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Four Theories of Public Policy Making and Fast Breeder Reactor Development

Author(s): Herbert Kitschelt

Source: International Organization , Winter, 1986, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter, 1986), pp. 65-104

Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706743

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Four theories of public policy making and fast breeder reactor development Herbert Kitschelt

The recent revival of the discipline of political economy challenges purely economic explanations of economic growth, technological innovation, and sectoral change. This approach recognizes that political actors, institutions, and strategies to organize the economic process together shape the economic development of industrial societies. Whereas economists have emphasized determinants of growth such as savings and investment rates, degrees of domestic and international competition in an industry, or the supply of labor, the new political economists view the political definition of property rights, the nature of state intervention in the economy, the resources of politically mobilized groups, and political actors' belief systems as critical determinants of economic transformations.' Both economists and political economists, however, share the assumption that actors are rational; they pursue their interests in a calculated manner within a given system of institutional constraints.

The commitment to rational-actor models and to a structuralist analysis of interests and institutions represents the smallest common denominator among modern political economists. Outside this conceptual core exists a wide variety of competing hypotheses, four of which appear in this article:

so-called sociological theories of policy making, political coalition theory, domestic regime structure theory, and international systems theory. Although theoretical and empirical work on these approaches has as yet been incon- clusive, recent research points to the compatibility and complementarity of different explanations, rather than a simple zero-sum competition between them.2 Single-factor theories are usually not rich enough to capture the dy-

For helpful comments on a first draft I thank Joseph Grieco and Peter Lange. 1. For a sophisticated historical reconstruction of economic and political development, see

Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981). 2. In this vein Peter A. Gourevitch in "The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources

of Domestic Politics," International Organization 32 (Autumn 1978), pp. 881-91 1, links inter- national systems and domestic coalition arguments. Several authors have attempted to combine

International Organization 40, 1, Winter 1986 0020-8183 $1.50 ? 1986 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the World Peace Foundation

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66 International Organization

namics of complex processes of industrial transformations. Even careful research design-that is, the selection of difficult cases, and the analysis of crucial experiments in the perspective of a specific theoretical proposition- can rarely control all relevant intervening variables or provide sufficient data. Rather than resignation or an indifferent endorsement of theoretical pluralism and eclecticism, these problems should stimulate empirical investigations to

engage in more complex theoretical arguments and in a configurative analysis of public policy making. Testing the compatibility and interdependence of different theories prevents theoretical parsimony from leading to oversimplification.

In this article I will provide an example of how a complex configurative policy analysis can be constructed. The likelihood that multiple explanations of public policy will be found relevant increases if analysts employ one or any of the following four strategies in comparative analysis: survey a large number of cases; compare determinants of several different policies; measure the dependent policy variable at a high level of quantitative precision (interval scales), or at least distinguish analytical components of public policy; compare determinants of a specific ongoing policy using time series data.

Although I analyze a single policy-the development of fast breeder reactors (FBRs) in France, the United States, and West Germany -I break down the dependent policy variable into a number of analytical components. Moreover, I examine FBR policies over time to determine whether or not the causal structure of policy making remains the same.

Traditionally, comparative public policy studies, especially with respect to economic and industrial policy making, have poorly defined and concep- tualized their dependent variables.3 In the case of FBR development policy, quantitative policy measures are difficult to construct. Instead, I distinguish among four analytical aspects of policy making:

1.The social groups that mobilize around a public policy. Here I am looking for an explanation of the structural position of actors in a pol- icy arena and the relevance actors attribute to a policy issue vis-a-vis their self-definitions of "interests."

domestic structure and political coalition theories; see, for example, Peter J. Katzenstein, "Con- clusion: Domestic Structures and Strategies of Foreign Economic Policy," in Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Francis G. Castles, ed., The Impact of Parties (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982); John Zysman, Government, Markets, and Growth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Peter A. Hall, "Patterns of Economic Policy: An Organizational Approach," in Stephen Bormstein, David Held, and Joel Krieger, eds., The State in Capitalist Europe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984).

3. Cf., as a good critique, George D. Greenberg, Jeffrey A. Miller, Lawrence R. Mohr, and Bruce C. Vladeck, "Developing Public Policy Theory: Perspectives from Empirical Research," American Political Science Review 71 (December 1977), pp. 1532-43. Studies of economic policy making often do not clearly distinguish output variables such as tax policies and welfare expenditures from policy outcome variables such as employment, inflation, and economic growth. The problem can be seen in Manfred Schmidt, Wohlfahrtsstaatliche Politik unter bufrgerlichen und sozialdemokratischen Regierungen (Frankfurt: Campus, 1982), pp. 121-23.

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Fast breeder development 67

2.The specific institutional arenas of political decision making. Here I focus on the organizational rules of selectivity which facilitate or impede the access of actors to a specific arena. It is distinguished from the broad political regime and opportunity structure in a coun- try which features "policy styles" and institutions that remain similar across policy arenas. (I will elaborate this point below.)

3.The decision-making process. In the case of FBR policy a number of subgroups are closely enough meshed to merit treatment as a single complex of variables: the use of resources and the coalitions of actors preferring specific policy options; the choice of policy instruments to pursue an objective-public incentives, regulation, state investment, and so on; the extent to which these instruments are applied. The second and third subgroups are aspects of policy "outputs."

4.The economic, social, and political impacts of policy, that is, its "out- comes." Outcomes are determined by the effectiveness and the effi- ciency with which certain results are brought about, the unintended side effects of a policy, and the legitimacy that policies enjoy.

A public policy, then, is a cluster of actors, institutions, decision-making processes, and outcomes. Obviously, a causal relationship exists among the four components of policy making. The interplay among actors, decision- making processes, and outputs logically precedes the outcome. But the precise nature of the relationship may well be contingent upon broader constraints and inducements to policy formation. For FBR development in France, West Germany, and the United States, political actors and policy arenas do not directly covary with decision-making processes and policy outcomes. Sim- ilarly, in FBR policies in the 1970s, although actors are similar across coun- tries, policy arenas, processes, and outcomes differ.

Unfortunately, much of the empirical policy literature focuses on just one component of policy making-budget allocations, or measures such as in- flation, economic growth, social unrest, for example-without reconstructing the complexities of policy formation. This narrow focus promotes single- factor explanations.

In addition, time and timing in the ongoing (re)production and transfor- mation of social systems also have received little attention.4 Most theories treat time as a continuous, linear variable. It is then possible to look at the relative timing of a country's development within the context of international systems. Within countries, domestic structure theories point to the relative inertia of institutions; hence, the past predicts future policies most successfully. But within both approaches, change in public policy, and the role of time and timing for public policy, are explained in terms of invariant causal con-

4. In social theory this issue has been critically analyzed by Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), especially pp. 202-4.

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68 International Organization

nections between variables. Relations between variables are expected to re- main stable over time and be applicable to a broad range of contexts. This is logically and theoretically assumed when policy analysts treat cross-sectional comparisons of public policies as if they revealed longitudinal patterns of policy formation. Contrary to this assumption and inference, causal rela- tionships in policy making may themselves change over time. Time, timing, and contextual boundary conditions of public policy making may limit the generality of theories about policy formation much more than the nomological version of policy theory leads us to believe. If theoretical propositions about policy making are only valid in very limited contexts, cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis can no longer be treated as equivalent. Conversely, we can imagine that time and timing can change the nature of causal relationships that are involved in public policy making. We may also have to assign a time index to theoretical propositions about policy formation to account for rupture. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of public policy may then single out different determinants of public policy.5

It is possible to link theory and empirical investigation of public policy without falling into the traps of reductionism, eclecticism, or linear time analysis. Analysis of the development of a new and extremely sophisticated, research-intensive energy technology reveals that the theoretical arguments which provide the most powerful explanations of the four components of policy making will differ for a given period. Whereas sociological policy theories and coalition theories describe FBR policy from the mid- 1960s until the economic and political watershed of 1973-74 in the three countries I compare here, domestic regime structure and international systems theory provide the stronger explanation for the period after 1974.

The fast breeder reactor provoked intense political controversy in the 1970s. As a result, the case is methodologically relevant because it dem- onstrates the significance of timing. The energy crisis of the early 1970s and the gradual politicization of energy issues by environmental movements in- troduced new "intervening" variables into FBR policy arenas. The impact of these variables on public policy in the three countries differed considerably. Among France, West Germany, and the United States, the trajectory of FBR policy, shaped by the intervening variables, moved from greater similarity in the 1960s to greater dissimilarity in the 1970s and early 1980s. An em- pirically exhaustive treatment of FBR policy within the confines of this article

5. Only a few authors have conceptualized a historically changing structure of public policy making. See, for example, Martin 0. Heisler and B. Guy Peters, "Comparing Social Policy across Levels of Government, Countries, and Time: Belgium and Sweden since 1870," in Douglas Ashford, ed., Comparing Public Policies (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978); Peter Flora and Jens Alber, "Modernization, Democratization, and the Development of Welfare States in Western Europe," in Flora and Arnold Heidenheimer, eds., The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1981); and Manfred G. Schmidt, "The Role of Parties in Shaping Macro-Economic Policy," in Castles, Impact of Parties.

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Fast breeder development 69

is not possible.6 Instead, I use the empirical case to make a point about the methodology and theory of comparative policy analysis rather than to prove each empirical assertion about FBR policy.

1. Determinants of public policy making

The four strands of public policy theory I review briefly do not exhaust the range of explanatory options but define variables that are especially relevant in "most similar systems" comparisons, such as between advanced capitalist democracies that share the same level of economic development, competitive party systems, and similar structures of consciousness and culture.

Sociological policy theory

The first explanatory approach argues that the nature of policy issues in a societal context determines the nature of political actors, decision-making structures and processes, and policy outcomes. In similar societies, we expect to find similar policies toward the same issues across political systems, varied policies across issues within the same system.

Neo-Marxist public policy analysis assumes that the structures of power and the interests in the economic system determine the capacity of political groups to organize the shape of political regimes and arenas, and, finally, of policy outcomes. Neo-Marxists emphasize differences in policy formation between "state functions" such as the provision of industrial infrastructure or social policies.7 Different styles of rationality emerge in political admin- istrations, depending on the policy arena,8 and different areas of state activity correlate with different organizational structures of policy making.9 The structure and dynamics of state policies thus vary over time and across policy arenas, for example, between repressive, economic, and ideological policy concerns'0, or between production and circulation issues."I

These theories all rely on an overly simplistic image of social structure

6. For a closer investigation of FBR policies in the context of the overall energy policies of the three countries, see Herbert Kitschelt, Politik und Energie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1983), chaps. 3-5.

7. See James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's, 1973); Claus Offe, " 'Krisen des Krisenmanagements': Elemente einer politischen Krisentheorie," in Martin Janicke, ed., Herrschaft und Krise (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1973).

8. See Claus Offe, "Rationalitaitskriterien und Funktionsprobleme politisch-administrativen Handelns," Leviathan 2, 3 (1974), pp. 333-45.

9. Linking Marxist political theory to organization theory is Goran Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? (London: NLB, 1978).

10. Compare Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: NLB, 1973), and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: NLB, 1975).

11. See Gosta Esping-Anderson, Roger Friedland, and Erik Olin Wright, "Modes of Class Struggle and the Capitalist State," Kapitalistate 4/5 (1976), pp. 186-220.

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70 International Organization

which takes economic class into account but treats sectoral, territorial, and

cultural differences as politically insignificant. Consequently, policy analyses often resort to ad hoc categories such as class factions, societal categories or nonclass actors, and multiclass actors in empirical investigations. Moreover, because actors do not always readily define their interests in class terms, policy structures, processes, and outcomes cannot be directly deduced from a political-economic class analysis.

