Native American Constitutions In 2000, Joseph Kalt and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development launch the Initiative on American Indian Constitutional Reform, which serves as a forum for American Indian reform leaders, tribal policymakers, and scholars to share information and best practices for strengthening American Indian constitutions. More than a dozen tribes have participated directly in the initiative. Information gathered from this effort is also being used to develop curricula and other materials to inform the rapidly growing number of Indian nations engaged in constitutional and governmental reform.

20 l Achievement Gap In 2001, Ronald Ferguson examines the black/white achievement gap by surveying 40,000 middle and high school students in high-performing suburban school districts. Information gleaned from this work led Ferguson to collaborate with participating districts to create the Tripod Project, for school improvement, in which schools in 20 districts across six states are working to change conditions that contribute to gaps between academic performance and potential for students of all racial and ethnic groups, but especially for African Americans and Latinos. This research/practice collaboration is producing additional data and broadly applicable lessons.

21 l The United States as an Empire? In The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., establishes that, though America is militarily omnipotent, it cannot succeed unilaterally. This work establishes a popular framework for the ongoing international debates on the role of the United States in the world.

22 l “A Problem from Hell” Samantha Power examines the “bystander” attitude of American foreign policymakers in the 20th century, probing the U.S. response to genocide committed against Armenians, European Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnians, and Rwandans. Her findings were published in “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

23 l Environmental Status Report The State of the Nation’s Ecosystems, produced by William Clark working with a team of environmental organizations, businesses, universities, and federal, state, and local governments, gives the nation the first non-biased report on the state of its ecosystems in 2002. This report — to be updated biannually after 2007 — provides guidance to policymakers on environmental legislation.

24 l Mega-Project Politics In 2003, in Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment, Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff MPA 1989 document and analyze the unprecedented wave of large-scale public investments that occurred in American cities during the 1950s and 1960s, the social upheavals that stopped those projects, and the political impulses that have shaped a new generation of
urban mega-projects.

25 l Terrorism Dissected Jessica Stern carries out interviews with terrorist leaders around the world about their mobilization strategies and leadership styles. Her research culminated in the publication in 2003 of Terror in the Name of God:
Why Religious Militants Kill, on religious terrorists’ mobilization strategies.

Illustration: Bill Jaynes