Dilworth_Historical Thinking as a Skill in Public Affairs Graduate Education

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Journal of Public Affairs Education 19

It is in some sense simply a truism that history

is an important component of an education,including one in public affairs. As Dwight Waldo (1956, pp. 50–51) put it, “That welearn from the past strikes me as axiomatic; thehuman enterprise does not begin afresh at everysunrise with learning how to unbutton ourpajamas [emphasis in original].” And yet, as

Waldo says:

The discipline we know as publicadministration was born of the convic-tion that historical as well as legal studiesof government are narrow, bookish, andsterile…There were very real and pressing

problems to be solved, actual on-going

administration to be studied. Why try toreconstruct the Roman administrativesystem—it failed, didn’t it? (pp. 51–52)

This bias against history was later reinforced asgraduate programs moved from “administra-tion” to “policy,” and increasingly emphasizedstatistics, economics, and decision analysis—temporally static “skills” or “tools” that an“analyst” might apply to any situation.

My purpose in this article is to explore theextent to which historical thinking might betaught as a skill in public affairs graduate

Historical Thinking as a Skill in PublicAffairs Graduate Education

Richardson Dilworth

Drexel University

ABSTRACT

This article suggests how historical thinking, as a skill, might be integrated into MPA, MPP, andsimilar programs. I compare three modes of historical thinking—as a warehouse of analogues, a set

of historical institutionalist models of stability and change, and as a “stream”—in terms of thelikelihood that they provide useful skills for MPA/MPP graduates. I conclude that historicalinstitutionalist models possess the greatest potential for skill building. Historical analogizing,though obviously a useful skill, is likely to be less portable than historical institutionalist models,and less useful as a tool for navigating the fragmented organizational terrain of the new governance.I argue as well that the potential of “thinking in time streams” is not as a skill, but rather as an idealpoint against which skill at applying historical institutionalist models, and historical analogizing,might be judged.

KEYWORDSskills, skill building, history, historical institutionalism

… it came as a revelation to me that history could be more than a chronicle of past events—that it could be a tool of analysis and criticism.

—Richard M. Nixon (1978, p. 15)

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20 Journal of Public Affairs Education

education. More so than knowledge orenlightenment, skills sound like palpable thingsthat MPA/MPP programs might providestudents in exchange for tuition dollars. The

Network of Schools of Public Policy and Administration (NASPAA), for instance, claimsspecically that MPA programs teach “the skillsand techniques used by managers to implementpolicies, projects, and programs” (NASPAA,2013). Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon goesso far as to claim a comparative advantage inskill building in its Master of Science in PublicPolicy and Management (MSPPM, itsequivalent of an MPA/MPP), in explainingthat “While most public policy graduateprograms focus on theory, we offer a skills-based curriculum.” Yet Heinz provides nofurther elaboration of what is meant by a skill,and the MSPPM core curriculum looks similarto other MPA/MPP programs, with courses oneconomics and nance, statistics, management,and political science (Carnegie MellonUniversity, 2013). An examination of the

websites of the other top-10 MPA/MPPprograms reveals no program that promotes a

focus on theory, especially at the expense ofskill building.

In the context of MPA/MPP programs, skill isoften vaguely dened, or used interchangeably

with technique , tool , competency , capacity , or knowledge , as in the case of the Maxwell School,

which describes the goals of its MPA corecurriculum in terms of “skills/knowledge”(Syracuse University, 2013). Thus my rst taskin this article is to dene what is meant byskill (or what I treat here as its synonym,expertise ),and the role that skill building has played inpublic affairs education. I make ve mainpoints: (a) that expertise is a combination ofautomaticity and knowledge; (b) that thedistinction between automaticity and know-ledge is at least roughly reected in the earlydebate within public administration, between aspecialist or generalist orientation; (c) that thecollective decision to emphasize the generalist

over the specialist orientation raised relativelydeep problems regarding what should be taughtin MPA programs and how the politics-administration dichotomy could be preserved;

(d) that the advent of the “policy analysis”orientation in the 1960s resolved the dilemmaover what to teach in MPA/MPP programs byreplacing the generalist orientation with

specialized skills, though ones that had generalapplicability; and (e) that the rise of “thirdsector” and networked governance replaced anylasting concerns about the politics-administration dichotomy with concerns forbuilding skills that adhered more to individualsrather than organizations (i.e., “portable” skills)and that helped individuals navigate within afragmented organizational environment.