A second version of policy theory shares with neo-Marxism the assumption that determinate societal "interests" shape the processes and outcomes of policy formation, but rejects class analysis as the sole foundation of such interests in favor of a more flexible, inductive approach that links the actors' perception of the costs and benefits of policy options to the nature of a given policy process. In this vein, James Q. Wilson proposes that political groups will organize and mobilize more or less vigorously depending on the perceived

costs or benefits of a policy.'2 Accordingly, governments can easily adopt policies with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, but it is almost im- possible for them to act on policy issues with the reverse configuration. Policies with both distributed costs and benefits can easily be institutionalized, whereas policies with highly concentrated costs and benefits lead to protracted and intense conflicts with the affected actors.

Although Wilson avoids economic determinism, his approach raises some questions. Are the actors' definitions of costs and benefits grounded in and explainable in terms of the social structures that generate the decision-making problems? Or, are the perceptions themselves the final anchor of the theory?

The first alternative leads to a historically and structurally refined macro- sociological theory. By implicitly choosing the second alternative-a sub- jective, actor-oriented definition of interests and stakes-Wilson risks depriving the theory of content. Circular reasoning and ad hoc assumptions can render the theory tautological by attributing the perceptions of costs and benefits to actors after the fact, based on observed patterns of policy making.

Similar questions exist with respect to Theodore Lowi's well-known policy theory of public policy making, which distinguishes four types of political arenas.'3 In more recent work, Lowi rejects both a sociological-structural and a subjectivist definition of policy issues. Instead, he adopts a statist perspective, treating the formal, legal provisions of enacted policies as a "formal classification of the functions of the state" and of the intentions of the rulers.'4 A semantic analysis of laws then generates predictions about policy processes that are associated with specific legal patterns.

12. James Q. Wilson, Political Organization (New York: Basic, 1979), chap. 16. 13. Theodore Lowi, "American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies and Political Theory,"

World Politics 16 (July 1964), pp. 677-715, and Lowi, "Four Systems of Policy Politics and Choice," Public Administration Review 32 (July-August 1972), pp. 298-310.

14. See Theodore Lowi, "The State in Politics: An Inquiry into the Relation between Policy and Administration" (ms., Cornell University, 1982), p. 1 1. In this more recent formulation, Lowi's approach is no longer far removed from another statist policy theory that uses properties

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Fast breeder development 71

Correlations between semantic structures of law and policy formation, though interesting, fall short of the expectations Lowi's original formulation raises. The statist formulation cannot explain why new policy issues that are not yet legally codified produce certain patterns of policy formation.'5 More- over, other than by reference to the rulers' volitions, the statist approach cannot explain systematic changes of legal codifications of a policy issue over time. Lowi's approach disconnects the link between social structure and policy formation. The operational content and the impact of policy on politics and society are, as Lowi himself confirms,'6 irrelevant for his approach.

Short of a statist or a subjectivist approach to policy theory,'7 I see only two avenues to a policy theory that links social structure to politics and avoids a reductionist conceptualization. An inductive approach can always test the hypothesis that, within structurally similar societies, specific policy issues are associated with similar patterns of policy making and cost-benefit perceptions by actors. Assuming this hypothesis to be true, one can work backwards to reconstruct the underlying dynamics of interest formation in a society. Second, we can deductively explain the actors' perception of costs and benefits in a given social structure and make predictions about policy patterns. Although a substantive analysis of societal cleavages-of the emer- gence of preferences or values and of changes in cognitive and normative orientations-requires a more far-ranging macrosociological foundation than space allows, I will propose three formal hypotheses about the logic of interest mobilization in modern capitalist societies which political-economic theories of collective action and resource mobilization elaborate, and which empirical studies confirm: the magnitude and distribution of material gains or losses through a policy decision determines the level and aggregation of political mobilization in conflicting and coalescing groups; actors discount the future, hence they will mobilize more vigorously in response to policies with short- term impacts than those with long-term impacts; within this logic of social mobilization of interests, Wilson's hypotheses about the ease of policy in- novation, institutionalization, and conflict aggregation are valid.

Domestic regime theory

A second theory of policy formation directly opposes issue-based and sociologically based explanations, and argues that policy patterns within

of decision processes to predict the nature of political actors, conflicts, and outcomes: Jiirg Steiner, "Decision Process and Policy Outcome: An Attempt to Conceptualize the Problem at the Cross-National Level," European Journal of Political Research 11 (September 1983), pp. 309-18.

15. In a sense Lowi has thus confirmed the criticism made by discussants of his earlier work that-contrary to the statement "policy determines politics-the "policy type is rather an ex- planandum than an explanans of public policy." See Greenberg et al., "Developing Public Policy Theory," p. 1542.

16. Lowi, "The State in Politics," p. 1 1. 17. This subjectivist turn has been advocated by Peter Steinberger, "Typologies of Public

Policy: Meaning Construction and the Policy Process," Social Science Quarterly 61 (September 1980), pp. 185-97.

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72 International Organization

countries across policy arenas are more similar than those across countries within policy arenas."8 Building on the comparative study of political insti- tutions, political economists and policy analysts have updated this approach. In the most general sense, domestic regime and opportunity structures of politics are expected to shape the participation, organization, and processes in all policy arenas of a country. The specific national "policy styles" that emerge are based on complex institutional patterns that govern entire political systems.'9 Such patterns are the principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures that have been firmly institutionalized over time and that survive fluctuations of power and coalitions among political actors in a country.20 These domestic regimes are thus relatively impervious to sudden changes in the domestic balance of power. Regime theories explain new policy pro- cesses and outcomes, if these can be predicted on the basis of knowledge about recurring patterns of policy making which are typical across policy arenas within a country.

Political economists distinguish two not always complementary theories of domestic political structure. One focuses on the interaction between state and society, specifically, political articulation and interest aggregation. It distinguishes pluralist patterns of interest intermediation in which multiple, overlapping, decentralized interest groups that arise spontaneously vie for the attention of policy makers, from a neocorporatist pattern of more orderly, sectorally monopolistic, and comprehensive interest groups that work in policy making through firmly established channels of communication; are represented equally in decision procedures; and are attributed a semiofficial

participation status by the government in policy formation.2' In contrast to corporatist systems, pluralist systems tend to permit a broader representation of newly mobilized political actors with innovative political claims.

The other domestic regime theory is concerned with the state's capacity to impose policies and implement them consistently. It highlights variables such as the territorial and functional centralization of the executive branch, the domination of the executive over the legislature, the control of material and informational resources by the state, and the ability of policy instruments

18. This argument is developed in Douglas E. Ashford, "The Structural Analysis of Policy or Institutions Really Do Matter," in Ashford, Comparing Public Policies.

19. The analysis of national policy styles is attempted in Jeremy Richardson, ed., Policy Styles in Western Europe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982).

20. The definition of domestic structures and international regime structures rests on similar methodological and conceptual choices. For a definition of international regimes along lines similar to the definition of domestic structures see Stephen D. Krasner, "Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables," International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), pp. 185-205.

21. For the growing literature on state-society relations in capitalist democracies, see Suzanne Berger, ed., Organizing Interests in Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Gerhard Lehmbruch and Philippe Schmitter, eds., Patterns of Corporatist Policy- Making (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982).

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Fast breeder development 73

to induce change in civil society.22 Especially in "strong" states, interest intermediation between state and society may not be confined to pluralist

and corporatist options. Rather, states may selectively recognize only some mobilized interests concerned with a policy issue. Segmented policy patterns result, in which a limited range of compatible interests is co-opted into the

policy process. States may even exclude or subordinate interest groups al- together and develop policies in a statist fashion.

Domestic structure theories suggest that similar policy problems will gen- erate different groups of actors and levels of mobilization, structures of policy arenas, decision-making processes, and policy outcomes contingent upon the predominant type of politics in a country (pluralist, corporatist, segmented,

or statist) which expresses institutional patterns of interest intermediation and state strength.23

Coalition theories

Both sociological policy and domestic regime hypotheses are deterministic in that they seek policy explanations that ignore the actors' capacities and

volitions. In contrast, coalition theories assert the significance of conscious choices by actors and groups that have common and identifiable goals and purposes.24 In this view, policies emerge from the formation of winning coalitions among mobilized groups. We expect coalitions that unite actors with similar resources and interests to develop similar policies. Conversely, differences in policy result from differences in coalitions. Groups will enter into coalitions according to their interests, whether defined in economic and class terms (income, market share, economic hegemony) or by sectoral, re- gional, and cultural criteria.

Whereas sociological policy theories often draw from structural Marxism, certain coalition theories approach a voluntaristic Marxist theory of political power.25 Similarly, regime theories see policy as institutionally determined,

22. See for instance Stephen Krasner, Defending the National Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), chap. 3. A combination of interest intermediation and state capacities is attempted in Katzenstein, "Conclusion: Domestic Structures."

23. Criticisms of this perspective have been advanced from other public policy theories. For issue-based approaches see Steiner, "Decision Process and Policy Outcome," pp. 310-1 1, and Zysman, Governments, Markets and Growth, p. 297. From the perspective of international systems and political coalition theories, see Gourevitch, "Second Image Reversed," p. 301, and Zysman, Governments, Markets and Growth, pp. 347-49.

24. Coalition theories are developed in Peter A. Gourevitch, "International Trade, Domestic Coalitions, and Liberty: Comparative Responses to the Great Depression of 1873-1896," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (August 1977), pp. 281-313, and Gourevitch, "Breaking with Orthodoxy: The Politics of Economic Policy Responses to the Depression of the 1930s," Inter- national Organization 38 (Winter 1984), pp. 95-129; and Gbsta Esping-Anderson and Roger Friedland, "Class Coalitions in the Making of West European Economies," Political Power and Social Theory 3 (1982), pp. 1-50.

25. In this vein coalition theories have often blended a Marxist, economy-based conception of politics with a pluralist, group-based vision of the political process. Recent reformulations

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74 International Organization

while coalition theories emphasize the multiple opportunities for group co- alitions to influence public policy. The image of policy making espoused in coalition theory underlies those comparative public policy analyses that have found political party strength and control of government to be key deter- minants of public policy.26 While left-wing parties represent the interests of the working class, right-wing parties are the political agents of the bourgeoisie. Starting from this simple key proposition, coalition theory analyzes public policies according to the relative strength, durability, unity, and success at forming coalitions of each of the principal blocs. We therefore expect policies to vary across countries and over time within countries, depending on party strength and control of the government.

Coalition theories investigate three factors as determinants of public policy: the strength or weakness of identifiable, mobilized groups in society; the interests of these groups; and their actual capacities and skills to enter into coalitions. All too often, however, actual applications of coalition theory identify groups and group preferences in terms of the same structural bases of power and interest in society that sociological policy theories, especially of the Marxist variety, typically employ. Thus coalition theories frequently blur their distinctiveness from structural analysis.

International systems theories

Whereas the previous theories are concerned with domestic determinants of policy, an alternative exists that considers countries only as elements of an international system. Accordingly, the international system of states shapes the internal politics in each of its elements.27 Dominant interests and possible courses of public policy result from each country's structural location in the international system. Like economic theory, this approach makes certain simplifying assumptions in order to explain system-level processes and cor- responding domestic policies: countries or states as the elements of the inter- national system can be treated as actors, that is, as entities to whom volitions can be attributed; states are self-interested and seek military and economic power in absolute as well as relative terms within the system; states follow

of pluralism by Dahl and Lindblom have come rather close to a similar conceptualization of politics in capitalist democracies. For a critique see John F. Manley, "Neo-Pluralism: A Class Analysis of Pluralism I and Pluralism II," American Political Science Review 77 (June 1983), pp. 368-83.

