Theodore J. Lowi

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Theodore J. Lowi (born July 9, 1931) is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. His area of research is the American government and public policy.

[edit] Biography

Theodore J. Lowi was born on July 9, 1931 in Gadsden, Alabama. He is currently married to his wife, Angele, with whom he raised two children, Anna and Jason. He currently makes his home in Ithaca, NY.

Lowi obtained a BA from Michigan State University in 1954, and an M.A. and PhD from Yale University in 1955 and 1961, respectively.

He is a past President of the American Political Science Association and was voted one of the most influential political scholars of the modern era[1]. Lowi has been a frequent guest on NPR, PBS and cable television news-issues talk shows.

[edit] Published Work

The End Of Liberalism

From dust jacket: The main argument which Lowi develops through both editions is that the liberal state grew to its immense size and presence without self-examination and without recognizing that its pattern of growth had problematic consequences. Its engine of growth was delegation. The government expanded by responding to the demands of all major organized interests, by assuming responsibility for programs sought by those interests, and by assigning that responsibility to administrative agencies. Through the process of accommodation, the agencies became captives of the interest groups, a tendency Lowi describes as clientelism. This in turn led to the formulation of new policies which tightened the grip of interest groups on the machinery of government.

The end of the Republican Era (1996)

"American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory" (1964), World Politics 16(4):677-715.

In this journal article, which reviews a book by Raymond A. Bauer, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Lewis A. Dexter, Lowi lays out his classic typology of public policy in the U.S.: distribution, regulation, and redistribution. This typology was meant to help political scientists and policy scholars build theories of policy making that could be generalized beyond particular issue areas. Distributive policies, aka "pork barrel" programs, distribute resources from the government to particular recipients; the winners are concentrated but the losers (those who ultimately pay for the distribution) are diffuse. Regulatory policies are aimed at groups or classes of targets, rather than individuals, and they typically raise costs for the targets (in which case the costs are concentrated). Redistributive policies transfer resources from one class or group to another.