From the start, Mark Lawrence Schrad minces no words in telling us three things about Prohibition: that it was a really bad policy idea (“a historic policy gaffe” [p. 3]); that the story line of a uniquely American social movement rooted in a divide between rural Protestant and urban Catholic cannot be the real story, since 10 other diverse nations adopted alcohol prohibition at around the same time; and that the notion in which best practices are copied from an innovating nation is wrong, since the idea was both really bad and completely foreseen by policy experts. So Schrad's key research question becomes: How did so many nations adopt such an abysmally (and obviously) bad policy?

Then the author really gets started; he produces a powerful, compelling book that delivers on the evidence demonstrating these propositions, and constructs a far more plausible analysis based on the modern tools of public policy process theories and historical political development. His analysis is at base quite simple: The actions of the now well-understood policymaking mechanisms of positive (self-reinforcing) feedback and negative (dampening) feedback operating simultaneously in many nations produced an international “prohibition wave” that crested and then fell as the abject policy failures generated by the legislation became increasingly evident.

Schrad examines the rise and fall of this wave by studying its causes through a set of careful and analytical case studies of Prohibition in the United States and Russia, both of which adopted and then abandoned the prohibition of alcohol, and in Sweden, which adopted a system of liquor control that involved regulation of both supply and demand, but not outright prohibition. The policymaking process was realized differently in each of the three societies—with the United States characterized by an open and society-centered system, Russia by an autocratic, centralized system, and Sweden by a nascent corporatism. Schrad's cases involved intensive studies of both the secondary and primary sources in all three countries, a remarkable achievement in its own right. His careful historical studies allow him to assess the specifics of causality, but it is his combination of strong theoretical analysis and historical adeptness that is the core strength of the book. The author also examines the transnational temperance network, the collection of interconnected social, religious, and governmental organizations that developed into a professional cadre of prohibition advocates; this network was the proximate cause of the spread of prohibition ideas throughout the world.

Many political scientists may be repelled by Schrad's claim that Prohibition was bad policy—perhaps it is not for us neutral social scientists to say. I cannot take that position, since I co-wrote a book with a very similar title at about the same time (Bryan D. Jones and Walter Williams, The Politics of Bad Ideas, 2008), and we have reached roughly similar conclusions on radically different policies. It is evident to students of policy processes that some policies are simply flawed; as Schrad defines it, “a policy is bad when it is known to be a less-than-optimal means of achieving its objectives, and when its implementation creates new (or exacerbates existing) policy problems requiring additional policy action” (p. 12). Surely the repeated tendency to adopt bad policies is a serious empirical issue worthy of serious empirical study, which he provides.

Schrad makes the case that Prohibition was bad policy independently of the fact that it was repealed in every country that adopted it, all within 15 years, since it is entirely possible that better tools were not known at the time of adoption. In the case of Prohibition, his careful analysis of the historical records indicate that better means of control were well known and many nations replaced them with the suboptimal outright policy of the prohibition of alcohol.

Schrad's explanation of why so many nations were seized with the headstrong desire to prohibit alcohol consumption involves interplays among the processes of positive feedback and contagion, the mechanism of spreading the policy (the worldwide Prohibition network), and a triggering event, the advent of World War I. Prohibition policy entrepreneurs tied the prohibition of alcohol to patriotism in all nations, while, in Russia in particular, the evils of drink were blamed for the poor performance of its navy in the 1905 war with Japan.

Differences in historical institutions play an important role in the analysis, as they filter the demands for quick policy action, in some cases promoting the positive feedback effect and in others retarding it. It is interesting to note that the most open (the United States) and the most closed (Russia) systems promoted positive feedback, the former through the contagion of free organization and discussion and multiple policy venues and the latter through centralized command and control. Sweden, with its system of nascent corporatism and reliance on specialized committees of policy experts and advocates, resisted. Sweden had adopted what was a clearly superior system—the Gothenburg system—based on local control of alcohol delivery, and kept the system rather than adopt prohibition.

Part of the story of Prohibition is the failure of the better policy idea (the Gothenburg system and variants of it) to spread, as the “laboratories of democracy” model so common in studies of state politics would predict. States and localities were experimenting at the time with a variety of approaches and the Gothenburg system was well known to policy specialists. Yet all the variation was pushed aside as the United States passed the Eighteenth Amendment and the implementing Volstead Act. The late-adopting United States failed to integrate either experiences in its own states, or from abroad (where some nations were already dropping the idea), choosing rather to adopt a demonstrably bad idea.

Students of the policy process should read The Political Power of Bad Ideas in conjunction with Graeme Boushey's Policy Diffusion Dynamics in America (2010), which details just how frequent are what he calls “policy outbreaks” of mimicking that move too fast to allow much policy learning. These books together document the failure of the standard incrementalist learning model in many cases of policy diffusion. The model is not wrong, as both Schrad and Boushey tell us, but it is limited in a way that we must face. Indeed, Schrad suggests that some institutional arrangements are more conducive to policy learning than others, and these arrangements involve more bureaucrats and experts to halt runaway policy changes.

We are used to thinking of the US system as one of gridlock and “institutional friction,” which is hard to overcome, but Schrad asks us to contemplate a system that is too attuned to sweeps of faddism oftentimes not based on sound independent analysis: “With a domestic structure that provides policymakers comparatively little insulation from the changing tides of public sentiment, the dynamics of public attention and public sentiments have a greater influence on policy in the American case” (p. 191). For Schrad, this is an important theoretical insight, as he claims that “[a]ll policymaking systems have numerous mechanisms of negative feedback that promote stability and incremental change. Yet … these systems differ in how easily these negative feedback processes can be overcome by a switch to self-reinforcing positive feedback to cause a sudden policy change” (p. 190). The power of this notion, which may or may not prove to be fruitful (I for one believe that it will be), indicates the depth of Schrad's thinking. This fresh notion indicates in part his truly impressive willingness to rethink much of what had become standard lore. But it also indicates just how fruitful a theoretically based yet open-minded case study can be.