26. See, for example, Francis G. Castles, The Social Democratic Image of Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); David R. Cameron, "The Expansion of the Public Economy: A Comparative Analysis," American Political Science Review 72 (December 1978), pp. 1243-62; and Douglas A. Hibbs, "Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy," American Political Science Review 71 (December 1977), pp. 1467-87.

27. See Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), and, critically, Robert 0. Keohane, "Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond," in Ada Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (Washington, D.C.: APSA, 1983).

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Fast breeder development 75

optimal (or at least satisfycing) strategies in pursuit of their objectives and order their objectives consistently to allow for rational action. The theory proposes that international systems tend toward a fairly stable balance of power. Actors with similar positions in an international system of power, dependence, and interdependence select similar strategies, while actors with different positions pursue different strategies. This framework yields several specific hypotheses, two of which relate to international security concerns. First, where several actors share a collective good, providing common security

through cooperation, and where the actors are of unequal size and weight so as to benefit unequally from the collective good, the largest and most important actor(s) will have to shoulder a disproportionate burden.28 A second security-related hypothesis predicts that countries will mobilize their domestic power resources more vigorously and exhibit less domestic conflict in public policy making as their sensitivity and vulnerability to foreign threats and control of critical resources increases.

This logic has also been applied to the economic dimension of international politics.29 The relative position of a country in the international political economy may determine its approach toward economic modernization. Latecomers in industrial development will seek to overcome their disad- vantage by means of vigorous state intervention in and regulation of economic

activities. More ambitious theories claim a connection between the timing

and stage of industrialization, the relative position of a country in the world economy, and the form of the political regime itself.30 (The mirror image of states rising in the shadow of hegemonic powers is the relative decline of economic and political leaders: their efforts to modernize the economy wane, they become leaders of financial rather than industrial world centers, and they engage increasingly in foreign economic investment.) Entrepreneurs can take advantage of relative-factor prices in less developed countries, because military hegemony secures property rights on a global scale.3'

Debate continues over the limitations and problems of neorealist inter- national systems theory. In passing, the issues include the difficulty of at- tributing interests to collectivities such as states;32 the historically recent

28. In the limitational case that a subset of actors constitutes a "privileged group," whose benefits from supplying the collective good are higher than its goods, this privileged group will supply the entire collective good. See Russell Hardin, Collective Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

29. In this sense the openness of economies to world markets has been suggested as a constraint on domestic policy making. For example, see Cameron, "Expansion of the Public Economy."

30. See James R. Kurth, "Industrial Change and Political Change: A European Perspective," in David Collier, ed., The NewAuthoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

31. See Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York: Basic, 1975).

32. For debate on this point see Krasner, Defending the National Interest, pp. 35-43, and, critically, Keohane, "Theory of World Politics," p. 521.

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76 International Organization

TABLE 1. A preliminary hypothesis about the relation between explanatory theories and aspects of public policy

Sociological Political Political International policy regime coalition systems theory theory theory theory

Policy actors X – –

Policy structure – X

Policy process – – X

Policy outcomes – – – X

territorial differentiation of the international system into states,33 and the possibility it will give way to functionally differentiated but territorially over- lapping units;34 and, the applicability of the microeconomic paradigm, that is, to what extent we can disassociate "unit level," domestic and international, and "system-level" determinants of policy.

Predictions about the shape of public policy based on the four theoretical traditions presented here vary widely. Sociological policy theories see similar issues associated with similar policy patterns, regardless of how the overall political institutions or the domestic and international distribution of resources and skills vary across countries. Domestic regime theories anticipate a cor- relation of any particular public policy in a country with the policy style that prevails in that country. Coalition theories emphasize the skills and resources of actors, as against issue and regime structures, and, therefore, expect similar policies only where similar coalitions prevail. International systems theories apply when the location of states in international systems predicts similarities and differences of policy making among them.

A simple way to connect the four theories of policy making and the four components of public policy patterns would be to propose a specific affinity to one aspect of public policy for each theory. Sociological policy theories seem to explain the constitution of interests and the mobilization of actors; regime theories explain the structure of specific policy arenas; coalition theories examine the process of policy formation; and international systems theory sheds light on the realization of objectives, as facilitated and constrained by the location of state actors in their international environment. (See Table 1.)

Relating theories to aspects of policy making according to this model is for the heuristic purpose of presentation only. The case of FBR policy reveals that this model is too simplistic to reflect the relationship between deter-

33. For a historical critique of Waltz's theory see John Gerard Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," World Politics 35 (January 1983), pp. 261-85.

34. Efforts to test the relative explanatory power of "realist" and "complex interdependence" views of international politics can be found in Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).

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Fast breeder development 77

minants and attributes of policy making. In fact, the policy literature realizes the need for more complex models, but more progress has been made by combining explanatory variables than with respect to a sophisticated con-

ceptualization of policy itself.35

2. Fast breeder reactor policy in the 1960s and early 1970s

Compared to conventional commercial converter reactors (such as the light- water reactor, the Canadian heavy-water reactor, or the gas-cooled reactor),

the FBR has the potential of using uranium resources up to sixty times more efficiently. Unlike converter reactors, the FBR has no moderator in its core to slow the flow of neutrons. Therefore, "fast" neutrons convert nonfissile uranium 238 into fissile plutonium isotopes at a much higher rate than occurs in other reactors. As long as enough "fertile" uranium 238 is present, the FBR can "breed" more fissile material than it consumes. Bred plutonium isotopes are extracted from the irradiated fuel elements through reprocessing

technologies. Next, they are refabricated as plutonium oxide fuel elements. Finally, they become the fissile inventory of FBRs destined to convert more fertile material into fissile isotopes, while producing heat that is employed to generate electricity. Solutions to the problems posed by the FBR and its fuel cycle have depended on very expensive long-term research and devel- opment programs.

Sociological policy theory and FBR development

The sets of political actors in FBR policy, and certain structural, processual, and outcome aspects of FBR policy making were quite similar in France, the United States, and West Germany until the early 1970s. Actors who

35. This limitation applies to most of the literature referred to in fn. 2. It is also highlighted by Robert Alford's seminal "Paradigms of State and Civil Society Relations," in Leon N. Lindberg, Robert R. Alford, Colin Crouch, and Claus Offe, Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975). First, Alford's recommendation to use class, elite, and pluralist arguments in a layered analysis of policy making omits "institutionalist" approaches (regime theory), while the methodological similarity of elite and pluralist analysis may warrant treating them both as variations of coalition theory. Second, his essay sheds little light on the conceptualization of policy itself. For a sophisticated empirical application of Alford's framework see J. Allen Whitt, "Toward A Class-Dialectical Model of Power. An Empirical Assessment of Three Competing Models of Political Power," American Sociological Review 44 (February 1979), pp. 81-99. Given that Whitt studies referenda decisions about public trans- portation projects in just one setting, California, structural-institutional impacts on policy making cannot be analyzed well. Moreover, the analysis tends to focus on groups and decisional outcomes while neglecting an explanation for the shaping of the policy arenas or the choice of policy instruments. This is unfortunate, because the conditions that lead to the choice of the policy instruments, e.g., the financing schemes for public rail systems, could be a serious contender to his own preferred explanation of referenda outcomes, the mobilization of class (factions)- unless he were prepared to argue that these choices merely reflected class interests.

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78 International Organization

expected short-term, concentrated advantages from a vigorous development policy resided in the scientific communities of all three countries. The eventual societal payoff (a new energy conversion system) legitimized the construction of basic research facilities. The second immediate constituency of FBR de- velopment included the engineering and electromechanical industries that were already developing first-generation nuclear reactors in the three countries.

Given the technological risks, the uncertain economics, and the lack of an accepted institutional framework within which to use highly sensitive fission technologies, private industry was very reluctant to invest significantly in the new technology.36 Both science and industry looked to the state for help.

Until the early 1 970s, only the direct economic beneficiaries of FBR research (scientists, nuclear industry, associated government agencies, and regional governments where large research facilities were located) were mobilized and enthusiastic about the FBR. The national governments of the three countries gave little priority to the FBR effort. Even within the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the West German Ministry of Scientific Research (Bun- desministerium fir Wissenschaftliche Forschung), and the French Com- missariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA), other energy projects received greater attention until the mid-1960s or later. The FBR did not offer governments an opportunity to mobilize broad constituencies because it lacked an im- mediate or foreseeable impact.

As a consequence, FBR funding remained at retrospectively modest levels in all three countries throughout the 1960s. In the United States, the re- sponsible AEC division could only overcome federal resistance to funding a very large FBR effort, when, in 1971, the United States became a net importer of energy. The Nixon administration then reluctantly agreed to elevate the FBR to a high-priority program.37 Similarly, in West Germany, the FBR remained one among several reactor designs pursued throughout the 1960s.38 In France, the FBR became vital for the CEA only in 1969, when the development and commercialization of its converter reactor line,

36. The market failure argument for government intervention in FBR policy has been challenged by Otto Keck, Policy-Making in a Nuclear Program. The Case of the West German Fast Breeder Reactor (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1981), chap. 1. Keck points to large private in- vestment efforts, for example in the computer industry, but he overlooks the fact that the breeder reactor is only one part of an extremely complex nuclear fuel cycle. Moreover, the institutional uncertainties of breeder development, due to its military sensitivity as well as its extraordinary hazard potential, are unmatched in the history of industrial innovation.

37. For budget data see Brian Chow, The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor: An Economic Analysis (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1975), p. 13. In the 1960s the LMFBR budget grew mostly at the expense of other advanced reactor technologies. Only between 1970 and 1976 did annual budget allocations for the LMFBR skyrocket, from about $100 million to about $650 million.

38. The spreading of West German development funds over several reactor lines is documented by Keck, Policy-Making in a Nuclear Program, p. 73.

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Fast breeder development 79

the gas-cooled reactor, was terminated, leaving the agency in need of a new priority.39

Electric utility companies, like state agencies, exhibited only very limited enthusiasm for the FBR. In none of the three countries did utilities perceive either an immediate need for vigorous development efforts or an economic rationale for participating in the costs of FBR demonstration plants. The political logic behind the one apparent exception to this rule, the effort of American utilities and nuclear industries to build the 1 00-megawatt (electric) FERMI-reactor near Detroit, had little to do with FBR technology per se. Begun in the mid-1950s at the height of the debate about private versus public organization of electric utilities, the project was intended to demonstrate private industry's willingness to develop nuclear power in a private framework and to prevent socialization of the utility sector.40 The project failed for technical reasons, and private industry developed a cautious research strategy for the FBR as a result.

Other potential constituencies and crucial participants of nuclear policy did not mobilize around the FBR issue until the 1970s. Military and foreign policy concerns played a negligible role until 1974. Both the United States and France already controlled other technologies that supplied plutonium in sufficient quantities for their military programs. And in West Germany, the breeder reactor project surfaced only when a nuclear rearmament had been ruled out.41 Throughout the early period of FBR development, consumer and environmental groups remained almost entirely inactive, because the FBR was a remote, hypothetical technology. The only exception was the conflict about the FERMI-reactor between its builders and the United Auto Workers of America.42

In all three countries, the distribution of players around FBR development directly corresponded to structural similarities of the FBR policy arenas. Only players with technical expertise and immediate institutional interests in technology development had access to policy arenas. Structurally, the

arenas were far removed from the main coercive and economic organizations of the state; they were not clearly integrated into a centralized, hierarchical chain of command; and they relied on the voluntary participation of essentially

39. For the controversy about the end of the French gas-cooled reactor see Jean-Marie Colon, Le nucleaire sans les francais. Qui decide? Qui profite? (Paris: Maspero, 1977), and Irwin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian, Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved (New York: Basic, 1978), p. 62.

