Paths, precedents, parallels and pendulums: the uses of the past in public policy and administration.

Dutil, Patrice

If Winston Churchill once observed that "the farther backward you can look, the farther forward you will see," his contemporary G.K. Chesterton was frequently quoted as saying that the only thing that could be learned from past was that nothing can be learned from it. The disagreement on the importance of history is probably as old as humanity, but its nature should not be lost on decision makers and those who study them. For many scholars, it seems impossible to imagine any situation without at least trying to think of its yesterday. The same can be said about public policy management: it is simply inconceivable to think of it as something that emerges out of anywhere but the past. And yet "history" is typically discarded when policy making is about shaping the future. Anyone acquainted with the affairs of government--politician, public servant, scholar, student, citizen--will acknowledge that in responding to provocations, decisions will typically be made in light of the best guesses and hopes based on a personal insight or an inkling of how the "game" will play itself out. Most of the time, policy and practice is a result of habit--a bounded reality, to echo Herbert Simon--or a new political pressure. It is not likely the result of a new understanding of the "past." Sometimes, it might be the result of a lesson learned--a situation (or precedent) that revealed that battle-tested actions and understandings have simply grown irrelevant in a new environment governed by novel power alignments and instant communication technologies. And yet, many people will insist: what happened last year--years ago, decades ago--matters. The trick, clearly, was and remains in the difficult learning from the right "past" and in drawing the right "lesson" from it. The objective here is not to justify policies: indeed quite the contrary. It is, rather, to precisely show how current policies have been outmoded by the economic, social, cultural and intellectual realities and that present-day approaches no longer correspond to the motives and intentions of the past. How can this be done when the past seems so hostile, intimidating and, as Chesterton would have said, unknowable?

The purpose of this article is to explore the various devices put to use by policy and public administration scholars and practitioners and to encourage the field to use the past more effectively so that the claim that "This time, it's different" will be understood with a measure of precision, but also with modesty. Every policy (including the policy to do nothing) has a past, sometimes a sordid one. It can be one of inactivity, or of neglect; sometimes it is actually triumphant. That lesson is often overlooked.

Public administrators are not alone in relying on habit, but it could be argued that they are not as adept as they should be in drawing lessons from the past (and so keep doing and saying the same things even after crisis hits) and in this, they are practically unique. The medical profession continues to improve because its leaders ceaselessly conduct autopsies and post-care assessments and push discovery based on endless experimentation. Doctors and surgeons rely as much on the "history" their patients yield as they do on the track records of various therapies--records that are tracked in "time." Lawyers must be steeped in the past in that they must follow more than just precedents, both as a comfort in advising their clients, but also for its lessons in preparing the innovative argument that will win the day. Engineers and architects are students of past practice as a matter of course: they do not want to repeat the (sometimes tragic) errors of their predecessors. Even business education has long been bitten by the "history" bug: its intensive use of case studies is nothing if not stories about real experience.

Individuals comfortable with the past were once were quite popular hires in government, particularly in the Department of External Affairs (as it was known at the time) in the 1920s and 1930s. J.L. Granatstein (1982) described that remarkable generation of mandarins with History backgrounds shaped by O.D. Skelton, who taught economics at Queen's University but who had distinguished himself by his work on leading figures of Canada's past (A.T. Galt and Wilfrid Laurier in particular). If Skelton was at ease in discussing the past, he sought recruits like Hume Wrong, Lester Pearson, Norman Robertson (to name but three) who had the same cast of mind. Canada was hardly alone in this practice. In the United Kingdom at the time, individuals such as Harold Nicolson, E.H. Carr, Isaiah Berlin and Charles Kingsley Webster (all of whom also turned out to be superb writers) were employed. Webster was actually first hired by the British government to get a briefing on the Congress of Vienna as it prepared for the peace talks at Versailles in 1919, and went on to play a leading role in positioning the United Kingdom as a leader of the United Nations. Tellingly, he never thought his historical analyses made much impact on the deciders (Reynolds and Hughes 1976).

