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In the immediate aftermath of the Chadha decision, some members of Congress searched for a universal response that will fit all the 207 cases. Some of the certain results of the decision, then, will be a loss of governmental efficiency, a heightening of the level of conflict between the Congress and the executive, and exacerbation of the normal tendency toward stalemate and deadlock in the policy-making process. Until 1940, the Congress had always regulated immigration through precisely-written statutes that the Justice Department was directed to enforce to the letter—a relationship between the branches conforming exactly to what the founders had in mind. The veto became much too convenient a device, in the view of executive branch officials and many congressmen as well. The mutual risk of dissolution and removal should encourage both Congress and the president to cooperate in fulfilling their governmental responsibilities while the longer presidential and congressional terms could allow such cooperation the time needed to produce results.

52 6.35 6.33 -.02 International Interactions 53 6.91 6.86 -.05 Public Administration Quarterly 54 7.04 6.94 -.11 Judicature 55 6.95 6.83 -.12 Journal of International Affairs 56 7.07 6.68 -.39 Asian Survey 57 5.30 4.84 -.46 Journal of Black Studies 58 8.10 7.52 -.58 Slavik Review 59 5.03 4.39 -.64 Experimental Study of Politics 60 8.22 7.58 -.64 China Quarterly 61 6.44 5.70 -.74 Political Science 62 9.26 8.45 -.82 Political Theory 63 8.17 7.24 -.93 Journal of Latin American Studies 64 8.83 7.87 -.96 Soviet Studies 65 8.64 7.68 -.96 European Journal of Political Research 66 5.59 4.42 -1.16 Simulation & Games 67 12.35 10.75 -1.60 British Journal of Political Science 68 7.85 6.23 -1.62 Middle Eastern Studies 69 9.76 7.81 -1.95 International Affairs 70 6.94 4.98 -1.97 Women & Politics 71 8.55 6.50 -2.04 Journal of Asian Studies 72 9.08 6.69 -2.40 Political Quarterly 73 10.77 7.71 -3.05 Government & Opposition 74 12.87 7.73 -5.14 Political Studies

Since President Clinton and Vice President Gore released the report of the National Performance Review--better known as the Gore Report (or the "Reinventing Government" report)--in September of 1993, most of the public, and congressional, discussion has centered on just one aspect of the proposal: the promise to cut 252,000 jobs from the government payroll (later raised by Congress to 273,000). In addition, Mr. Gore has been able to get some publicity for a few vignettes of improved governmental performance, such as reduction in the number of steps required to process veterans' claims and the redesign of fish ladders on the Columbia River. But virtually nothing has been said about what is potentially by far the most important and constructive recommendation in the report's entire 124 pages--presumably because in and of itself it is undramatic and carries little human-interest appeal. That is the recommendation buried on page 89, which reads: "Every federal department and agency will designate a chief operating officer." The chief operating officer (or COO) will, among other things, be responsible "for applying quality principles in transforming the agencies' day-to-day management cultures, for improving performance to achieve agency goals, for reengineering administrative processes, for implementing other National Performance Review recommendations," and--inserted almost as an afterthought--"for ensuring that the President's and agency head's priorities are implemented." Add up all those responsibilities and it becomes clear that, at long last, every federal department and agency is intended to have a manager, in the full and modern meaning of that word, as it is understood in business and industry and city government and every other kind of organization. And one need only read the horror stories sprinkled throughout the report, as well as those that appear regularly in the newspapers, to know that overstaffing, red tape, excessive centralization, procedural rigidity, insensitivity to public and clientele convenience, horrendous case backlogs, obsolete computer systems, and so on, are palpable evidence that the government has never established over the years a tradition and a structure that would ensure consistent attention by competent managers to the day-to-day operations of its departments and agencies. Why the lack of attention? Because direction of the government's operations is, with some notable exceptions, placed in the hands of political appointees. Managerial background, competence, and interest usually rank low among the criteria applied in staffing the top political positions in any administration. Political appointees normally get their jobs for a variety of other reasons--because they stand for the right policy positions and will be articulate in promoting them, because they have records of loyal service to the president or his party, because they represent demographic or interest groups important within the party, because they served well in the presidential campaign, and so on. Some of these appointees sometimes turn out to be highly competent managers, but that is likely to be the consequence not of design but of lucky accident. Often the political appointees placed in charge of multi-million- and even multi-billion-dollar operations have never managed anything of significant size in their entire careers. Some are lawyers, who at most may have managed middle-sized law firms. Some are academics, who may not even have had the managerial responsibilities of a deanship. Some are former members of Congress, or aides to members, who have never run an organization larger than their personal office staffs, plus perhaps a subcommittee or committee staff. Appointees from those backgrounds tend to be more accustomed to doing their own work than to delegating, organizing, and supervising the work of others. "Transforming" a "management culture" is likely to be not only quite outside their experience but also, initially at least, beyond their comprehension. …