40. The public vs. private power debate is discussed in Aaron Wildavsky, Dixon- Yates: A Study in Power Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), and Harold P. Green and Alan Rosenthal, Government of the Atom (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

41. To keep military options open, West Germany might have favored the heavy-water reactor technology during the 1950s. See Joachim Radkau, "National politische Dimensionen der Schwerwasser-Reaktorlinie in den Anfangen der bundesdeutschen Kemenergieentwicklung," Technikgeschichte 45 (Autumn 1978), pp. 229-56.

42. The environmental conflict about the FERMI-reactor is discussed in John G. Fuller, We Almost Lost Detroit (New York: Random, 1975).

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80 International Organization

autonomous organizations, collectivities, and quasi-non-governmental cor- porate bodies. The arenas constituted segmented subgovernments, which were exposed to very few public pressures to legitimate their activities and decisions.

Funding of development projects proceeded according to the incremental and distributive logic of positive-sum games in which overall spending levels remained sufficiently low to maintain a correspondingly low political profile. Simultaneously, the FBR programs of all three countries employed similar

policy instruments, such as publicly financing research facilities and subsi- dizing industrial research. These many similarities between the FBR policies in the three countries support sociological policy theory. Nevertheless, FBR policies were associated with significantly different coalitions among the mo- bilized actors, substantive research strategies, and policy outcomes in each country.

With respect to policy outcomes, countries made varying progress in their programs. But all actors shared the same key rationality and performance standards for FBR development. In addition to emphasis on technical progress of development efforts, the future economic need and viability of FBRs were stressed. In all three countries, the reactor proponents prepared elaborate cost-benefit analyses to argue their case.43 No consideration, however, was given .to the social acceptability and institutional implications of FBRs and their associated fuel cycles.

Political coalitions in FBR development

Although a sociological policy theory explains how and why actors, non- actors, organizational structures, and standards of rationality converged in all three countries during the early development of the FBR, it fails to address adequately other important features of the policy process and its outcomes. Even in the early time period, France, the United States, and West Germany exhibited some notable FBR policy differences. Coalition theory shows that the relative strength of the key actors in FBR policy varied across countries. Simultaneously, unique coalitions in FBR policy emerged in each country during the 1960s and these coalitions cannot be interpreted simply in terms of theories about sociological or political structures of interests. Coalition theory, however, does not explain the variation in outcomes of FBR dem- onstration reactor projects in that time period.

In the United States, the early dominance of national research laboratories

43. For the calculation of reactor development strategies in France see J. Andriot with J. Gaussens, Economie et perspectives de l'energie atomique (Paris: Dunod, 1964); for the United States see U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Potential Nuclear Power Growth Patterns (Wash- ington, D.C.: GPO, 1970); and for West Germany, Wolf Hafele and Helmut Kramer, Technischer und wirtschaftlicher Stand sowie Aussichten der Kernenergie in der Kraftwirtschaft der Bun- desrepublik (Karlsruhe: GfK/KFA, 1971).

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Fast breeder development 81

and private industry in FBR policy ended in the mid- I 960s when the failure of past development programs became apparent. One small research breeder

designed by Argonne National Laboratory suffered a partial core melt-down during experimentation; a second reactor, facing engineering and financing problems, was completed five years behind schedule and over budget. Simi- larly, the FERMI-reactor was beset by technical and financial problems, and experienced a partial core melt-down soon after completion in 1966. The failure of private industry and national laboratories set the stage for leadership

to shift to the central AEC staff, which, supported by the congressional representation of the nuclear community in the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, embarked on a more centralized, state-controlled FBR program in 1965, closely modeled after the successful program to develop reactors for navy submarines in the 1950s.44 The new program focused on the devel- opment and quality control of innovative reactor systems components rather than on complete demonstration plants, and limited the role national lab- oratories and industry could play to subcontracting. By spreading around industrial contracts, the AEC intended to preempt development of a monopoly in the nuclear reactor industry. However, centralized program direction, coupled with widely dispersed research contracts, ignored the most expe- rienced and knowledgeable industrial and scientific institutions in the FBR arena, and soon proved unworkable. These organizational failures are high- lighted by the Fast Flux Testing Facility (FFTF) project for breeder fuel elements. Scheduled to begin operation in 1973, it was actually delayed until 1980, by which time its estimated costs had escalated from $87.5 million

to $1.5 billion.45 Not surprisingly, industry, national laboratories, and then the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy soon grew dissatisfied with the AEC program. In the late 1960s, they demanded a large breeder demonstration plant be built under control of industry and utilities.

In West Germany, a strong scientific community in the major national laboratory at Karlsruhe sought full control over the emerging FBR program in the 1960s and asked the Ministry of Science to restrict industry to sub- contractor status for the testing and the demonstration of FBR facilities. The administrative management of the government's FBR program did not have a large independent staff of experts, unlike the AEC, and relied primarily on industrial expertise. In the conflict between science and industry about the control of the FBR program, the ministry allied itself with industry, a move that was consistent with the overall philosophy of German industrial policy to allow private business to take as much initiative as possible.46 In

44. A detailed analysis of the navy reactor program can be found in Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Nuclear Navy, 1946-1962 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

45. For the U.S. breeder program in the 1960s see Michael D. Stiefel, "Government Com- mercialization of Large Scale Technology: The U.S. Breeder Reactor Program, 1964-1976" (Ph.D. diss., MIT, June 1981).

46. A good account of the controversy about leadership in the German FBR program is Keck, Policy-Making in a Nuclear Program, pp. 67ff., 80ff.

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82 International Organization

1964, a project committee of the ministry asked for industrial bids to design

breeder demonstration plants. From then on, the leadership of the FBR program remained firmly in the hands of a few large companies in the electrical

and engineering industries, most notably Siemens. National laboratories par- ticipated only in basic research and component development. Industry even designed and built the first sodium-cooled breeder test reactor at Karlsruhe.

The German FBR program emphasized industrial self-regulation: that is, industrial consortia developed the substantive technological choices and pro- grams, while the state underwrote a major fraction of the development costs and risks. Under the leadership of Siemens, engineers designed a sodium- cooled FBR that closely resembled the U.S. design (West German engineers opted for plutonium-oxide fuel elements and sodium as a coolant). Another consortium, under the leadership of the electromechanical manufacturer All- gemeine Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft (AEG), proposed a very different steam- cooled breeder reactor. In 1969, after a protracted conflict, that project was abandoned when it became clear that a lack of testing facilities and the less advanced state of international research on this reactor design would throw the project far behind the liquid metal (sodium-cooled) FBR.47

In contrast to the West German and the American experience, the French FBR development was not hampered by major conflicts between the principal groups of actors. As in the other countries, a large government research

facility, Cadarache, was involved in the program effort. Unlike in the other countries, however, the administrative leadership of the CEA had unusual authority over the research community. A conflict between the nuclear re- search community, and the engineers and administrators in the CEA head- quarters had been resolved in favor of the latter in the early 1950s.48 Unlike in the other countries, the French engineering and electromechanical industries were, both in terms of know-how and economic potential, too weak and fragmented to assume leadership of a research program as complex as the breeder technology.

The absence of industrial competition and the strength of the administrators and engineers in the CEA led to a more concentrated research effort than in other countries. Early on the CEA committed itself to specific technical pathways (e.g., the reactor coolant and the chemical composition of the fuel elements); it built cumulatively on past research findings and gradually in- creased the size of reactor components and facilities.49 A crucial step in this process was the construction of a 20-megawatt (thermal) experimental breeder

47. The conflict about the choice of FBR technologies in West Germany is discussed in numerous contributions to Atomwirtschaft-Atomtechnik 14 (April 1969).

48. For the conflict between scientists and engineers-administrators in the early development of the French CEA, see Lawrence Scheinman, Atomic Energy Policy in France under the Fourth Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), and Spencer R. Weart, Scientists in Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

49. For the French choice of reactor technology, see CEA, Rapport annuel (Paris, 1962), p. 118.

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Fast breeder development 83

reactor called RAPSODIE. Private industry was involved in this project as

a subcontractor. For this purpose, CEA arranged the formation of an industrial consortium (GAAA, Groupement Atomique Alsacienne Atlantique).

Both coalition and domestic regime theories would predict the dominance

of private industry in the West German case and of a combination of civil administrators and engineers in France. The West German state had tra- ditionally abstained from directly shaping industrial policy in the post-World War II era and kept an arm's-length relationship to business, relying on tax and foreign-trade policies to create a climate conducive to technological innovation and economic growth.50 On the other hand, the French state was

a major actor in industrial modernization throughout the 1 960s, attempting to reorganize fragmented, weak, and outdated industrial sectors into inter- nationally competitive corporations with access to state-of-the-art technol- ogy.5' Domestic regime theory, however, would not have predicted the process of coalition formation in the U.S. breeder program of the 1 960s. The American state, like its West German counterpart, generally displays characteristics of a "weak" state relative to the private economy.52 Nevertheless, a state- centered policy coalition did emerge temporarily in the FBR program, al- though it lasted only a short time. The ensuing realignment brought the American FBR policy process in closer agreement with what domestic regime theory would have predicted.

Regime theory and policy outcomes: FBR demonstration reactors

Although regime theory is ill-equipped to explain the process of FBR policies in the 1 960s, it sheds some light on one particular task and outcome within these programs, the construction of large FBR demonstration plants on the order of from 250 to 350 megawatts (electric) in each country. Such plants had been designed in the mid- I 960s, when the United States appeared the clear technological leader, equally ahead of France and West Germany. Each country's success in actually bringing facilities on-line, however, differed dramatically as the decade progressed. For the first time, the political visibility of FBR programs was raised beyond the narrow bounds of actors within the highly technical policy arenas; the programs drew new actors, such as the

electric utilities and national finance industries, into the policy process and thus made the impact of more general, country-specific policy styles felt on FBR policy.

In the United States, under the onslaught of increasing pressure by the

50. Cf. Hans-Joachim Amdt, West Germany: Politics of Non-Planning (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966).

51. See Keith Pavitt, "Government Support for Industrial Research and Development in France: Theory and Practice," Minerva 14 (Autumn 1976), pp. 330-54, and John Zysman, "The French State in the International Economy," in Katzenstein, Between Power and Plenty.

52. Krasner, Defending the National Interest, chap. 3.

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84 International Organization

reactor industry and congressional supporters of nuclear research expendi-

tures, the AEC leadership had to concede authority over the initiation of a demonstration reactor project in 1969. But because of several problems, defining the project and arranging for contractors took no less than four years. The first conflict involved selecting the major industrial contractors of the project. Eventually, all major reactor manufacturers (notably General Electric, Westinghouse, and the engineering firm Bechtel) were invited to participate in the project. The second problem concerned financing. The

U.S. Bureau of the Budget insisted private industry share the financial risks involved. But as a result the electric utilities, whom the AEC designated to operate the plant, were reluctant to commit resources to the project. Protracted negotiations between the manufacturing industry, a national consortium of electric utilities, and the AEC yielded only a fixed contribution of $240 million by the utilities, with the state absorbing all the remaining construction costs (estimated to be about $500 million in the early 1 970s) and all potential cost overruns.53 A third problem concerned the management of the dem- onstration project. The initial agreement rested on a very complex distribution of authority between the AEC, the utility consortium, and the manufacturing industry, which soon proved unworkable.54 As the cost estimates of the project rose dramatically and the percentage of the private financial contri- bution to the overall project therefore decreased, the Energy Research and Development Agency (ERDA), successor to the AEC, took over authority for the entire project.

