Participation and Conflict in Making American

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with the anatomy of population policy making in the United States. It identifies the types of individuals, institutions, and resources involved in the process. It speculates on how the quality of participation in the policy discourse influences its contents and boundaries. The paper concludes that the compact and limited quality of participation in the policy process yields a discourse that tends to exclude controversial policy alternatives.

A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS

Given the existing state of technology and the prevailing patterns for distributing material resources, the population of the world and the United States cannot continue to increase indefinitely. There is a range of positions on how rapidly our numbers are swelling, the exact nature of the consequences to societies and humanity, what size population our globe can support, and the concept of an optimum population and its relevant variables. However, during the past decade, these concerns about the causes and consequences of population growth have created an identifiable and distinctive issue of public policy at national, subnational, and international levels.1

In the United States, the emergence of population growth as an identifiable public policy area was symbolized by two political acts that occurred in 1970. On March 16, 1970, President Nixon signed legislation creating a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future to "provide information and education to all levels of government in the United States, and to our people, regarding a broad range of problems associated with population growth and their implications for America's future."2

At the same time, the 91st Congress was considering the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 whose central purpose was to "promote public health and welfare by expanding, improving, and better coordinating the family planning service and population research activities of the Federal Government."3

The executive and legislative branches thus legitimated a national concern for the causes and consequences of population growth and set out deliberately to seek and justify a series of decisions and actions that would be in the national interest.

The respective objectives of the Family Planning Act and the Commission comprise two distinctive, but related, approaches to the issue of population growth in the United States. The Act emerges from a concern for population growth on the individual level, and the Commission's mandate from a concern for growth on the societal level. The Act would provide individuals the

The Commission would provide an assessment of the likely effect of population growth on American society, and what American society might do about it. Thus, the Commission's mandate provides for an inquiry into

.. aspects of population growth in the United
States and its foreseeable social consequences:
(1) the probable course of population growth,
internal migration, and related demographic
developments between now and the year 2000;
(2) the resources in the public sector of the
economy that will be required to deal with the
anticipated growth in population;

(3) the ways in which population growth may
affect the activities of Federal, State, and local
government;

(4) the impact of population growth on
environmental pollution and on the depletion
of natural resources; and

Participation and Conflict in Making American