In many respects, Lori Brainard's case study of the “incremental, incomplete, and highly ambiguous” deregulation of television from the midseventies through the midnineties suffers from false advertising. Rather than a mere case study in a field highly populated by such analyses, it is an ambitious attempt to critically assess competing midlevel theories of regulatory change and macrolevel determinants of policy change. As Alexander George has observed, case studies are extremely valuable, not because they test theories but because they clarify, offer critical insight into, and generate hypotheses for future research on those theories. Viewed from this perspective, Brainard's book provides a strong basis for deeper examinations of change in the regulatory and the broader policy process.

Rather than dwell on the story of efforts at television deregulation, which Brainard tells with considerable skill, I focus on her more far-reaching exploration of regulatory and policy change. She divides the theoretical world of regulatory change in three: market forces explanations, industry determinism explanations, and contingency frameworks. The first is, in effect, the progressive public-interest theory that animated much of the regulatory policy enacted in the first half of the twentieth century and that informed economic critiques of regulatory “failure” in the sixties and seventies. An economist might well label this a “market failures” approach denoting that monopoly, externalities, public goods, and information asymmetries constitute strong arguments for government intervention to serve the public good of efficiently deploying society's resources. The second recasts what most students of regulation would recognize as “capture theory” or “elite theory,” essentially laying out the case for powerful private interests determining policy outcomes within subgovernmental arenas that purportedly dominate the policy landscape. The final theoretical category, contingency theory, derives from management models associated with the “resource dependency” school.

In a trenchant analysis woven throughout the book, Brainard convincingly makes the case that the first two approaches are seriously lacking in explanatory power. One might criticize this analysis either as incomplete, in that it does not include pluralist or Marxist explanations of policy change, or as setting up a straw-man argument. Nevertheless, the main idea of this book is quite persuasive, namely, that shifts in regulation and, indeed, in wider policy stem from a complex interaction of ideas and institutions. Students of American political development will recognize this approach as new institutionalism. In the contingency framework, institutions function as both exogenous and endogenous variables, at once shaping regulatory change and reflecting changes in ideas and policies. In the case of television deregulation, the Federal Communications Commission and congressional committees at once filtered efforts at policy change and took on the narratives or metaphors of leading figures and organized interests.

As Brainard puts it, “[n]either technology [market forces] nor the influence of the television industry [institutional determinism] was determinative or decisive precisely because they were filtered through the larger issue and institutional context” (p. 164). In contrast to the deregulatory benchmarks of airline, trucking, and banking, television (ultimately “telecommunication”) deregulation very explicitly incorporated wider social policy concerns, including impact on children. Consequently, the institutional and ideological scope of conflict was much wider and more multifarious than in the other cases of deregulating infrastructure industries. This fact assured a much more difficult set of problems for advocates of deregulation and a much less decisive set of outcomes. On the other hand, by the time of the Clinton administration, the framework of contingent factors or, more precisely, the political-institutional context signaled the triumph of a more market-oriented approach among conservative, pro-market Republicans, and so-called New Democrats alike, thus assuring a congressional and administrative environment more congenial to policy change. The upshot was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, “incremental, incomplete and highly ambiguous” (p. 147) to be sure, but a landmark in regulatory policy nonetheless.

The suggestive insights of Television: The Limits of Deregulation argue strongly for extending the analysis outward to other areas of regulation, indeed, to other areas of public policy, in order to more systematically test the theoretical conclusions adduced.