Similar struggles over the financing and institutional design of a demon- stration project also burdened the West German FBR program. Utilities resisted pledging open-ended financial support for the project, although the public authorities, backed by the Finance Ministry, originally insisted on it. But, as in the United States, in the final instance the government assumed all contingency costs, and the utilities and manufacturers contributed only a fixed and relatively small sum of the project costs (DM 120 million out of an original estimate of about DM 1.5 billion in 1972). Unlike the U.S. case, the management of the project went to industry, reaffirming the self- regulated character of German technology policy. The Siemens subsidiary Interatom had emerged as the only plausible general contractor for the dem- onstration plant, once AEG had withdrawn from the FBR development in 1969. But the reactor industry and utilities still had to settle a number of

53. Documents of the "project definition" phase in the LMFBR program are published in the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, LMFBR Demonstration Plant Program: Proceedings of the Senior Utility Steering Committee and of the Senior Utility Technical Advisory Committee (Washington, D.C., 1972).

54. Changes in the FBR project management were discussed by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, Fast Breeder Reactor Program (Washington, D.C., 1975), pp. 2273ff.; see also U.S. General Accounting Office, The LMFBR Program: Past, Present, and Future (Washington, D.C., April 1975).

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Fast breeder development 85

disagreements about the design of the FBR plant. The utilities insisted on economizing on the costs of reactor and fuel elements, while the manufacturing industry emphasized technological innovation and high performance. In this conflict, the utilities prevailed.55 Just as in the United States, resolution of these problems required about four years (1968-72).

In sharp contrast to West Germany and the United States, institutional problems proved to be insignificant in the French preparation of a breeder demonstration project. Organizationally, construction arrangements for the 250-megawatt (electric) Phenix reactor resembled those of the test reactor RAPSODIE: technology and engineering were provided by the CEA and subcontracts were given to the industrial consortium GAAA.

Unlike the RAPSODIE project, the French utility, Electricite de France (EDF), participated in the project. But its role and concerns sharply contrasted with those of electric utilities in the West German and American breeder projects. In these countries, utilities had to risk private capital in the research venture and therefore proved to be difficult partners in the negotiations with the domestic reactor industries and government agencies. In France, on the other hand, the nationalized EDF could afford a less risk-averse investment strategy. The state, in any case, would underwrite the financial risks of the Phenix project. No wonder, therefore, that the managerial structure of the project proved less cumbersome than that of FBR projects in the other countries.

The project's tight organizational structure, continuity, and incremental improvement in technology development, and the well-established relation- ships among the major players (except the EDF) made it possible to build the French reactor rapidly.56 In just four years (1969-73), before nuclear energy became a target of intense political controversies and while its com- petitors in West Germany and the United States were still negotiating the details of demonstration projects, France completed its FBR plant. The es- timated costs of the Phenix reactor turned out to be lower by a factor of three or four (in constant prices) than the estimated costs of the corresponding projects in the other two countries.57

International systems theory and early FBR development

What remains to be evaluated is the influence of the international system on domestic FBR policies. At least in the 1960s, the international political

55. Keck, Policy-Making in a Nuclear Program, pp. 148-50, praises the economizing spirit of the utilities. But these savings might have been erased by project delays due to the lengthy negotiations.

56. The Phenix project is described in G. Vendryes et al., "Situation et perspectives de la filiere de reacteurs a neutrons rapides en France," in United Nations and International Energy Authority, Fourth International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, vol. 5 (Geneva, 1971).

57. U.S. Energy Research and Development Agency, Energy Policies in the European Com- munity (Washington, D.C., 1975), p. 132, estimates the price of the Phenix reactor at about $530 million.

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86 International Organization

configuration sheds little light on FBR development policies. In all three countries, nuclear proliferation and security worries had subsided or were, in the wake of Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program (1953-54), divorced from concerns about commercial nuclear energy. There was also little fear of international energy supply shortages, which could have increased the significance of the FBR as a future energy supply.58

Certainly the breeder played a role in the international technology com- petition. But such competition was less a national concern than a preoc- cupation of domestic subgovernments, which were often at odds with the general foreign-policy commitments of their countries. For instance, officials in the FBR subgovernments in France and West Germany competed for international technological leadership in FBR development, while national politicians intended to use long-range nuclear technology development as a vehicle of European integration.59 The budgetary constraints on breeder pro- grams indicate the FBR's limited role with respect to national interests. There is also little evidence to support the "declining hegemony" argument, which would predict vigorous efforts in France and West Germany to catch up with or surpass a faltering U.S. program. The difference between the French and the West German programs renders this hypothesis invalid. Moreover, U.S. budget outlays for breeder development throughout the 1 960s remained far higher than in the other two countries. Although France and West Ger- many benefited from U.S. technological leadership by avoiding some technical dead ends (such as metallic fuel elements in the early test reactors), the role of the "advantages of backwardness" pales in significance to the influence of various coalitions and institutions concerned with the FBR.60 International systems theory does not, finally, offer a set of hypotheses consistent with the reality of FBR development during the 1960s and 1970s in the three countries.

3. The crisis of FBR programs in the 1970s and early 1980s

In the 1970s, national FBR policies had to cope with three new challenges. Correspondingly, the causal structure underlying policy changed in this period. Domestic regime theory provides the most persuasive explanation for the

58. Although some authors have claimed a continuing concern with energy security in French policy since the 1920s, public documents show that such worries had subsided in the 1960s and early 1970s and that a further rise in oil imports was no longer considered undesirable. See Commissariat Generale du Plan, Plan et prospectives: l'energie (Paris: Colin, 1972).

59. Cooperation in the French and West German FBR programs soon gave way to intense competition; cf. Henry Nau, National Policy and International Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), chap. 8.

60. Note, for instance, the loss of three to four years in the West German and U.S. FBR demonstration projects relative to the French effort. These delays were due entirely to institutional difficulties of the development program.

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Fast breeder development 87

three countries' FBR policies, but international systems theory makes at least an indirect contribution.

Sociological policy theory and the FBR crisis

Sociological theory can explain the emergence of new issues, actors, and interests associated with FBR policy in the 1 970s, but it cannot account for any structural features of political decision making in FBR policy arenas. New groups of actors began to participate in FBR policy making when they began to perceive the rapid development of the new technology as damaging to their interests. For some, material costs and rewards of collective actions were not the motivating factors, which suggests that the logic of interest

mobilization described earlier requires modification. There were at least three developments and challenges that brought about the emergence of new po- litical actors and interests in FBR policy.

The first new challenge that mobilized additional sets of political actors and reoriented the interests of established actors was the energy crisis of 1973-74. The sudden realization that Western industrial countries were vul- nerable to foreign energy suppliers reinvigorated the search for new energy

sources and the FBR figured prominently among them. Faced with the energy crisis, most of the past conflicts between the players within existing FBR policy arenas disappeared. For instance, utilities in West Germany and the United States became fully committed to the breeder.

All three countries also faced the second challenge of antinuclear power movements, which grew out of concern for the preservation of the natural environment and the protection of nature and society from man-made risks.6' In each country, the rapid growth of nuclear power programs attracted their attention and criticism, and eventually led them to oppose the large FBR demonstration plants, thought to be the next logical step toward escalating the nuclear power economy. First and foremost, they challenged the safety of FBR technology. They also questioned its economic efficiency, given the great uncertainties about the cost of reactors and of the corresponding fuel cycle, as well as the projected costs of natural uranium.62 Later, the debate turned to the consequences of the use of very dangerous, militarily sensitive, nuclear technologies to preserve civil rights in a democracy, and to the impact of a global "plutonium economy" on the maintenance of nuclear nonpro- liferation policies.63

61. For a broader discussion of these movements see Herbert Kitschelt, "Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Countries," British Journal of Political Science 16 (Winter 1986), and "New Social Movements in the United States and West Germany," Political Power and Social Theory 5 (1985).

62. Thomas B. Cochran, The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor: An Environmental and Economic Critique (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

63. See Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1977), and Robert Jungk, Der Atomstaat (Munich: Kindler, 1978).

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88 International Organization

The antinuclear movement's environmental concerns overlapped with the third challenge to established FBR policies: a reawakening of the foreign- policy debate about the link between "peaceful" nuclear energy technology and nuclear weapons. In light of the nuclear explosion in India in 1974 and of numerous other nuclear development programs in Iraq, Pakistan, Ar- gentina, Taiwan, Israel, and South Africa, the compatibility of complete nuclear fuel cycles, a necessary component of a world breeder economy, and the maintenance of an international nonproliferation regime became sensitive issues. This latter problem is, of course, central to the explanation put forth by international systems theories for FBR policy in the 1 970s. Sociological policy theory cannot quite explain why FBR proliferation concerns were loudly voiced not only within the U.S. foreign-policy community but also within those of the other two countries.

Although environmental and consumer opposition to FBRs existed in each of the three countries in the 1 970s, political decision arenas, decision-making processes, and outcomes diverged further than in the preceding period. The new actors and interests developed different capacities to modify FBR policies and to redefine the nuclear subgovernments that linked the manufacturing industry, research laboratories, electric utilities, and promotional nuclear state agencies within each country. Sociological policy theories are unable to explain this divergence. Instead, they would predict similar policy struc- tures, processes, and outcomes as a consequence of similar issues in each country.

Political coalition theories and FBR policy in the 1970s

Does coalition theory predict policy formation more accurately than so- ciological policy theory? Coalition theory predicts that the challenge to es- tablished nuclear policy arenas and policy decisions is strongest where newly mobilized demands are most powerful or where the established proponents of FBR are the weakest. As I discuss elsewhere, there is little indication that antinuclear sentiment differed systematically among the three countries or that it was strongest where the FBR program was impeded the most, namely the United States.64 It appears rather that, at the height of the nuclear power controversy (1976-79), between 35 and 45 percent of the population sampled in opinion polls opposed nuclear power. West Germany certainly displayed the highest level of antinuclear activities (demonstrations, petitions, lawsuits), and the breeder reactor demonstration project at Kalkar was one of the antinuclear movement's prime targets. But, though delayed, the project sur- vived.65 Similarly, the French antinuclear movement targeted the site of a

64. See Kitschelt, "Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest." 65. For the politicization of the breeder demonstration reactor in West Germany see Herbert

Kitschelt, Kernenergiepolitik. Arena eines gesellschaftlichen Konflikts (Frankfurt: Campus, 1980), chap. 5.

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Fast breeder development 89

new precommercial, very large 1,200-megawatt (electric) Super-Phenix FBR for several massive demonstrations but was unsuccessful in even slightly affecting the planning and implementation of the reactor.66 On the other hand, in the United States, where opposition was much less visible and more soft-spoken, the breeder demonstration project was nevertheless abandoned at the end of a struggle that lasted almost ten years (1974-83).

Differences in the strength of probreeder coalitions also provide only very limited support for coalition theory. The long-standing participants in FBR policy arenas closed ranks in all three countries. Utilities supported FBR development unequivocally. And even in the 1980s when expectations about future electricity demand growth had been revised downward dramatically, both in the United States and in West Germany, private utilities offered to spend more of their own funds to save FBR development programs.67 Also, the state agencies responsible for nuclear technology in all three countries never wavered in their support of breeder reactors. In fact, nuclear subgov- ernments were able to put their stamp on long-term energy programs that were developed as an immediate response to the energy crisis of 1973-74. In each case, FBRs emerged as the highest-priority future energy technology.68

Finally, coalition theory proponents could argue that the coalitions in the three countries exhibited different degrees of fragility and resourcefulness. Although this may have been true for the 1960s, it does not hold for the 1970s and early 1980s. By then, all three countries had concentrated their advanced reactor industries in a very few powerful, capable firms. Even France had eliminated its traditional industrial weakness by nurturing a single national "champion" in the nuclear industry, Framatome, which was then owned in equal shares by Creusot-Loire and the CEA.69 Its subsidiary, Novatome, was charged with the industrial implementation of the FBR project Super-Phenix. To conclude that the resourcefulness of the French electric utility (EDF) is so much greater than that of its West German and American

66. French antinuclear opposition is reviewed in Francis Fagnani and Alexandre Nicolon, Nucleopolis: materiaux pour l'analyse d'une societe nucleaire (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1979), and most recently in Tony Chafer, "The Anti-Nuclear Movement and the Rise of Political Ecology," in Philip G. Cemy, ed., Social Movements and Protest in France (New York: St. Martin's, 1982).