In the second section of this paper, I identifythree modes of historical thinking: (a) the pastas a warehouse of potential analogues, (b) ahistorical institutionalist focus on relativelysimple models of stability and change, and (c)“thinking in time streams” (Neustadt & May,1986). Other modes of historical thinking thatI do not examine here, such as counterfactualanalysis (MacKay, 2007) or reiterated problemsolving (Haydu, 1998; see also, more generally,Howlett & Raynor, 2006), may have even more

relevance to public affairs. In later research,their eligibility for inclusion in MPA/MPPtraining and curricula might be tested in muchthe same way as I test my three modes ofthinking here. This article represents only a rststep in exploring the potential for historicalthinking to be taught as a skill in public affairsgraduate education, and thus my conclusion,that historical institutionalist thinking holdsthe greatest promise as a skill in comparison tothe other two modes of historical thinking Iexamine, is only tentative. Other modes ofhistorical thinking that I do not examine heremight hold even greater promise as a skill to betaught in MPA/MPP programs, and this articlehopefully provides a tool by which that potentialmight be recognized.

The purpose of creating criteria to identify thepotential for historical thinking to be taught asa skill is, rst, to provide a new tool by which

instructors who teach in MPA/MPP programscan better explain the relevance of historicalstudies to their students’ professional goals. Asthe other essays in this symposium suggest,

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historians who teach in MPA/MPP programs,and even social scientists who are notparticularly historically oriented but who wantto make use of valuable but older research,

often grapple with this task. The secondpurpose of thinking about historical thinkingin terms of skill building is simply to increasethe potential skills available to MPA/MPPstudents; the third purpose is to provide a newlink between teaching and historically orientedresearch in public policy and administration.

While it may be true that “the policy literaturehas taken a denite historical turn, with thestochastic models favored . . . in the early yearsof the policy sciences largely falling by the

wayside” (Howlett & Raynor, 2006, p. 13), theavailable evidence suggests that stochasticmodeling is still the dominant methodologicalorientation in MPA/MPP curricula (Morçöl &Ivanova, 2010) and thus the “historical turn”has not yet made its way down to the level ofthe classroom. Providing the means by whichhistorical thinking might be understood as askill might produce a link between historicallyoriented policy research and teaching.

This article focuses not on history in the senseof what has happened in the past, but rather onhow to think about the relevance of past eventsto contemporary or future events—or, in the

words of Neustadt and May (1986), how to“think in time.” Some modes of historicalthinking are relatively atemporal in the sensethat the sequence, timing, and context of pastevents are not considered important—indeed,Paul Pierson (2004, p. 1) has claimed that mostcontemporary social scientists work withmodels in which “‘variables’… are ripped fromtheir temporal context”—but in other modesof historical thinking, time is a key component.The three modes of historical thinkingexamined in this article form a continuum interms of the extent to which time is a corecomponent in each mode. Thinking of historyas a warehouse of analogues is relativelyatemporal, because the analogues are typically

taken out of their historical context andcompared directly to a contemporary event.Historical institutionalist thinking takes timemore seriously in the sense that its goal is to

explain how and why history unfolded the wayit did, and thus how events might unfold in thefuture, yet it is atemporal in the sense that it isrelatively reductionist, relying on simple (or

“parsimonious”) explanations of the passage oftime (e.g., path dependence, critical junctures,or punctuated equilibrium) that can be appliedto myriad events.

A more inherently temporal approach than thehistorical institutionalist thinking employed bysocial scientists is the non-reductionistapproach more typical of historians. At its mostextreme, this method would conceive of everyevent as a product of its specic moment intime, and thus incomparably unique. In thismode of thinking, past events and decisionsby themselves are not useful guides forcontemporary decision makers, because everysignicant decision and event is unique, yet thehistorical unfolding of these decisions andevents might itself serve as a guide. Althoughdecisions and events that dene major changesmight be understood as the means by which wecan discern the passage of time, time might also

be understood as an independent force thatmoves forward of its own volition—or, asNeustadt and May (1986) call it, a stream—opening up new spaces for new events to occur.In this latter way of thinking, the ability to usehistory as a guide for policy making thus doesnot depend on knowledge of past events somuch as it depends on understanding of themovement of time itself.