Students of public policy and administration are not well prepared in discussing past policy, and public servants are generally not interested in learning about the past beyond what they have experienced. There are exceptions, of course. A few government departments have made the task of understanding the past a key part of their decision-making. The Department of National Defence, for instance, has long had an office of military history. The mandate of this small team is not merely to document battles and dates, but to understand precisely what the ingredients of success and failure were in any instance, and to articulate those lessons to decisionmakers. The same could be said for the small offices lodged in the Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada and Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada that look into the past systematically. Regardless, none of these efforts have matched the British attempt during the 1950s and 1960s to engage history in order to shed light on policy persisted. Peter J. Beck's Using History, Making British Policy: The Treasury and the Foreign Office, 1950-76 detailed how two particular departments managed--struggled, really--to square the historical pegs into circular realities.

Nor would it be fair to say that the historicity of experience is entirely neglected. Some departments, those more concerned with citizen service, will seek to generalize the behaviour of their clientele by visualizing their "journeys" in seeking help, as they speak to one office, then another, only to be referred to a third. These "mini-histories"--personal experiences of service over time--have been used to sharpen approaches and make the system more efficient for both employees and those in need of service. Similarly, some departments (transportation comes to mind) do make efforts to track data over long periods of time, and seek to draw conclusions from what they gather. Regulatory agencies may also be inclined to think in terms of precedents, but these efforts have been small given the size of government, and hardly understood, let alone documented. Sadly few other departments have invested in a "history" department of some sort, much to the chagrin of many public servants who suddenly wish they knew more about "what happened last time" and "how did we get here?" The assumption, presumably, is that an understanding of past practices is not relevant to the ever-changing circumstances of "today" and the hyper complexity of "tomorrow." If the past is deemed to be of some importance, then the assumption is that it can be quickly captured by policy officers. In his highly influential "Lessons of the Past": The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (1973), Ernest May famously made three arguments. First, that policy makers are too often obsessed with finding a perfect parallel in the past. Second, he argued, they "use history very badly." His third argument was more encouraging in that he pointed out that some policy makers were quite adept at using history to examine a trend and "dissect the forces that produced it and ask whether or not those forces will persist" in the situation they presently face (p. xii). British historian Jeremy Black smartly portrayed it as a contrast between a "history as questions" and "history of answers" (p. 4).

Scholars have made a case for a better understanding of history and for the very relevance of history to the policy process. In 1972, Guy Thuillier and Jean Tulard wrote on the "Problemes de l'histoire de l'administration," and E.N. Gladden made an eloquent case for "Public Administration and History" in an issue of the International Review of Administrative Studies. Iain Gow and Ted Hodgetts (2003), two Canadian giants in the field, wrote that there was great deal to be learned from the past, particularly if its pendulum swings were more closely studied. More recently, Paul Pierson defended "The study of policy development" in the Journal of Policy History (2005) by pointing to the need for a better understanding of the past.

Indeed, The Journal of Policy History, which has been published for over thirty years, has made an eloquent case for its study. Its contents reflect a wide range of interests that have attracted public policy scholars from a decidedly interdisciplinary mix: policy analysis, history, political science, and economics. Their concerns are in documenting the inspirations, the sequences and consequences of government policy. A recent issue was entirely devoted to the issue of tax resistance, featuring articles that examined Turkey, Switzerland, Canada, various parts of the United States, Argentina, France and Africa. The earliest study concerned the mid-nineteenth century; the latest the 1970s. This number should be required reading for any public servant. Its lessons are rich: a variety of tax approaches have, over time, elicited strong reaction from the people in different ways, different lands and in different times. In a similar cast of mind, the International Institute of Administrative Studies (IIAS) has, for decades now, fostered a "history of administration" working group and has consistently published fascinating monographs. Its publications are fundamentally different from the contents of The Journal of Policy History as they have focused on the structures of public administration a great deal more. Likewise, the British "History & Policy" website (www.historyandpolicy.org) was created a few years ago to link historians and policy makers. It is animated by the same hope that brought about The Journal of Policy History in that it aims to demonstrate the relevance of the past to contemporary policy makers and to increase the influence of historical research over current policy. Not least, a number of eminent scholars have, over the years, made eloquent cases for the integration of "policy history." The History and Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington convenes a wide range of scholars and observers in the consideration of global affairs and publishes occasional papers.