67. In West Germany agreements in April 1983 increased the utilities' and the reactor man- ufacturers' shares of the FBR demonstration reactor's cost to DM 1.42 billion, or 22% of the project costs (Nuclear Engineering International, 28 June 1983, p. 3). Similar arrangements were aired during 1983 in the United States, but Congress terminated funding before they could bear fruit.

68. Cf. Bundesregierung, Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1. Fortschreibung des Energiepro- gramms (Bonn: Bundestags-Drucksache VII/2713, 1974); U.S. Energy Research and Development Agency, A National Plan for Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration (Washington, D.C., 1975); Commissariat Generale du Plan, Rapport de la commission de l'energie sur les orientations de la politique energetique (Paris: Ministere de l'Industrie, 1975).

69. For the reorganization of the French nuclear industry see Jacques Gaussens, "Creation d'une industrie nucleaire et arboriculture," Revue de l'energie 30 (August-September 1979), pp. 597-6 17.

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90 International Organization

counterparts is difficult. Rather, what appears to have set France apart from the other two countries are the specific ties between industry and state agencies, the variations of which in the 1970s closely correlate with broad patterns of political regime structures in France, the United States, and West Germany.

The lack of a direct link between the composition of political coalitions and government policy is also indicated by the minimal impact government changes have had on FBR policy. In the West German and French cases, FBR programs survived changes in government in 1981 (France) and 1982 (West Germany), despite the highly politicized nature of nuclear policy. Con- versely, no matter what the executive's official position on FBR policy in the United States was, the FBR program declined during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, and it was finally killed during the Reagan administration, Reagan's vigorous support notwithstanding.

It is noteworthy that similar economic and political coalitions led to quite different national policy structures, processes, and outcomes, and that different coalitions led to similarities of policy formation. Resourcefulness, levels of political mobilization, and control of the executive branch of government, contrary to what the pluralist and coalition positions suggest, do not directly translate into policy. The domestic regime or "opportunity structures" that endowed the challenging interests with different capacities to "disorganize" the probreeder coalitions and to alter policies made the crucial difference between the nuclear policies in the three countries during the 1970s and early 1980s.

Political regime theories and FBR policies in crisis

In the United States, new political actors in the nuclear controversy en- countered a permeable institutional field of channels that could be penetrated and used as a base to articulate and aggregate political demands in the battle against the established probreeder subgovernment. The fluid political structure allowed political coalitions to form that eventually killed the breeder project. This openness is evidenced by the access antinuclear groups gained to agencies charged with monitoring environmental matters. As early as 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to criticize the unsatisfactory state of environmental impact research on FBRs and their fuel cycles. In 1975, both the EPA and the General Accounting Office joined antinuclear forces in criticizing favorable economic cost-benefit analyses of the FBR program.70 In the same year, these criticisms precipitated a congressional compromise about the funding of the FBR demonstration reactor at Clinch River, according to which public expenses for the project were not to be authorized in a single stroke but, rather, incrementally or on an annual basis.

70. See, for instance, the testimony of an EPA representative in the hearings of U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Fast Breeder Reactor Program, p. 334.

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Fast breeder development 91

This facilitated the campaign against the breeder by the Carter administration and by congressional opponents.

With increasing public sentiment opposed to nuclear power, many members of Congress switched to an antinuclear position. Not bound by parliamentary party discipline, a politically heterogeneous group of political entrepreneurs in Congress coalesced to oppose the FBR; its membership cut across party lines and included environmentally oriented members of Congress and fiscal conservatives, who opposed any "industrial policy." This group eventually controlled a majority of the votes in both houses and killed the Clinch River project in 1983.

In the same vein, President Carter built his political coalition around those influential segments of public constituencies and state agencies which opposed the breeder. The very heterogeneity of the Carter antibreeder coalition and the wavering position of the administration on which argument to use against the FBR show the fluidity of American policy makers and the individualistic rationality of political players in this framework.7' The administrative units promoting and administering nuclear energy research in the newly founded Department of Energy (DOE) remained faithful to the breeder, while the political leadership of the department, for pragmatic reasons, wanted to replace the Clinch River project with a more advanced reactor design. On the other side, environmentally oriented politicians in the president's White House staff and in executive agencies opposed nuclear technology in principle. In between, the foreign-policy community split over the advisability of de- veloping the breeder reactor and its fuel cycle technology, given the dangers of the international nuclear proliferation.72

But during the Carter years, the probreeder forces in Congress remained able to counterbalance the antinuclear assault and salvage funds for the demonstration project. The position of the administration and of Congress led to a political stalemate: Congress, with shrinking majorities, authorized and allocated funds for the Clinch River reactor; at the same time, President Carter interrupted and terminated the licensing procedure for the project. Construction of the plant could not begin, but reactor components were ordered and built. The probreeder Reagan administration was not able to bring the FBR program back on the track. Faced with the fiscal crisis of the U.S. federal budget, congressional majorities for the breeder, already slim, eventually disappeared.

71. This analysis is based on Richard L. Williams, "The Need for Energy vs. the Danger of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation: President Carter's Decision on the Clinch River Plutonium Breeder" (Ms., National War College, Washington, D.C., 1978).

72. In 1975 the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency solicited a critical report on the proliferation impacts of FBR fuel cycles by Albert Wohlstetter et al., Swords from Plowshares: The Military Potential of Civilian Nuclear Energy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Influential during the Carter administration was a report by a Ford Foundation energy project under direction of Spurgeon M. Keeney, Nuclear Power: Issues and Choices (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1979), with conclusions critical of the FBR project.

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92 International Organization

In both France and West Germany, party and government discipline made it impossible for antinuclear groups to gain access to the legislative arena to the same extent as in the United States. Even the French Socialists and the West German Social Democrats, who were under considerable internal pres- sure to change their position on the breeder reactor, did not yield on this issue though it divided their own electorates. They were caught between losing the labor unions, which in both countries continued to support a vigorous nuclear development policy by large majorities, and the younger,

educated "new middle-class" constituencies of the left-wing parties, which opposed the FBR. The two socialist parties, therefore, tried to sidestep the conflict.73 In West Germany, the Social Democratic government finally called for a parliamentary commission to study the breeder reactor. The commis- sion's mid-term report, released just before the 1980 national election, was ambiguous enough to encourage antinuclear activists.74 In its final report, however, following the election, the commission endorsed the breeder. In France, the Socialist Party called for a "national debate" on nuclear power.75 After the Socialist victory in 1981, it endorsed the nuclear policy of the preceding government with few modifications following a very brief parlia- mentary debate on energy policy in October 1981. The breeder program remained untouched by these leadership changes.

None of the established political parties in France or West Germany were able or willing to represent the antinuclear demands forthrightly. Their re- luctance has strengthened the position of those who have called for new antinuclear and ecological parties in both countries.76

At the same time, the opponents of nuclear energy could not gain access to the executive agencies of the state in order to find representatives of their interests in the bureaucracy. Neither France nor West Germany has envi- ronmental policy agencies as independent as the EPA. Moreover, statist and corporatist traditions and orientations in the civil service of both countries have predisposed bureaucrats and agencies against direct interaction with organized groups that are not licensed and formally recognized as repre- sentative of "respectable" constituencies.77

73. The difficulties of integrating the nuclear issue into the established cleavage structures of political parties are described in Dorothy Nelkin and Michael Pollack, "The Political Parties and the Nuclear Energy Debate in France and Germany," Comparative Politics 12 (January 1980), pp. 127-41.

74. See Deutscher Bundestag, Enquete-Kommission "Zukiinftige Kernenergiepolitik," Zwis- chenbericht (Bonn: Bundestags-Drucksache VIII/4341, 1980).

75. Cf. the foreword by Franqois Mitterrand to Etienne Bauer et al., Pour une autre politique nucleaire. rapport du comite nucleaire environment et societe du parti socialist (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).

76. This is not meant to suggest a monocausal explanation of the rise of ecological parties in Western Europe. See Ferdinand Muller-Rommel, "Ecology Parties in Western Europe," West European Politics 5 (January 1982), pp. 68-75.

77. For France see Ezra Suleiman, Politics, Power, and Bureaucracy in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); for West Germany, Renate Mayntz and Fritz Scharpf, Policy- Making in the German Federal Bureaucracy (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1975).

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Fast breeder development 93

Variations among the three countries that had important consequences for FBR policies can also be discovered with respect to the capacities of states to implement industrial policy. In West Germany and the United States, the design of licensing procedures for industrial plants reflects the arm's-length relationship between state and business.78 The state symbolically assumes the position of a neutral arbiter who settles disputes between the proponents and opponents of an industrial project. Although state agencies have clearly been sympathetic to nuclear manufacturers and utilities in li- censing hearings, the nature of the procedures compels the regulatory agencies to reason with antinuclear groups and to examine their arguments. In the cases of the West German FBR project at Kalkar and the American Clinch River breeder project, these procedures delayed implementation considerably; project applicants were required to submit additional evidence for their cases and the regulatory agencies imposed numerous design changes on the pro- posed plants. In the West German case, initial partial construction permits required additional safety equipment that increased the cost of the reactor by DM 500 million and delayed the project by about twenty months.79 Further delays and additional design requirements followed; the reactor is currently scheduled to go into operation in 1986-a delay of eight years- at four times the originally calculated cost. In both the United States and West Germany, as the nuclear controversy heated up and as the probreeder

coalition tried to exert pressure on the state licensing authorities, these became instead increasingly independent-minded. Faced with open conflict, the reg- ulatory agencies had to preserve their legitimacy vis-a-vis the antagonists by decreasing the opportunities for regulatory co-optation.80

After exhausting opportunities to appeal licensing procedures, West German and American antinuclear groups could still resort to further litigation. As early as 1973, the Union of Concerned Scientists initiated a lawsuit that compelled the AEC to prepare an environmental impact statement not only for the breeder demonstration reactor but for the entire FBR fuel cycle as well in the course of licensing the Clinch River project. Critical project delays resulted from this decision. In West Germany, lawsuits against the construc- tion of the demonstration reactor never interrupted work on the project but attracted wide publicity and certainly pressured the licensing authorities to tighten safety requirements.

78. For a comparison of U.S. and French nuclear licensing procedures see Michael W. Golay, Iri Saragossi, and Jean-Marc Willefest, Comparative Analysis of U.S. and French Nuclear Power Plant Siting and Construction: Regulatory Policies and Their Economic Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Energy Laboratory Report, 1977). For the West German licensing process see Kitschelt, Kernenergiepolitik, chap. 4.

79. Klaus Traube, "Intemationale Brutreaktor-Entwicklung," Atomwirtschaft-Atomtechnik 21 (September-October 1976), pp. 471-79; Alois Brandstetter, "Stand der Schnellbriiterent- wicklung," Atomwirtschaft-Atomtechnik 22 (September 1979), pp. 477-83.

80. Critiques of "co-optation" theories of industrial regulation are elaborated in James Q. Wilson, ed., The Politics of Regulation (New York: Basic, 1980).

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94 International Organization

The French fast breeder coalition encountered none of these constraints on nuclear policy making. The Phenix reactor and the more recent Super- Phenix project were licensed in an atmosphere of close cooperation between the project groups designing the reactors (CEA engineers, the nuclear man- ufacturer, and the utility) and the licensing authority; there were no oppor- tunities for direct public participation.8' A lawsuit filed against the construction license was promptly decided in favor of industry and the state.82 This sup- portive environment ensured the rapid progress of both reactors even though the Super-Phenix met intense opposition from the burgeoning French an- tinuclear movement.83 The Super-Phenix reactor was completed in early 1985 and is expected to start operation in early 1986 after testing all reactor components. And Novatome is already preparing the design of a more mature commercial 1,500-megawatt (electric) FBR to be submitted with a firm cost estimate to the French government in 1986.