This version of non-reductionist historicalthinking is admittedly a caricature (and onethat few historians are likely to prescribe). Yet itis useful for my purposes because it denes oneend of the continuum, with a similarly extremeversion of historical analogizing at the otherend, in which cases are studied without anyconsideration for their historical context(which, as Pierson suggests, is a mode ofthinking that many social scientists actually doprescribe). Neustadt and May (1986, ch. 14)

do in fact offer a relatively extreme view of non-reductionist historical thinking, which usefullyreveals that, unlike the collection of facts aboutpast events and decisions that denes the

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conscious accumulation of historical know-ledge, thinking of time as a stream is a potentialmeans of developing a mode of historicalthinking that is both more thoroughly temporal

and also more automatic and reexive thaneither historical analogizing or historicalinstitutionalist thinking. I argue that thinkingin time streams is also ultimately an unrealizableideal, more akin to at least some depictions ofthinking in four dimensions. Though un-realistic as a skill, thinking in time streams mightserve as an ideal benchmark for comparison ofmore practicable modes of historical thinking.

Converting the major themes I had previouslyidentied in the history of skill building inMPA/MPP programs into criteria by which mydifferent modes of historical thinking might beevaluated as skills, I question the extent to

which each different mode of thinking (a) canbe learned and deployed as either an “automatedsubroutine” (Rasmussen, 1983) or as consciousknowledge; (b) can be considered as part ofeither a generalist or specialist orientation;(c) might provide skills that benet to a greateror lesser degree either individuals, or theorganizations for which those individuals work;(d) provides portable skills that individualsmight carry across organizations; and (e) provides navigational skills that individualsmight use in the context of the new governance.In the conclusion, I suggest that the most usefulavenue for introducing history into MPA/MPPprograms might be to conceive of history inhistorical institutionalist terms, as a series ofevents that can be identied and categorized bygeneral models of stability and change.

SKILL BUILDING IN MPA AND MPP PROGRAMS

To become skilled or an expert in some domainrequires the development of both automaticityand knowledge. Automaticity refers to theroutines or functions learned through consistentand repeated performance that become secondnature and that serve as the building blocks for

learning more complex functions. Knowledgerefers to the conscious mental map used to deploythe automatic routines toward some specicgoal. As Jens Rasmussen (1983) has put it:

Human activities can be considered as asequence of… skilled acts or activitiescomposed for the actual occasion. Theexibility of skilled performance is due

to the ability to compose, from a largerepertoire of automated subroutines, thesets suited for specic purposes.

The proper mix of automaticity and knowledgedepends on the context in which expertise is dev-eloped and used. Someone with well-developedautomated subroutines yet with little knowledgemight be unable to respond successfully to newor changing environments, because they have

not learned how to deploy their routinesstrategically or creatively (Hallam, 2010; seealso Logan, 1985). Yet an emphasis on auto-mated subroutines at the expense of knowledgemight be appropriate in a specic organizationalcontext. Indeed, such a skill set might describethe classic conception of the good civil servant,

who, due to a relative lack of knowledge and aninexibility engendered by technical training,

was uniquely unsuited to the subtleties of thepolitical sphere and whose training thusmaintained a division between politics andadministration. As Paul Appleby (1947) notedof career civil servants in the period immediatelyafter World War II:

They all feel themselves to be techniciansin greater or less degree…They feelthemselves politically unqualied, andoften say, in leaving a political judgmentto a political ofcer, “I don’t know

anything about politics.”…The rigiditythat in other connections is sometimescharged as a fault of civil servants in theseconnections surely is a great virtue. (p. 93)

Skills and expertise are typically not promoted within MPA/MPP programs, because theymight actually disempower students by in-culcating within them an intellectual rigidityand thus maintain the dubious dichotomy

between politics and administration when thosestudents become public servants. Indeed, Appleby was actually using the ostensibly apoliticalnature of administrators as a foil to call on

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universities and governments to train presentand future public servants to be more politicallyaware, to turn away from the training oftechnocratic specialists, and to emphasize a

generalist orientation. In doing so, he was joining what at the time was the winning sideof the relatively long-standing debate, knownby at least some as decisive balance(Golembiewski, 1965), over the importance ofa generalist versus specialist orientation topublic administration. Jump (1947) describedthis debate, specically with regard to univer-sity training:

Practitioners frequently observe, whethercorrectly or not, that graduates whoenter the public service reect anoverexposure to the more theoretical orstratospheric aspects of public admini-stration. Another complaint, in theopposite direction, is that, in an effort toescape that kind of overexposure andmeet the supposed public service demandfor people with “practical” training,some graduates show an overdose of theprocedural aspects of administration,amounting in some instances to adogmatic xation on points that have tobe unlearned or dislodged because theyare inapplicable to the job in which thegraduate nds himself. (p. 211)

By the 1950s, university programs in publicadministration had evidently moved away fromthe specialist orientation and more toward the

generalist orientation and the teaching of“stratospheric aspects of public administration.”

As Fesler (1958) described the rationale for thegeneralist orientation:

A bright higher administrator couldmaster quickly the vocabulary andconcepts of the specialized subjectmatter; and…he could readily draw onthe specialized competence of his staff to

compensate for his own deciencies inthe area. “The expert should be on tap,not on top” maximized the argument.(p. 370; see also Cohen, 1970)

From the standpoint of training future admin-istrators in university public affairs programs,the generalist orientation posed at least twodilemmas. First, if “specialized subject know-

ledge” could be learned on the job, and mightin any case doom a promising administrator tolower-level jobs, it was not worthy of graduateeducation in public affairs. Yet if public affairseducation was to be devoted to the pursuit ofknowledge, with little focus on technicaltraining, what should be taught? Appleby’sfrustratingly vague answer to this questionsuggests the lack of a good response; acknow-ledging that “educational institutions clearly

cannot turn out young graduates ready to serveor acceptable in top positions,” he claimed:

They can hope to turn out larger numbersof young people qualied in the courseof years to go higher and to serve betterat higher levels. They can hope also tocontribute constantly to the widening ofhorizons, the raising of standards, theelevation of aim. (Appleby, 1947, p. 97)

A quarter-century later, one survey of MPAcurricula concluded:

We…produce a relatively diffusecollection of individuals who havedemonstrated an interest in somethingabstract called “public administration,”some of whom have apparently had in-depth exposure to multiple administrativetools and concepts, some with cursory

exposure to multiple administrative toolsand concepts, and some with a potpourriof neither. (Medeiros, 1974, p. 255)

The focus on knowledge rather than technicaltraining also opened the eld up to the criticismthat it was “preoccupied with institutionaldescription rather than analysis” (Elmore,1986, p. 70) and that it was simply promotingan elitist amateurism reminiscent of the British

civil service (Presthus, 1964).This rst dilemma was resolved, in part,starting in the 1960s, by turning generalist



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knowledge itself into a technical eldthrough the advent of “systems techniques”(Hoos, 1973) that dened the new programs inpublic policy and that included a greater

emphasis on economics, statistics, and decisionanalysis tools such as linear programmingand game theory. Where the generalistorientation had relied on broad knowledge asthe primary skill in making executive decisionsand responding creatively to problems, systemstechniques recast the decision to be madeor problem to be solved as a quantiablemodel from which a concrete answer could bederived. As Wildavsky (1985, p. 28) put it,“The capacity to build big models impliedthe ability to understand large nationalproblems by measuring (and then minimizing)the loss of economic efciency among thevarious alternatives to existing policy that

were considered.”

The new focus on “analysis” to some extentsimply repackaged the decisive balance debate,because systems techniques were criticized asbeing too rigid, and as requiring too simplistic

assumptions, to really handle the kind of largeand complex decisions that confrontedgovernment executives (see, e.g., Dror, 1967;Hearle, 1961). Yet if the new systems techniquesrepackaged the specialist orientation, they didso in a way that allowed the specialist orientationto predominate over the older generalistorientation. Although the older version of thespecialist orientation had been dened by amodesty of ambitions and a narrowness ofscope—Perkins and Sessions (1951) referred tospecialists in the federal bureaucracy aspolyps—systems techniques, as Hoos (1973)and others have pointed out, possessed a kindof hubris in believing that large and ultimatelyvalue-laden problems were solvable throughtechnical expertise. With the new specialists ontop rather than on tap, there was really no needfor the generalist—or the generalist had at leastbeen reformulated as someone with specializedskills that were generally applicable. Second,

though the specialist orientation was tied to abureaucratic model in which specialists werenecessarily parts of large organizations (muchlike polyps adhere to coral reefs), systems

techniques were portable; skills or toolspossessed by analysts that could be deployed indifferent contexts. As Hoos (1973, p. 158)pointed out, the main attraction of these new

techniques was “their ubiquity, the ready-mixfeature that renders them instantly applicableto almost any problem, especially if it is bigand complicated.”

