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Inconsistency and Indecision in the United States Supreme Court. By Matthew P. Hitt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. 234p. $75.00 cloth.

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preferences. Instead Davis embraces the democratic principles of contestation and conflict as a means to allow diverse members of society to navigate their differences and find collective values. For public… Click to show full abstract

preferences. Instead Davis embraces the democratic principles of contestation and conflict as a means to allow diverse members of society to navigate their differences and find collective values. For public lands, these collective values include cultural heritage, egalitarianism, and freedom. Davis provides empirical evidence, such as the large numbers of volunteers on public lands and the high percentages of survey respondents who express support for keeping public lands public, to show that individuals have preferences beyond individual interests. The notion of the social construction of preferences through politics has been an important theme in political science, including scholarship in natural resource management (Edella Schlager and William Blomquist, Embracing Watershed Politics, 2008; Ronald D. Brunner, Christine H. Colburn, Christina M. Cromley, Roberta A. Klein, and Elizabeth A. Olson, Finding Common Ground: Governance and Natural Resources in the American West, 2002). In the political-bureaucratic realm, Davis lays out the case that privatizers make an overly simplistic assumption about the motivation driving bureaucratic behavior: budget maximization. Although this assumption is not new to politics (see, for example, William Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government, 1971), Davis argues that it overlooks more powerful motivations. Here the author provides a nice overview of public administration scholarship about the forces shaping bureaucratic behavior, which can be viewed on a continuum from professional/insulated/expert at one end to flexible/open/ accountable at the other. He describes how the Forest Service has shifted from the former to the latter over time, while state and local forest agency personnel have not. To examine bureaucratic motivation, Davis summarizes scholarship showing that public servants are often motivated by professionalism, dedication, and autonomy and are less likely to be motivated by self-interest than are private sector employees. In this chapter Davis also addresses the criticism that federal public lands decisions are made by bureaucrats following centralized commands from afar, who are out of touch with the local stakeholders. He describes arguments that scholars have made that local control would be undemocratic for nationally owned resources, and he points out that federal lands have decentralized management that often works with locals through collaborative arrangements. The book ends with a description of the first major public land issues of the Trump presidency: reducing the size of several national monuments and increasing oil and gas production. Davis then lists numerous strategies for turning widespread public support for public lands into strategies to defend them, focusing on issue framing and coalition building. He describes longer-term threats (population growth, cultural shifts away from the outdoors, climate change) and opportunities (growing support for environmental protection) for a robust public land base. Throughout, I found this to be an engaging book. It is also eminently accessible. Davis is not a neutral bystander in this debate. He lays his cards on the table with the title and preface, where he states that the book “unapologetically makes the case for public lands on biological, economic, and political grounds” (p. xiii). The author’s own photographs of public lands show his love of these places. The tone makes for lively reading, yet at the same time it may be off-putting to those who think privatization of public land has merits. For example, Davis describes the privatization advocates’ “audacious claims” (p. 53), “more mercenary motives” (p. 53), and “obtuse refusal to identify any objective standards” (p. 58). This tone may be at odds with his desire to “build as broad a coalition as possible,” because “the movement to protect public lands needs a grand coalition that can cut across class, cultural, and political boundaries” (p. 196). Overall, this book makes important connections to a variety of political science literatures. Readers will gain a fuller understanding of the arguments for and against keeping federal public lands in the public domain and, in particular, their ecological, economic, and political dimensions.

Keywords: public land; davis; indecision united; inconsistency indecision; book; public lands

Journal Title: Perspectives on Politics
Year Published: 2020

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