When President Carter came down from Camp David, in July 1979, to talk of a national "malaise" and warn his countrymen that "a crisis of confidence" was "threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America," he gave his political rivals in both parties an unintended issue. As the campaign got under way in the fall, Ronald Reagan was saying that there was no "failure of the American spirit," only "a failure of our leaders," that the people did not lack confidence in themselves but only in their government. And Senator Kennedy was throwing Carter's words back at him with, "the malaise is not in our people but in our leadership." The implication, of course, was that confidence could be restored with a change in leadership. But the thesis of this article is that the problems of the U.S. government will not be solved by anything so simple as a change in leadership-or a return to office of the incumbent leadership, depending on one's preference. The American governmental system has built-in structural features that have always presented severe difficulties for any president who would provide the sought-after leadership. But deep-seated trends have been, and are, at work that will make effective government even more difficult to attain in the 1980s than it has been in the decade just ended and those that have gone before.

Exactly ten years ago, Political Science Quarterly published an article of mine that asked in its title, "Whither the American Party System?" and answered by challenging what appeared at that time to be the two most prevalent views of the future of American politics. One view held that the American party system was in, or was entering, a period of major realignment; the other that political parties were disintegrating, would continue to disintegrate, and might eventually even disappear. I These two interpretions advanced competing visions of the future, but they agreed on the present: the New Deal party system-that structure of political competition established in the 1930s between a liberal

On 8 November 1988, when the American voters decreed that Republican George Bush would succeed Ronald Reagan in the White House but the opposition Democratic Party would control both houses of the Congress, it was the sixth time in the last nine presidential elections that the electorate chose to split the government between the parties. As in 1988, so in the earlier elections of 1956, 1968, 1972, 1980, and 1984, the people placed their faith in Republican presidential leadership but voted to retain Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and in the first three of those elections (as well as in 1988), Democratic majorities in the Senate also. This is something new in American politics. When Dwight D. Eisenhower took his second oath of office in 1957, he was the first chief executive in seventy-two years since Grover Cleveland in 1885to confront on Inauguration Day a Congress of which even one house was controlled by the opposition party. Sometimes the opposition would win majorities in the House or the Senate, or both, at the midterm election, but even such occasions were relatively rare. In the fifty-eight years from 1897 through 1954, the country experienced divided government during only eight years all in the last half of a presidential term or 14 percent of the time. Yet in the thirty-six years from 1955 through 1990, the government will have

Exactly twenty years ago, in a burst of national euphoria and confidence, President Lyndon Johnson and the Congress completed the enactment of the Great Society -the greatest spate of domestic legislation in thirty years and one of the most exuberant expressions of social conscience in our history. The Great Society dealt forcefully with virtually every social problem that activists and reformers at that time had been agitating about. And the country felt good about it. The Congress that passed those historic measures had a popular approval rating certainly exceeding that of any Congress since, and probably higher than that of any Congress since the 1930s -71 percent approval late in 1965 by a Louis Harris poll.I And President Johnson was riding nearly as high; his approval rating in the Gallup poll was in the high 60s and 70s throughout most of that climax year of the Great Society. The legislative outpouring of 1964-65 was a surge of national compassion. True, some of the legislation of the period conferred its benefits on the rich, the middle class, and the poor alike-Medicare, for instance, and environmental measures. But the central measures of the Great Society were designed specifically to bring aid and opportunity to the poor and the dispossessed. The great civil rights measures guaranteed equal social and political rights, and the War on Poverty aimed to en

The Republican mayor of New York City, John Lindsay, becomes a Democrat. Two ambitious young Republicans in the House of Representatives, Ogden Reid of New York and Donald Riegle of Michigan, do likewise. A former Democratic governor and prospective presidential candidate, John Connally, becomes a Republican. Another former Democratic governor, Mills Godwin of Virginia, leaves his party and accepts the Republican nomination for that same office. Meanwhile, two states of the once-solid Democratic South, Tennessee and Virginia, elect a majority of Republicans in their delegations to the House of Representatives. And four states of the former Republican heartland of the upper Midwest-South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin-send to the Senate eight Democrats and not a single Republican. What does it all mean? Political scientists and journalists have been speculating for a decade that a major realignment of the American two-party system may be taking place. Every presidential election during that period

As originally planned, the war on poverty was to be co-ordinated at the Washington level by the Office of Economic Opportunity and in each community by a community-action agency (CAA). But neither institution succeeded in that purpose: Sargent Shriver chose to make OEO an operating rather than a co-ordinating agency; in the communities, the CAA's lacked the power to enforce co-ordination among community institutions and, in any case, like OEO, became absorbed in operating programs—and sometimes in organizing protest. To fill the vacuum, the federal government created a new co-ordinating structure for urban programs—Model Cities—that has proved successful to a promising degree. The federal government needs to conceive a single system for co-ordination of intergovernmental programs, extending from the Executive Office of the President to the neighborhood. In the cities, it should be built upon the Model Cities mechanism; in nonurban areas, upon multicounty organizations created by the states. The entire system should be overseen by a unit of the Executive Office of the President, created or designated for that purpose. It should have regional staff that would, among other things, develop their roles in the intergovernmental system on an individualized basis with the states.