Domestic political structures thus covary consistently with the structures, processes, and outcomes of FBR development in the three countries. Where opponents to breeder reactors gained access to policy making and simul- taneously subverted the program's implementation, as in the United States, the effectiveness and efficiency of the breeder program suffered most. Where they succeeded in doing neither, as in France, the program was implemented almost without delay, albeit with high initial costs. West Germany is an intermediate case. Because the institutions of political articulation and ag- gregation were closed to the opponents of breeder reactor policy, new critical actors tried to delay the breeder demonstration plant by subverting the state's implementation procedures. Although the efficiency and legitimacy of the demonstration plant declined as the conflict intensified, in the end, FBR policy survived the challenge.

Yet is the link between FBR policies and domestic regime structures really more than a mere coincidence? At least one alternative causal theory has yet to be considered: namely, that the position of the countries in the inter- national political-economic system may have determined the differing policy courses. The claim that domestic regimes are causal determinants of breeder reactor politics would be strengthened if such an international systems ex- planation were found to be inconclusive.

The international system and FBR policies

International systems theory proposes two security and one economic argument to explain differences in national preferences, policy processes, and

81. M. Rappin, "Dezentralisierung des franzosischen Genehmigungsverfahrens," Atomwirt- schaft-Atomtechnik 27 (January 1982), pp. 79-81.

82. Nuclear News 22 (August 1979), pp. 52-53. 83. For the development of the Super-Phenix project see Gordon Friedlander, "Breeder

Progress Shifts Overseas," Electrical World 194 (July 1980), pp. 108-17; C. Pierre Zaleski, "Breeder Reactors in France," Science 208 (11 April 1980), pp. 137-44.

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Fast breeder development 95

outcomes of FBR policy. They concern differential attention to nuclear pro- liferation in the three countries, variations in their international energy de-

pendence, and differences in their foreign-trade policies and international strategies of economic competition.

International systems theory has little trouble explaining why domestic foreign-policy actors became concerned with nuclear proliferation in the mid- 1 970s. What is more difficult to understand is why the link between civilian

and military technology was perceived so differently in the United States, France, and West Germany. According to the collective goods argument I discuss in the first section of this article, the United States, as the greatest beneficiary of nonproliferation policies, would be expected to carry the greatest burden of adjustment and abstain from civilian nuclear technologies (such as the breeder reactor and fuel reprocessing) which potentially undermine nuclear nonproliferation. But such a policy would have been doomed to

failure, because nonproliferation is provided either entirely or not at all- and the minimal size of the coalition needed to produce the good is equal to that of the group composed of all potential suppliers of nuclear know- how, which includes France and West Germany. The lesser weight given to

nonproliferation issues in the latter two countries thus torpedoed the chances for a global policy of nonproliferation.

What is puzzling from the point of view of collective goods theory is the observation that even within the United States, the Carter administration's rationale for a "technical fix" nuclear policy (no breeder, no fuel reprocessing, hence no proliferation) was deeply controversial, especially within the foreign- policy community.84 Although several influential reports in 1976 advocated the technical fix, members of the foreign-policy community joined traditional champions of nuclear power to rebut the idea that halting work on fast breeder reactors and the associated fuel cycles would retard the spread of nuclear weapons. They pointed out that there are much cheaper ways to acquire nuclear weapons, for instance, the so-called hot-and-dirty methods of reprocessing fuels from research reactors. In the final analysis, the merits of a technical fix policy hinges upon its capacity to forewarn about nuclear weapons programs in other countries. Opponents of the technical fix policy view this capacity as very limited. Nuclear policy in their view is not a matter of technological fixes but of developing international standards of institutional safety and controls.85 Both West German and French foreign-policy makers shared this institutionalist view of the FBR issue.86 In the United States even

84. In addition to references in fn. 72 see for an explanation of the Carter policy Joseph S. Nye, "Nonproliferation: A Long-Term Strategy," Foreign Affairs 56 (April 1978), pp. 601-23.

85. Institutional problems of the nuclear fuel cycle are discussed in Gene Rochlin, Plutonium, Power and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

86. The official French perspective is explained in B. Barre, "The Proliferation Aspects of Breeder Development," in Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (London: Francis & Taylor, 1979).

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96 International Organization

former supporters of technical fix policies came around to this point of view in the course of the debate.87 The Reagan administration, however, has abandoned this strategy.

Different cognitive perceptions of the link between civilian and military nuclear technologies apparently cannot be attributed simply to different global

interests of states.88 Instead, actor-level studies of domestic information processing and decision-making capacities are needed to account for the social construction of policy choices,89 so we turn once again to domestic regime and coalition theory. The nonproliferation issue could play such an important part in determining U.S. breeder reactor policy only because the domestic policy-making process is fluid and permeable: new arguments, easily communicated through the system, allowed crucial voices in the foreign- policy community to tip an unstable balance of pro- and anti-breeder forces.

Matters of cognitive perception also play an important role in evaluating the second international systems hypothesis. We expect countries that are more vulnerable to a cut-off of foreign energy supplies to develop new do- mestic fuel alternatives more vigorously and to be willing to pay an economic security premium on energy supplies.90 Again, at first sight, the data fit the hypothesis very well. The most vulnerable country, France, has the most vigorous FBR program, followed by West Germany, which has a somewhat

less serious foreign energy dependence. The United States, with the least vulnerability to foreign energy supplies, displays the least sense of urgency about the breeder reactor. It can "afford" to open the FBR policy arena and slow the political decision-making process through protracted controversy.

However, the logic of this argument has some holes. First, advanced in- dustrial countries with similar or even greater energy dependence than France, such as Italy, Japan, and Sweden, have shown much less enthusiasm for speedy development of the breeder. Conversely, a country with no foreign energy dependence but one that shares some domestic regime structures strikingly similar to those of France, namely Britain, has implemented a program quite similar to the French effort.

Second, we have to look more closely at the nature and meaning of energy dependence and of the FBR as a remedy. The first column of Table 2 provides an estimate of economically recoverable uranium resources in the three

87. See Gerard Smith and George Rathjens, "Reassessing Nuclear Non-Proliferation Policy," Foreign Affairs 59 (Spring 1981), pp. 875-94.

88. For this reason, the reconstruction of the conflict as "European energy interests vs. U.S. nonproliferation interests" is, at best, a single facet of the complex disagreements on nuclear nonproliferation strategy. Too narrow, therefore, is the analysis by Pierre Lellouche, "Breaking the Rules without Quite Stopping the Bomb: European Views," International Organization 35 (Winter 1981), especially pp. 52-53.

89. The role of domestic structures in the shaping of political perceptions and conflicts among countries has been analyzed by Richard E. Neustadt, Alliance Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

90. Cf. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 155-57.

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Fast breeder development 97

TABLE 2. Estimates of economically recoverable uranium resources

Uranium resources Estimated uranium Estimated per ton of oil or resources per GW

uranium resources equivalent energy nuclear capacity

(in tons) consumed in 1980 (in year 2000)

France 101,200 0.55 1,690 tons/60 GW

United States 1,868,000 1.02 15,600 tons/120 GW

West Germany 12,000 0.04 480 tons/25 GW

countries.91 The less uranium a country has, the greater will be its dependence on future foreign uranium supplies and the greater its incentive to develop fuel-efficient FBRs. Column 2 relates the expected availability of uranium to the present size of energy consumption, and column 3 to the expected size of nuclear power programs in operation in the year 2000. What emerges is that West Germany has by far the lowest supply of uranium, at least in proportion to its energy consumption. France comes surprisingly close to the United States, because it has a more frugal energy economy and quite sizable uranium supplies. West Germany, then, should have the most vigorous breeder program, not France, if energy security matters most. Proponents of international systems theory, of course, retort that the West German hedge against energy vulnerability is its environmentally problematic and expensive hard-coal industry. The usefulness of the international systems hypothesis, therefore, remains ambiguous at this point.

The breeder reactor, however, may not be an effective hedge against energy dependence for a long time to come. Recent studies assessing the economic and security prospects of FBRs for the United States, France, and West Germany have calculated that, given reasonable and robust assumptions, the breeder reactor will make a difference in dependence on foreign energy supply only in the second third of the 21st century at the earliest, even if countries are now willing to build a significant number of breeders and thus to pay an economic "insurance premium" for energy security through com- paratively expensive power stations.92 And neither will the breeder reactor and its fuel cycle be competitive with conventional nuclear reactors or, under some circumstances, coal-powered plants, until that time, even assuming

91. Estimates of natural resources are problematic and subject to political bias. See, for example, Aaron Wildavsky and Ellen Tenenbaum, The Politics of Mistrust (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981). To interpret the figures presented here in a meaningful way, we have only to assume that the bias in the estimates is the same for all three countries.

92. For the United States see Brian Chow, "Comparative Economics of the Breeder and Light Water Reactor," Energy Policy 8 (December 1980), pp. 293-307; for France see Dominique Finon, "Fast Breeder Reactors: The End of a Myth?" Energy Policy 10 (December 1982), pp. 305-21; for West Germany see Otto Keck, "The West German Fast Breeder Programme," Energy Policy 8 (December 1980), pp. 277-92.

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98 International Organization

that the actual cost of FBR fuel cycles will not exceed the present highly uncertain calculations. Security concerns notwithstanding, the early timing of breeder development in some countries must appear to have been stra- tegically suboptimal in that the technology cannot be justified either on grounds of energy efficiency or supply security. Electricity can only substitute for a limited fraction of present fossil fuel consumption (within reasonable economic costs) in the absence of major breakthroughs (e.g., practical electric cars, cheap technologies for hydrogen electrolysis) that dramatically increase demand.

In West Germany, the proponents of FBRs have quietly retreated from economic and international security arguments in support of the breeder.93 The most recent government agency research program, for instance, justifies breeder development more in terms of German competitiveness in the high- technology field and of testing the social acceptability, the "licensability," of a new technology in an industrial society.94 In France, the issue of tech- nological leadership rather than economic and security concerns has also assumed a prominent place in the present debate about the future of the French nuclear program.95 Given the financial burden of a large FBR de- velopment program, France is now looking for closer international coop- eration, though without being willing to share its advanced know-how and technological lead with other countries.96 Even if immediately after the oil crisis of 1973-74 energy shortages and the upward spiral of energy con- sumption made the choice of the FBR look rational from the point of view of countries heavily dependent on foreign supplies, the apparent irrationality of West Germany and, especially, France in underwriting the continued and vigorous development of an industrial infrastructure around this technology remains unexplained.

Similar contradictions arise from an economic international systems ex- planation of FBR technology competition. Even if we concede that industrial latecomers (such as West Germany, France, and Japan) tried to narrow the technology gap vis-a-vis the United States during the 1 960s by interventionist

93. Almost annually the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center revised its estimates of uranium demand in West Germany downward. Cf. Hans-Henning Hennies, Peter Jansen, and G. Kessler, "A West German Perspective on the Need for the Plutonium Fueled LMFBR," Nuclear News 22 (August 1979), pp. 69-75, and Hennies et al., "Die deutsche Briuterentwicklung: Stand und Perspektiven," Atomwirtschaft-Atomtechnik 26 (March 1981), pp. 151-55.

94. Bundesministerium fur Forschung und Technologie, Zweites Programm Energieforschung und Energietechnologien (Bonn: BMFT, 1982), pp. 26, 130.