A second dilemma inherent in the generalistorientation of the 1940s and 1950s was whethergraduate programs in public administration

were designed to provide government with ableadministrators, and thus improve the perform-ance of government, or to provide better jobsfor students—two objectives made incom-patible by the combination of the generalistorientation and the politics-administrationdichotomy. As suggested by Appleby (1947),the disempowering impact of technical,specialized training was good for govern-ment because it maintained the politics-administration dichotomy. The benet tostudents in graduate programs in public affairs,however, of being taught techniques of their

own disempowerment so that they might havedead-end careers in government, seemssomewhat questionable, as suggested by thefocus on the generalist orientation, and innumerous later declarations that MPA/MPPprograms needed to start teaching “leadership”(Revell, 2008; Ventriss, 1991, pp. 7–8;

Wildavsky, 1985, p. 33). Yet before the full-scale assault on the legitimacy or practicabilityof the politics-administration dichotomy(which, as many authors have noted, has largelysurvived the assault), to teach anything but thedisempowering techniques of administration

would be to teach people how to be politicaladministrators. It seems that the oxymoronicpursuit of an apolitical but generalist orientationin public affairs education was achieved bysimply assuming away the problem andimagining that administration, by denition,

was apolitical (see Sayre, 1958, p. 102).

The rise of the third sector and networkedgovernance resolved the dilemma over whetherthe government or students were to be theprimary beneciaries of public affairs education.

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It moved the focus away from the skills requiredto work for a single employer (the federalgovernment) to those required to compete in amarketplace of potential employers, including

governments, quasi-governments, public-private partnerships, and nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs). In this new context ofsmaller employers with fewer resources, andemployees who might move to neworganizations more frequently, on-the-jobspecialized training was replaced by the needfor employees with portable skills that might beuseful across multiple contexts, learned to thepoint of becoming automatic so that theydened the individual apart from any specicorganization. At the same time, generalistknowledge also became more important: Peoplelooking to work in the public sector had tonavigate a more complex network of potentialemployers, and, once employed, they needed a

working knowledge of the external organizations with whom their employer interacted (seeCohen, 1970, for an early discussion of thegeneralist orientation and portable skills).

What might thus be considered problematic

political knowledge in the context of a singledominant government became an importantand valuable navigational skill in the context ofnumerous organizations participating in a systemof shared governance.

Relatively recent evidence supplied by Morçöland Ivanova (2010) suggests that, of thetechniques most closely related to automaticityand thus the development of portable skills,those taught in public affairs programs (at leastin the MPP and related programs they surveyed)that were also most relevant to potentialemployment (in the sense that an earlier surveyfound that they were also commonly used by“policy professionals”) were courses onquantitative research methods, and morespecically “Surveys, regression analysis, cost-benet analysis, and (quasi-) experiments.” Theauthors also found that quantitative methodscourses were far more prevalent than qualitative

research methods, despite claims of a recenttrend toward more qualitative methods inpolicy analysis (pp. 269–270). These ndingsare likely true for MPA programs as well, given

Hur and Hackbart’s (2009) ndings that thereis no longer much of a meaningful curriculardifference between MPA and MPP programs(see also Infeld & Adams, 2011).

Rather than displacing quantitative methods, which provide students with readily apparent,demonstrable, and portable skills, there is someevidence that more qualitative, knowledge-based skill building has taken the form ofcourses in MPP/MPA programs that dealspecically with interpersonal, interorganiza-tional, and interdisciplinary communication,including calls for a greater emphasis onteaching emotional intelligence and labor(Jaeger, 2004; Mastracci, Newman, & Guy,2010) and cultural competence (Carrizales,2010; White, 2004). Newander and Newander(2012) have also made a sophisticated argumentin defense of interdisciplinarity in public affairseducation—something that has often beenused to criticize MPA/MPP programs as simplygrab-bags of courses from other programs(Honey, 1967)—as helping to build cognitiveexibility as an important skill when dealing in

the fragmented system of the new governance. At least for the purposes of this article, a placefor historical thinking is evidently missing fromboth past and present formulations of therecommended proportions of automaticity andknowledge in the process of skill building inpublic affairs education. The purpose of thefollowing section is thus to suggest how trainingin historical thinking might be inserted into thistradition of skill building, and thus how histo-rical thinking might be understood as a skill.