Historians are not alone in trying to explain the past of policy; indeed many have argued that historians have practically lost their stake in this game. Over forty years ago, as historical writing entered a new age of hyperspecialization and professionalization, Pardon E. Tillinghast, an American historian, declared that the past was threatening to become specious. He argued that history had to be studied "for the sake of the present and the future" and noted in this respect that historians were proving not up to the task, and thus needing help from other professionals (1972: iv). In The Relevance of History, also written forty years ago, Gordon Connell-Smith and Howell A. Lloyd, two British historians, denounced this "divorce from the present and from the problems of contemporary society" (p. 2). For all their vehemence, Connell-Smith and Lloyd never outlined what problems in contemporary society history could shed light on, even while urging that all historians devote at least a part of their time on "contemporary history," by which they essentially meant a past where some of the actors are still alive and available to researchers.

Their denunciation of the craft fell on deaf ears. Historians today are ever more specialized and, as knowledge deepens, seem to want to dig even more to see what else can be uncovered. It is true that the vast majority of professional historians are weary of drawing lessons from the past, and most are satisfied to explore it "for its own sake." This is evident in the Journal of Policy History, which is the preserve of mostly historians who are content to examine the past without drawing too many lessons from it for the present.

Still, some historians and political scientists are using the past to better grasp what is at stake in policy. There is scarcely an area of policy in Canada where historians have not tread--medicare, foreign policy, social policy, bureaucratic biography, drug and alcohol policy, gun control policy, defence policy, aboriginal policy--but where the politics were not fully dissected and where the "lessons" for today were all but silenced. Yet my survey of the 138 articles published in Canadian Public Administration over the past five years (2008 to 2013) shows that perhaps five examined a phenomenon with a longitudinal perspective of more than a decade, and no more than two others had a outlook longer than 20 years (not counting the typical first paragraph that politely nods at historical experience). Not one examined a historic episode in public administration or policy in and of itself.

There is no shortage of books that use history to justify policy and state structures, but few of them have had a measurable impact. There are exceptions of insightful scholars who have successfully grappled with policy evolution at a more general level. Robert Gilpin's War and Change in World Politics (1981), Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) and David S. Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) became instantly famous when they were published and are still influential. Today, that niche is partly filled by Niall Ferguson, the much-followed British historian, who has long been concerned with the interactions of government institutions with society and the economy. His signature obsession with "rises" and "falls" led to two books on the subject of the downfall of the British Empire and the rise of the American one. More recently, he published The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die (2013) and, to more acclaim, Civilization: the West and the Rest (2011). In both books, he presented a broad sweep of history to present a provocative argument. What made Civilization more eloquent than its predecessors was the scope of Ferguson's ambition in making a case that the policies that had allowed the "West" to triumph over the past 500 years were being forgotten. In this book, he argued that policies that favoured economic competition, the flourishing of science, the protection of property rights, the advancement of medicine, the rise of consumerism and the encouragement of a strong work ethic had combined into a recipe for prosperity that had allowed the West to dominate the world.