95. Cf. Nuclear Engineering International 28 (July 1983), p. 4, and 28 (September 1983), p. 12. The financial problems of the French nuclear program are discussed in Stephen Cohen, "Informed Bewilderment: French Economic Strategy and the Crisis," in Cohen and Peter A. Gourevitch, eds., France in a Troubled World Economy (London: Butterworth, 1982).

96. This issue has recently given rise to frictions between the French and West German FBR communities. While earlier cooperation agreements provided for a joint precommercial reactor project in West Germany, France now prefers international contributions to its own Super- Phenix 2, the design of which is already much further advanced than that of any other project. Cf. Nuclear Engineering International 29 (June 1984), pp. 7-9.

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Fast breeder development 99

policies, it does not necessarily follow that the breeder was useful for meeting that objective. In general, compensatory industrial policies seem to work most effectively when established and economically successful technologies in the lead countries serve as guideposts to nations trying to catch up. In this sense, the model of innovators-latecomers may be difficult to apply to the case of breeder technology, which faced and still faces an uncertain technological, economic, and political future.

The question remains: why did some countries view FBRs as a rational path to reach international technological leadership, while others attributed much less importance to it? Regime theory explains the domestic and in- stitutional filters that shape policy formation so as to generate an image of the FBR as a rational strategy for pursuing political and economic power in the international system. As Keohane has shown, neorealist international systems theory cannot abstain from actor-level analyses, because countries do not acknowledge the cognitions, interests, and values involved in strategic pursuits as national concerns.97

Domestic regime structures appear to mediate between international power configurations and national policies. Even if we concede that domestic regime structures may have represented rational avenues for the pursuit of a state's self-interest through active intervention in economic investment and de- velopment of technology in order to match the technological know-how of leading countries, such structures develop a relative autonomy and inertia. Subsequently, the ways in which information about policy options is processed and interests are sorted out, and the way decisions are made may produce results that contradict the rationality assumptions of international systems theory. Domestic regime structures can survive international power config- urations and give rise to inefficient and ineffective national policies. French industrial policy making during the previous decade is likely to exemplify this hypothesis, and the breeder reactor may well be the latest white elephant produced by this policy style.98 American domestic structures, on the other hand, in varying degrees transmitted more early warning signals against rapid FBR development and had greater success in altering established arenas of nuclear policy making. The parallel to the French and U.S. policy-making decisions about the development of the supersonic passenger jet in the 1 960s is suggestive in this respect.

Different domestic policy processes and perceptions of rational action, finally, may shape not only the instruments but also the objectives of rational policy action. The rules and payoffs of the game of international technology development may be perceived differently. Political power and economic resourcefulness, assumed to be the leading policy objectives of states by

97. See Keohane, "Theory of World Politics," pp. 516, 518, 519. 98. Critical of French industrial policy is Stanley Hoffmann, "Conclusion: The Impact of the

Fifth Republic on France," in William G. Andrews and Hoffmann, eds., The Fifth Republic at Twenty (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), especially pp. 461-63.

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100 International Organization

neorealist theories, may be displaced under certain circumstances by concerns with political legitimacy and consensus in countries with domestic structures that do not clearly locate the state above society and its varied and shifting interests. Intense domestic policy disagreement stifled the U.S. breeder pro- gram, whereas the French state had little trouble ignoring the distrust and open hostility of many citizens toward its nuclear energy policy.

The case of FBR development in France, West Germany, and the United States does not conclusively refute the value of international systems theory for explaining policy formation. However, the link between configurations of power and economic capacities in international systems, and domestic policies may be weaker and more mediated by irreducibly domestic insti- tutions than is often assumed. Coalition theory alone appears to contribute nothing to the explanation of various components of policy formation, and sociological theory only explains the similarity of social actors mobilized around FBR policy in all the countries. International systems theory, on the other hand, provides an explanation of why some new actors have entered the policy arena. At the same time, international systems configurations have an impact on public policy making via the mediating role of domestic political regimes. Clearly, such configurations are most able to account for the struc- tures, processes, and outcomes of FBR policy making in the three countries.

4. Conclusion

The case of breeder reactor technology policy in France, West Germany, and the United States shows that no single explanation of public policy accounts sufficiently for all aspects of policy formation at all times. Tables 3 and 4 summarize the empirical argument of this article and show how alternate combinations of theoretical approaches explain FBR policy in dif- ferent time periods. They also highlight the inaccuracies of the simple com- bination of policy components and theoretical explanations in Table 1. Policy analysis needs to disaggregate its object of explanation in substantive and longitudinal respects. The causal structure of public policy making is differ- entiated and changes over time. Wholesale confrontations between different theories of policy formation are, therefore, less useful than detailed studies of the possible connections and compatibilities between various partial theo- retical models. We need more precise theoretical frameworks that can con- ceptualize the interplay between different determinants and components of policy formation.

This article takes one step in the direction of such theoretical models of policy formation, although it provides only a comparative (and hence static) elaboration of two different causal models of policy formation. A dynamic theory of change, a theory that explains the change in the causal texture of policy formation in the case of FBR technology development over time, is

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Fast breeder development 101

TABLE 3. FBR Policies during the 1960s and early 1970s

Sociological Political Political International policy regime coalition systems theory theory theory theory

Policy Similar actors in

actors all cases: science,

industry, utilities,

promotional state

agencies active; consumer groups

inactive.

Policy Similarities of seg- structures mented policy

arenas with high barriers to partici-

pation; policy invisible in the

public sphere.

Policy Similarity of the Theory only fully Different coalitions

processes policy instruments consistent with the between the major only.a decision processes actors lead to

on FBR demon- different research stration plants.a strategies and

cooperative arrangements.

Policy In all cases, no Different outcomes Coalition forma- outcomes legitimation prob- of FBR demonstra- tion influences the

lems of policy; tion projects are speed of develop- effectiveness/effi- associated with ment in the three ciency as criteria of different regime countries. success. Side-ef- capacities in fects of the tech- industrial

nology ignored. innovation.

a. Indicates a weak or indirect explanatory power of a theory.

lacking. That a dynamic theory of change is in no way incompatible with a comparative approach is the note on which I wish to conclude.

Policy analysts can seek such a theory of change from at least three angles. First, the tradition of classical macrosociology and historical comparative analysis refers us to momentous changes in social structures and cleavages which give rise to new social conflicts, collective decision making, and societal

integration. Such theories have the virtue of being very generalized and thus allow for broad comparisons; alone, though, they are not specific enough to explain the processes that generate transitions among causal structures of policy formation. Second, the changing causal structure of policy making

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102 International Organization

TABLE 4. FBR policies during the 1970s and early 1980s

Sociological Political Political International policy regime coalition systems theory theory theory theory

Policy Similar actors in all In hegemonic coun- actors cases: old actors, tries, the FBR mobi-

new actors, such as lizes the foreign-

environmentalists policy community and consumer around nuclear pro-

groups. liferation concerns.

Policy Where fluid, If a country is char- structures permeable regime acterized by high se-

structures prevail, curity concerns and new actors enter low energy depend-

the FBR decision ence, the FBR policy

arenas; elsewhere, arena will be opened paralysis or to opponents.a repression.

Policy The strength of A country's energy processes pro-FBR coalitions dependence and posi-

and the degree of tion in the inter- state intervention- national economic ism correlate with competition influ- different regime ences its commit- capacities. ment to FBRs.a

Policy FBR development A country's inter- outcomes outcomes (in terms national security and

of demonstration economic concern co- plants) vary with varies with its regime openness progress in the

and capacities. demonstration of FBRs.a

a. Indicates a weak or indirect explanatory power of a theory.

can be reconstructed as a "punctuated equilibrium."99 Crises disrupt estab- lished policy patterns and unleash innovative trial-and-error processes that produce new policies. Eventually, compatibility between new policies and changed, but relatively inert, regime patterns is reestablished. Although crises explain the pressure for change in policy formation, we need a theory to understand why some institutional and policy innovations are retained and transformed into stable patterns, while others fail and disappear. Finally, a third approach directs us to reconstruct changes in policy formation as though

99. This argument is elaborated in S,tephen D. Krasner, "Review Article: Approaches to the State. Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics," Comparative Politics 16 (January 1984), pp. 241-44.

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Fast breeder development 103

it were a process of cognitive political learning. '10 Here, not structural changes of societal cleavages or institutional ruptures, but policy makers' changing cognitive capacities are considered to be the key variables affecting the causal patterns of policy making. As the availability and certainty of information and of capacities to process information change over time, policy making, too, will change.

Which approach(es) explain the changing causal structure of policy making most fully must be analyzed in studies that compare a sizable number of changes in the patterning of policy over time. I suggest only one hypothesis pertinent to the case of nuclear policy, and perhaps industrial and technology policy making in advanced capitalism in general. Economic growth in the post-World War II period was facilitated by three interrelated political in- novations: comprehensive welfare states, economic interventionism by states to support growth, and the recognition of labor unions in collective bargaining and public policy making. Economic growth, efficiency, and positive-sum distributive games within a world system shaped by U.S. hegemony were the standards of rationality supported by most politically relevant groups in the economic sphere. Although advanced capitalist countries have varied remarkably with respect to their fabric of political institutions and dominant coalitions, the relevance of such variations was limited as long as economic and industrial policies could build on a societal consensus and stable under- lying structures of interests. In this sense, similarities of the sociological base and political trends were powerful determinants of policy making.

In the 1 970s, the complementarity of socioeconomic demands or require- ments, on the one hand, with the political capacities to meet them, on the other, eroded. One may attribute the present crisis to a failure of welfare capitalism to guarantee economic growth (as neoliberals and some Marxists do) or to the social consequences of growth itself.'0' At the same time, the international system governing the relationships among states has been de- stabilized through the decline of American economic hegemony. In this sit- uation, a realignment of social groups, the emergence of new demands, the resistance against established policies, and the end of the welfare state com- promise are factors that begin to press for policy change. But because political regime structures are relatively inert, demands and requirements do not directly translate into policy. Some regimes allow for more, or different, innovation than others. This may account for the momentous explosion of variation among industrial and economic policies in recent years. Societal

100. See Hugh Heclo, Modern Social Policy in Britain and Sweden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 304-22.

101. A comparative analysis of the causes of societal stagnation in the 1970s and 1980s can be found in Burkhart Lutz, Der kurze Traum immerwdhrender Prosperitdt (Frankfurt: Campus, 1984), especially chaps. 6, 7. Contrasting explanations of the crisis are compared in Herbert Kitschelt, "Materiale Politisierung der Prodution: Gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen und in- stitutionelle Innovationen in fortgeschrittenen kapitalistischen Demokratien," Zeitschrift far Soziologie 14, 4 (1985).

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104 International Organization

strains and developmental problems thus provoke policy variations, but "learning capacities" of polities are decisively shaped by their relatively inert institutional fabric and location within an increasingly turbulent world system. But whether, how, and based on which social formations, political institutions and public policies will establish a new compatibility between society and politics which will be disseminated to most advanced capitalist countries (like the welfare state was after World War II) are issues for the future to resolve.

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  • Contents
    • p. [65]
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  • Issue Table of Contents
    • International Organization, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter, 1986) pp. 1-186
      • Front Matter [pp. ]
      • Reciprocity in International Relations [pp. 1-27]
      • Neomercantilism and International Economic Stability [pp. 29-42]
      • The Limitations of "Structural" Theories of Commercial Policy [pp. 43-64]
      • National Energy Policies
        • Four Theories of Public Policy Making and Fast Breeder Reactor Development [pp. 65-104]
        • The Irony of State Strength: Comparative Responses to the Oil Shocks in the 1970s [pp. 105-137]
        • Reexamining the "Obsolescing Bargain": A Study of Canada's National Energy Program [pp. 139-165]
      • Review
        • Anarchy, Egoism, and Third Images: The Evolution of Cooperation and International Relations [pp. 167-186]
      • Back Matter [pp. ]
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