HISTORICAL THINKING AS A SKILL

Especially during the rst decades of its formalorganization as an academic discipline, publicadministration was in at least one sensehistorically oriented, though not consciouslyso. In one of the few early systematic attemptsat understanding the role of history in the eld,Harvey Manseld (1951, p. 52) pointed out

that scholars “fall back of necessity mainly oninterviews and observation, on records left andcompiled by others for other purposes—on thedata of history, that is—and try to make what



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sense of them we can.” Derived as it was fromnonexperimental situations, it was difcult todiscern from this historical data the key causalrelationships that might be helpful in

understanding future situations. As Manselddescribed the problem:

The repetitions in history are…onlyrecognizable similarities, seldom more, insituations challenging human action ordecision, and in human responses tosituations. From one event to the next,details in the environment change,personalities change, and the relative

strengths of similar forceschange. Anyone of these may be the decisive factor;enough of them cumulatively willdestroy the probability of any prediction;only the most general lessons are likely tosurvive transfer across extended intervalsof time or space. So we are always left

wondering in some degree whether it isthe similarity or the variation we observethat is most signicant. (p. 52)

History, though a necessary element in doingresearch, was thus not a subject of interest forpublic administration, but simply a vexation;the past served as a reservoir of experimentalsituations that were awed by their lack ofcontrols, so that “decisive factors” could not beisolated. The greater the extent to whichcontemporary events simply repeated pastevents in all respects, the more history couldserve as a useful guide. Thus, for Manseld,

“The trouble with history as a teacher ofadministration is, of course, that events do notrepeat themselves exactly” (p. 52).

Manseld’s conception of history, at least as itextended to public administration, was thus ofa warehouse of potential analogues to whichcurrent situations could be compared. AsNeustadt and May (1986, see esp. ch. 4) laternoted, in one of the most extensive studies of

how history is and should be used in policymaking, historical analogizing was commonamong federal ofcials faced with the need tomake quick decisions over high-stakes issues—

and historical analogies quickly drawn were amajor cause of bad decision making. As anantidote to the unreective deployment ofhistorical analogues, Neustadt and May coun-

seled a careful accounting of the “likenesses”and “differences” between the past and currentevents that were being compared.

Neustadt and May’s discussion of analoguesprovides an opportunity to discern notions ofhistorical analysis as an automated subroutineand as consciously applied knowledge in theprocess of policy making. Historical analoguesare dangerous specically because they are oftendeployed automatically with little reection:They might have seemed obvious or at leastcompelling, they could have come from theofcials’ personal experience, or they were sucha ubiquitous part of ofcials’ collectiveunderstanding, or part of “folk history” (p. 49),that it wasn’t even obvious an analogue wasbeing used (see generally chs. 3–5). Automaticanalogizing was not a skill, but rather a badhabit. The appropriate skill that could beautomated was to recognize when an analogy

was being drawn and to have that recognitiontrigger a conscious search for likenesses anddifferences between the current situation andthe past event. The actual, conscious accountingof likenesses and differences would requirespecic historical knowledge about the pastevent that was being used as an analogue.

As a skill, then, historical analogizing consistsof one automated response (the decision,triggered by an analogue, to account forlikenesses and differences), and consciousknowledge of the past and present situationsbeing compared. Relying as it does primarilyon specic historical knowledge, analogizingthus seems more of a specialized rather than ageneralized skill. Given the depth of knowledgenecessary to make meaningful comparisonsacross two events, the ability to analogize as anexpert would also most likely be limited to arelatively narrow eld of subjects and thus

would make this skill relatively non-portableand not very useful for navigating a fragmentedorganizational environment. One example ofan expert analogizer is the in-house historian,

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whose expertise is relatively inapplicable outsidethe agency for which the historian works and

whose position is typically of low status or evenseen as a form of internal exile (Neustadt &

May, 1986, p. 242).