The near-collapse of the financial sector in 2008 has provoked many a look in the rear-view mirror. In his foreword to Henry Kaufman's The Road to Financial Reformation: Warning, Consequences, Reforms on the crisis, Ferguson lent his support to the policy lessons of the legendary New York financier with a Ph.D. in banking. Both insisted that the only way to improve government policy was to learn from financial history. Kaufman argued that it was not so much an understanding of failed policies that mattered, but a comprehension of how the industry had evolved and behaved that was important. This is an important point to remember. "History should teach us that projecting the future by merely extending the past is a risky exercise," he noted, in cautioning against using too many historical analogies even among the fifteen crises he discussed that had beset the system since 1966. Instead, while making the argument that the United Reserve Federal Reserve Board should be more vigilant in restraining financial excesses, he warned throughout this book that government simply was not equipped to deal with the realities of the modern world because it did not understand it. He promoted the creation of a National Board of Overseers of Financial Institutions and Markets. This failure of policy also caused him to call for an international authority to oversee major financial institutions and markets (p. 49). His answers to the financial crisis were a combination of institution-building and policy craft. By his reading of "history" for instance, the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act should be reinforced to deal with the realities of the modern world of banking and finance. He challenged the policy of allowing banks to be involved in commerce and banking and called for a strengthening of every financial regulator. For Kaufman, the "lessons of the past" demanded that the state has to impose itself in order to change the trajectory of policy.

Scholars of all sorts have tried to make sense of the policy past and pointed to "cycles," "tendencies," "rhythms," "waves," and "patterns" of all sorts. Four approaches have been more popular among students of policy and public administration: Paths, Precedents, Parallels and Pendulums.

Paths

Over the past forty years, the economic concept of "path dependency" (or trajectory) has also imposed itself on the conceptualization of the past as usable to the present. Challenging the idea that organizations decide of their fate and of their policies based on "rational choice," "historical institutionalists"--a school among mostly American political scientists essentially made the point that the past mattered as much as the nature of the choice that had to be made. Echoing (though never acknowledging) the insights about the longue duree of the historians of the French Annales school, and the structural approach Michel Foucault had used in understanding ideas and power, their theory was that institutions and, to a certain degree, policies, have followed a consistent trajectory in their development. It followed, therefore, that to understand a policy, one had to understand the circumstances and the institutional forces that had brought it about originally and over time. This was not to say that change has not happened (arguably, the most distinguished political scientists and public administration scholars have long paid close attention to the past), but rather that it happened in a way that built on previous habits and inclinations that were consistently reinforced by a positive feedback (or as Theda Skocpol vividly put it in her study of some of the first social policies in the United States, on a wide range of "feedback loops") (Skocpol 1992 and 1995). In other words, the more an organization was rewarded for its work (either by continued legitimacy or simply by not being opposed on its affairs), the more it was likely to keep doing its work in the way it had done before. In measuring the historical evolution of policy, this concept has proven especially useful in shaping historical institutionalism. Many of the articles in this issue of Canadian Public Administration use a path-dependency model. Historical institutionalists insist that the origins of institutions, in particular the circumstances and wishes of the first promoters, have a lasting impact.

Paul Pierson, a key exponent of historical institutionalism, lamented that one of the uses of the past, examining how policies have evolved over time, had "fallen into disfavor in much of the social sciences" (Pierson 2005: 34) and argued that path dependency could explain the evolution of a great deal about policy development. He pushed the theory a little further by maintaining that there was more than simply an issue of positive feedback at work in allowing past actions to justify present policies. Using another economic concept, he argued that there had to be an "increasing return" for a particular way of doing things for a variety of organizations and stakeholders (Pierson 2000 and 2004). In other words, an organization was likely to continue along a consistent path of development, only slowly accommodating changes in its stakeholder groups, its budgets and its technologies, as long as it continued to demonstrate its usefulness. As long as the organization was rewarding many for its work, the habits and mentalities reflected in its routine of policy making would persist. The organization, indeed, would likely be strengthened over time by doing things in a particular manner. Only "critical junctures" such as natural disasters, economic calamities and war could really knock it off its course, and even then political institutions have found ways to stick to traditional ways (Pierson 2003; Thelen 1999 and 2003).

