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CHAPTER 5 Affirmative Action under Carter, Reagan, and Bush In this chapter I analyze the final expansion of affirmative-action policies during the Carter administration and their subsequent retrenchment during the Reagan and Bush presidencies. During the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, affirmative-action policy experienced a secular positive trend in which a voluntary, weak policy was transformed into a strong and compulsory one, and this trajectory seemed likely to continue after 1976. Jimmy Carter's election provided the first instance of unified government in eight years, and the elections following Watergate provided large Democratic margins in Congress, helping Carter to defeat Nixon's appointed successor, Gerald Ford. The Carter administration was not as supportive of affirmative action as his Democratic predecessors had been, and public opposition to affirmative action had increased since then, but African-Americans were key to the winning coalitions ofmost Democrats, so policy proponents were justifiably optimistic. In the 1980s, however, this scenario abruptly shifted. Ronald Reagan was elected president on a platform that was pointedly hostile to affirmative action, and his coattails swept in enough Republicans to allow them to capture the Senate for the first time in decades. Within a few years, this Republican dominance made its impact felt on the Supreme Court as well. In contrast with the Nixon years, when Republican party loyalty helped to bring about a pro-affirmative-action coalition of liberal and moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats, Reagan and Bush drew on party loyalty and the votes of conservative Democrats to frustrate civil-rights and affirmative-action enforcement. To explain the policy outcomes that resulted from this political transformation , I continue to apply the theoretical framework used in the previous chapter. Rational-choice methods are embedded in a qualitative historical context, with empirical evidence being used to determine the preferences of actors, the structure ofincentives they face, and the institutional configurations in which they negotiate to develop policies. Substantively , the political landscape was transformed in the 1980s, but theoretically and formally many of the factors remained constant. Actors faced 121 122 The Politics of Preference essentially the same structure of incentives: they needed to initiate, continue , or expand policies that would please their existing constituencies, and perhaps also appeal to new groups. And the institutional configurations remained constant as well: the arena of action continued to be the U.S. federal government, with its separation-of-powers system. The major changes came in the preferences ofconstituents, and therefore in the preferences of the actors involved in the policy process. As I observed in the preceding chapter, until the early 1970s affirmative action was not a salient policy for the American pUblic. But beginning in 1972, this circumstance changed. The debate over the Philadelphia Plan and the EEO amendments had brought attention to affirmative action as a new type of civil-rights policy. At the same time, actors outside the government had begun to implement policies of their own, which increased the policy's visibility. Public and private schools had begun voluntarily to adopt affirmative-action programs in admissions, while government regulations on affirmative action in hiring subjected university faculty-hiring policies to greater scrutiny. These two changes were challenged within the academy, which brought greater publicity to the concept of affirmative action as part of the civil-rights agenda (Glazer 1987; Bennett and Eastland 1979). At the same time, civil-rights policies that had already been more visible were facing strong and increasingly organized opposition. Once courtordered busing began to move north, beginning with the Supreme Court's Keyes decision, there was considerably less support for it, with public opinion eventually reaching a negative level of 90 percent in polls (Page and Shapiro 1992). Finally, in the enduring recessionary economy that characterized the economy, American began to be less generous in their attitudes toward policies targeted toward disadvantaged groups. Table 5.1 summarizes these attitudes. TABLE 5.1. Attitudes about Preferences versus Ability for Black Access to Employment and Higher Education 1977 1980 1984 Preferences 11 10 10 Ability 81 83 84 Sourcc: Gallup Poll data cited in Steeh and Krysan 1996. Don't Know 8 7 6 Note: The Gallup Poll asked. "Some people say that to make up for past discrimination. women and memo bers of minority groups should be given preferential treatment in gettingjobs and places in college. Others say that ability. as determined by test scores. should be the main consideration. Which point comes clos· est to how you feel on this matter'?"' The possible...

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