In this book, eleven prominent political scientists aim to make sense of the permanent campaign, to understand how and why
it has evolved, to weigh its consequences for our ability to govern ourselves effectively, and to consider whether steps might be taken to ameliorate its more damaging effects. In publishing these essays, they seek to make a substantive contribution to understanding this critically important feature of contemporary American politics.
This work is part of AEI's Transition to Governing Project, which is run in conjunction with the Brookings Institution and Hoover Institution and generously funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The project directors-Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at AEI, and Thomas E. Mann, the W. Averell Harriman Senior Fellow in American Governance at the Brookings Institution-edited the volume and wrote its concluding chapter, from which this summary is largely drawn.
The other contributors are Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow at AEI; David Brady, the McCoy Professor of Political Science at Stanford University; Anthony Corrado, an associate professor of government at Colby College; Morris Fiorina, a professor of political science and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Hugh Heclo, the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University; Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; Charles O. Jones, the Hawkins Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin?Madison and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; Burdett A. Loomis, professor of political science at the University of Kansas; and Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, associate director of the University of Pennsylvania's Washington Semester Program.
We live in the era of the
permanent campaign, in which the line between
campaigning and governing has been nearly erased. As Hugh Heclo makes clear in the opening chapter, even if campaigning and governing are inextricably interlinked in American-style democracy, the process is distinctly different now from what it was some decades ago. Sidney Blumenthal popularized the term permanent campaign in 1982, but the change in governing style goes back further. Systematic and sophisticated polling in presidential campaigns nearly reached its full bloom in 1960, but the process of tracking public views, or of politicians garnering support from the public for their priorities, is not what we mean by the permanent campaign. Rather, we mean, as Heclo suggests, "a nonstop process seeking to manipulate sources of public approval to engage in the act of governing itself." In this era of the permanent campaign, the process of campaigning and the process of governing have each lost their distinctiveness. Just as significant, the process of campaigning has become in many ways the dominant partner of the two.