Another approach to linking the past and the present was to emphasize "policy legacy" and "accumulated inheritance"--the reality that policy choices are emphatically made out of what the past has yielded (Rose 1990; Rose and Davies 1994). In a similar context, "Policy change and the politics of flat pensions in the UK and Canada" in this issue is a good example of a search for "paths." Daniel Beland and Alex Waddan argue that policy on flat pension in Canada has been considerably steady, particularly if compared to that in the United Kingdom. The comparative approach is especially useful in understanding the nature of the Canadian policy. The "path" to pensions in Canada was one that arced towards universality, that avoided income testing of clients but that instead used taxation to ensure a certain fairness. Certainly, as Beland and Waddan demonstrated, errors were made in Canada along the way, mostly because decision-makers had not learned the lessons of the past and ran afoul of well-organized opposition groups. Beland and Waddan contend that their long-term approach serves to better appreciate the true nature of the Canadian approach.

The study of policy history or of public administration history must go beyond the careful chronicling of events, however, and seek to better grasp the motivations of the various actors that stood at the origins of the policy enactment and track how those motivations changed over the time. The capture of changing ambitions, politics, goals and objectives thus becomes full of lessons for both the practitioner and the student. Equally important is the understanding of the outcomes that were created by policy. Were they, in fact, direct results of intentioned programs or policies or an accident?

In "The universal in the social: Universalism, universality, and universalization in Canadian politics and public policy," Michael Prince makes the case that universality is something of a path on which governments have embarked, one that arcs towards a uniformity of services to the majority, if not the totality, of the country's inhabitants. Universality in Canada is, aside from elementary and secondary education, and to a degree, medicare, hardly total. This is not an unbroken path, but one that features a built-in "change process" that can sometimes stall progress or indeed restrict the definition of universality.

Precedents

Precedents, of course, do matter. Herbert Simon (1957) argued that the bounded reality in which policy makers lived included the precedents they could remember. In a similar way, Charles Lindblom (1959) considered that a knowledge of precedents (however imperfect) could actually remedy the incrementalist approach to decision-making and the "muddling through" of public policy that seemed to militate against meaningful changes to practices. Many people are more comfortable in finding analogies or precedents to help them understand their situations than in actually studying its "past." In 2003, as the United States and a coalition of partners declared war on Iraq, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade invited Margaret MacMillan, one of the country's best-known historians, to give a lecture on the lessons of history that could be drawn from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Remarkably, she drew very few lessons. "If there are lessons to be learned from the peace conference," she told her audience, "it is that you can only make peace when the circumstances permit it. In 1919, in my view, the circumstances were not favourable" (MacMillan 2003: 7). She cautioned against great schemes concocted in distant capitals (p. 8) and observed that "professionals [private sector and scholarly] experts and amateurs" could contribute good ideas (p. 17), that personality mattered (p. 19) and that haste in making important decisions can eventually lead to trouble (p. 19). The most important lesson, it seemed, was that there was no point in coming to agreements if enforcement capacities were insufficient (p. 20). "The difficulty with taking lessons from history," she conceded, "is always in finding the right one" (p. 20). 1919 did not bring succor to 2003.

The challenge is to distill from the past the most fitting precedents and their relevant lessons. This challenge confronts anyone interested in "thinking in time," to use the wonderful expression coined by Richard Neustadt and Ernest May who jointly taught a class for practising public servants since the early 1970s at the Kennedy School of Government on "the uses of history." For these Harvard professors, history was a tool decision makers could wield. In their book, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (1986), they argued that history could stimulate the imagination in that "seeing the past can help one envision alternative futures." Neustadt and May, however, prescribed caution. Through their analyses of thirty key decision points, they applied a variety of critical questions, in their words: "Why did we believe that? Why did we expect that? What made us believe he or she (or they) would do that? (p xvi). Their teaching led them to offer a few methods to approach policy and administration questions.

The first was to ask a set of specific questions such as "What's the story?" (instead of "what is the problem?") and focusing on essential "journalistic" questions regarding the "who" "what" "where" "why" and "how" an event or an issue could be understood. The second was to draft time-lines so that the order of events and precedents was clear. Finally, they recommended that the selection of objectives be seized. Perhaps most importantly, they insisted that students of policy and administrative history also focus on what they called the "Likeness/Difference" test (p. 272-75). Neustadt and May emphasized the need to find correct analogies in history to help resolve an issue. They looked at the problem of American's entry in the Vietnam war in 1964, or Truman's dilemma in early 1947 during the first stirrings of the Cold War or in making a decision to go to war on the Korea peninsula in 1950, but domestic issues also like the establishment of social security in the 1930s and its viability in the 1980s.

Parallels

One of the best examples of how to study parallels has been the work of American political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who through numerous books documented remarkably similar moments in the development of American politics. In Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (2008) he documented how presidents found themselves facing similar situation at different moments in time, and argued that their responses could be seen as synonymous. Writing more specifically to convince opinion-makers, Sir Antony Fisher, one of the prime international promoters of libertarian thinking, published Must History Repeat Itself? A Study of the Lessons Taught by the (Repeated) Failure and (Occasional) Success of Government Economic Policy Through the Ages that the global economy was on the wrong path. His arguments, read almost forty years later, are hardly trenchant, but his six-step approach to policy thinking remains remarkably fresh and practical. The first was to examine principles at stake in the problem at hand. The second step was to document the case. Third, to "look back at history"--even though he admitted that he was hardly qualified in not being a trained historian--in the hope to learn from parallels and patterns both in time and around the world. He also prescribed a "look around" to ensure that comparisons with other contemporary approaches were done. His fifth step was to examine what could be done, and his final was to write out the final policy (one that inevitably would free the individual from the yoke of the state). What mattered here was not so much the prescription, but the argument that good economic policy work had to take into account the lessons of the past. This book announced the new right and the Thatcherite manifestos, but his influence was felt in Canada, as Fisher played a key role in the establishment of the Fraser Institute.

A few years later, this time wrestling with the issue of industrial competitiveness, Carlos Sabillon (2006) produced an economic study with the direct objective of being useful to policy makers, and came to a different, but more deterministic, answer. His used a broad historical and geographical survey approach to identify a series of parallels--similar circumstances and policies that triggered important growth at different conjunctures. His argument was that throughout time (either in the West or in the East), the key igniter of prosperity has been a breakthrough in manufacturing--the ability to transform a raw material into a usable good, usually at a phenomenal profit. But he went further, linking it directly to state policy. "History suggests," he said, "that the manufacturing sector has rarely expanded without government support and has systematically stagnated in the absence of such support." Manufacturing has always been expensive, he argued, and needing of the state's help to cut costs. Government in this regard could act as buyers (for example, war materiel), protectors (tariffs), and promoters (trade) or, indeed, direct investors (typically through agencies). Sabillon's survey was breathtakingly ambitious, starting with a first chapter on biblical times to the 1400s. The final chapter was devoted to the economic expansion in the United States and Britain during the 1900s-1950s. He drew an important lesson from this history: "when markets are left to operate freely, they do not allocate resources to manufacturing. The very nature of capitalism conspires against manufacturing as well as against the average worker, because when markets are left to run their natural course, they allot practically all of the available resources to services, construction and primary activities. Wage income goes down and technological inventiveness is unable to enter the manufacturing stream to boost the overall economy. Growth grinds to a halt" (p. 291). Such bold policy advice based on parallels in history is not likely to be read in the briefing notes drafted by public servants.

A similar approach was born from the left. To cite but two examples, Jeffrey Haydu (1998), a sociologist, made an eloquent case for using the past to find parallels in helping to devise better social policy. Neil Postman, chair of the department of Culture and Communications at New York University, who already had written insightful books on American education and had distinguished himself as an acerbic critic of the media, argued that American educational policy could base itself on another parallel when an entire society shook itself out of its torpor. As the twentieth century came to an end, he argued in In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century that the practice of education had lost its sense of the proper outcomes. Remembering Marshall McLuhan's reference to "rearview mirror" thinking when contemplating the future, he looked to history, and particularly to the century of the enlightenment, to find the goals that could be adopted. His argument was that American education was in as much of a crisis as Europe had been in the early 1700s and it had to reconnect with those core values instead of simply preparing humans to do work. For him, such an educational policy would lead to much better outcomes: citizens capable of adopting new languages, enamoured with the idea of progress, and dedicated to better ideas of education, democracy and culture.

Slowly but surely--and the articles contained in this issue of Canadian Public Administration demonstrate this--policy and public administration scholars are pointing the way to making use of history by shining lights on aspects of the past that are relevant to an understanding of the challenges of today. In "Pooling our resources: Equalization and the origins of regional universality, 1937-1957," P.E. Bryden probes the rationale and motivations in facilitating a transfer of wealth to the more vulnerable provinces, an approach that was at the root of the quasi-welfare state, and reminds readers that the origins of this uniquely Canadian approach to governing long predated the Constitution Act of 1982. It draws attention to the fact that a number of consensus-building approaches, in combination with the prosperity of the post-war period, succeeded in creating the context where this wealth-sharing mechanism might be feasible. It also draws attention to the lynch-pin role Ontario played in this policy area. As such, it showcases an important parallel, one that would be replicated later in determining the contours of public policy.

Pendulums

In 2003, Gow and Hodgetts argued in this journal that there were indeed many useful lessons to be drawn from administrative history. Pointing to the pendulum swings of centralization/decentralization, partnerships with private business, but also to technological advance and changes in social attitudes and expectations of governments, they argued that government changed in response to its environment. Pendulum swings--movements between extremes, as opposed to parallels or precedents--seemed to explain many of the policy thrusts of the state. Peter Aucoin and Herman Bakvis (1988) had pointed to this fifteen years earlier in The Centralization-Decentralization Conundrum: Organization and Management in the Canadian Government, while others have preferred to see history in terms of repeating cycles (I consider them much the same). The challenge of observers was thus to ensure that history's lesson be well learnt and that, going forward, predictions about government structures and policies would have to rely on economic and social realities. Hodgetts and Gow predicted that the pendulum of centralization and decentralization would thus continue to swing, that bureaucracy would survive, that privatizations and partnerships will be subjected to intense scrutiny and finally that bureaucracy would have to find a way to protect itself from the incursions of the political world in order to further the public interest and maintain the state's legitimacy (Gow and Hodgetts 2003: 196-97).

In "The three dimensions of universal medicare in Canada," Gregory Machildon points to a certain pendulum effect in public policy and describes the many occasions when the pendulum swung against the idea of universalization. The author deliberately moves deeper into the past to reveal the motivations of various actors. The first focus is on the definition of universality, but the article emphasizes the various provincial approaches over the years and the frank reticence of most promises to enter into an arrangement with the federal government on healthcare. The lesson drawn here is that Canada's medicare system has always been under sharp scrutiny and has often been susceptible to the erosion of economic pressures on the provinces and the federal government. That vulnerability cannot be forgotten, nor can it come as a surprise either to policy makers or to students of the system.

Public service observers often suspect that governments function and develop on some sort of pendulum model, and seldom stray from it. These swings do not negate the existence of reform and even change, but they do strongly convey the idea that government leaders and employees tend to be far more comfortable doing things "as before" than in adopting new ways. Governments are seldom "early adopters" of anything (except for the later stages of warfare, I would argue, when the enemy resists everything that is left in the arsenal).

For instance, in The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market's Perfect Storm, Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr (2007), two business professors from the University of Virginia, provided an example of how the case study of a particular swing of the pendulum in the past can be made to yield contemporary lessons. Indeed, they can be generalized. The first is to understand events and motivations as part of "systems." The second lesson is to learn to raise awareness of risk in a period of buoyant growth. The third is to ensure that "safety buffers" are healthy. In other words, government had to be more aggressive in dealing with the economic cycles by lending during economic contractions and in effecting a tighter lending standard during boom times (p. 161). The fourth lesson really concerned the nature of political leadership during a crisis. Its job should be to encourage healing, in both thought and action, leaving the scapegoating for later. The fifth lesson was that financial crises have many roots. In the case of the 1907 "panic," the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and the Bank of England's restriction on finance bills were as guilty in triggering fear as the machinations of Wall Street. The sixth lesson, as trite as it was evident, was that emotion plays a large part in "panics." It doubly underscored the importance of a government's ability to have action plans ready so as to steady capital markets and reassure investors. Finally, the failure of collective action was the key lesson. The only response was to ensure that government is continually in a dialogue with investors and with capital markets--largely through regulatory mechanisms--to ensure that the inevitable economic bumps are minimized and adequately managed. It could be a way to control the swings of the policy pendulum.

Conclusion

The habit of looking to the past is not a cure for bad policy. Too much focus on finding precedents, parallels, pendulums and paths will lead to "analysis paralysis" and impair the policy process. But it is still very important and as such policy makers do need to enter into a discussion with what their predecessors faced and invest time and effort (and money) in better understanding their past. To be effective, however, they must go beyond inquiring about precedents, or trying to find the right parallel, or measuring the swing of the pendulum. Students of public policy must necessarily ask hard questions of the past in order to draw out its "history." Students of public policy must necessarily ask hard questions of the past in order to draw out its "history": what was the mindset and what were the original intentions of the creators of the law or policy? What were the politics involved? What was the economic and cultural context? Did the policy/ program change with the times (Levesque 2008)? But it is not enough to simply ask why. As the historian Ged Martin pointed out, it is far more useful to ask "why when?", or "why what?" and "why who?" "Framing our questions in this way," he wrote, "will enable us to focus more clearly on those most fundamental building blocks of the historical edifice, the decisions taken by people themselves, either as individuals or as part of social and national collectivities"(Martin 2005: 3-4). Martin cautioned wisely that to ask historical questions is to ask why things did not get done, or why some options were pursued and not others. He makes a strong argument that the assumptions of past actors must be understood. How did they understand their pasts and their presents? What were the expectations of the future? In practice, the policy analyst contemplating a new situation asks: how is today's situation different from the past? How is it not? What are the factors that both situations have in common, or not?

Much has been written about the institutional amnesia of government in general and this is particularly true in Canada. The corporate memory is important in order to better understand the mindset of predecessors and how they approached particular problems. Such understanding will not lead to a better use of bureaucratic techniques, but it will be highly useful in understanding risk, and in this the past can be most instructive. Policy can be complicated, but its consequences (both foreseen and unexpected) often go far beyond expectations. An understanding of the past teaches modesty in the face of risk and of what can go right and wrong. If anything, history shows that the consequences of policy can be long-lasting and affect all sorts of political, economic, environmental, social, intellectual, artistic, and technological impact.

How does this help decision-makers? An understanding of paths, precedents, parallels and pendulums will help decision makers in gauging how their situations have changed from the time the policies and practices were first installed. But going beyond, and asking historical questions to better understand policies in time, will surely bring insight on how far the actual policy has strayed from first intentions. Perhaps it will signal more clearly what incremental changes might be needed or indeed that incremental change is not what is needed, but that fundamental change is required. The program review exercise at the federal government of the mid-1990s, for instance, was an opportunity for such a history-rich approach, but that option was not taken up. The same could be said for any policy reconsideration.

Public administration and policy historians can help. Tracking precedents and seizing the place of "today" in the swing of the pendulum will be useful, but it will not replace the difficult and time consuming task of "writing history" using archival materials, data and interviews in a manner that will capture the personality of the key actors, the Zeitgeist of the times, and the motivations of those who have promoted and who opposed the policy. In writing (and teaching) policy/public administration, scholars must borrow from the toolbox of historians and probe more deeply into the longer-perspective to bring to light the best precedents, parallels, and pendulum-swings and to measure if the paths are still the right ones. Discerning the right lessons from past practices is arduous, but conquering this challenge will pay dividends. In addition to providing ammunition for those who wish to fight the paralysis brought about by a now irrelevant inheritance, a historically minded policy approach may actually clear the way for better policy and administration, better scenario-building in an ever-more complex environment and, perhaps, a better wisdom for the future. Knowing history is the best tool to free policy-making from its grip.

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Patrice Dutil is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto (http://patricedutil.com).