One unique characteristic of historical analo-gizing as a skill is that it is most likely moreuseful to the extent that it is less historical. AsManseld noted, the further back in time onelooks to nd a past event that is comparable toa current event, the greater the risk ofmisinterpreting the past event. This is sobecause the contextual factors that help explain

what happened in the past will be both moredifferent from current contextual factors andmore obscure. Historical analogizing is thusonly circumstantially historical, in the sensethat some event already must have occurred,and some time must pass before that event canbe understood well enough for it to meaning-fully inform decision making in the present.

A more inherently historical conception ofhistory is one in which past and present events

are not directly compared to one another, butare instead compared to, and categorized by,general models of temporal stability andchange. Most of these models are drawn fromhistorical institutionalist studies in economics,political science, and sociology, such as pathdependence (Howlett & Raynor, 2006, pp.4–6; Pierson, 2004), critical junctures (Capoccia& Kelemen, 2007), punctuated equilibria (amodel borrowed from evolutionary biology; seeHowlett & Raynor, 2006; see also Gersick,1991), incrementalism (Bendor, 1995; Lindblom,1959, 1979), displacement, layering, drift, andconversion (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). All ofthese models conceive of time passing throughvarious types of changes (or absences of change)to institutional and organizational rule systemsthat thereby change individual-level expectationsand strategies.

In contrast to historical analogizing, in which

history represents a challenge to be overcome inorder to identify the similarities between eventsthat occurred at different points in time,historical institutionalist models of stability

and change take the passage of time as theirsubject. Their goal is to accurately identify aspecic organizational or institutional cong-uration as manifesting characteristics of a

general type of stability and change, to thusinfer how and why that conguration mightchange, or not change, in the future. As JeffreyHaydu (1998, pp. 340–341) has said of pathdependency—which highlights the differencebetween this approach and Manseld’s concep-tion of historical analysis—it “treats theidiosyncrasies of each historical period asresources for, rather than impediments to,causal explanation.” Although the only automated

routine required in historical analogizing is theconditioned response to account for likenessesand differences, historical institutionalistanalysis has the potential for greater auto-maticity, because an analyst could be conditionedsuch that different organizational or institutionalcongurations or idiosyncrasies could automa-tically trigger the application of any of a varietyof models of stability or change.

Relying as it does on general models, and thusless on specic knowledge of historic events,historical institutionalist analysis can be appliedto a greater variety of situations, making it amore generalist and portable skill, lessdependent on any single organization, as wellas one that might be more helpful than analo-gizing in navigating a fragmented organizationalenvironment. Indeed, Orren and Skowronek(2004, pp. 108–118) have argued that theprimary goal of historical institutionalist studiesin American politics should be the analysis oforganizational fragmentation, or “intercurrence.”One trade-off, however, is that although a moreconceptually elaborate historical analysis can beapplied to more situations, the relative lack ofspecic knowledge about any given situationmakes it more likely that the conceptualapparatus will be misapplied, because the eventitself is not properly understood. Thus thechallenge for historical institutionalist models,

at least as applied to decision making in publicaffairs, is to build their robustness to make surethat they can be applied accurately on the basisof a few easily identiable indicators.



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A nal form of historical analysis is, in the words of Neustadt and May (1986, ch. 14),“thinking in time streams,” which consists ofthree components that combine historical

institutionalism with a more automated versionof historical analogizing. The rst two com-ponents are (a) “recognition that the future hasno place to come from but the past, hence thepast has predictive value”; and (b) “recognitionthat what matters for the future in the presentis departures from the past, alterations, changes,

which prospectively or actually divert familiarows from accustomed channels, thus affectingthat predictive value and much else besides” (p.251). Put together, these two components ofhistorical thinking are relatively vaguesuggestions for trying to identify the causes ofstability and change over time, which historicalinstitutionalist analysis has attempted to specifyin more concrete models.

The third component of thinking in timestreams is an attempt to make analogizing anautomated routine, by engaging in “continuouscomparison, an almost constant oscillation

from present to future to past and back,heedful of prospective change, concerned toexpedite, limit, guide, counter, or accept it asthe fruits of such comparison suggest”(p. 251). Although the mode of thinking ofhistory as a warehouse of events to whichanalogies can be drawn requires consciousknowledge of the details of those events, in themode of thinking dened by constantanalogizing, “knowledge of historic specics,cannot substitute for (even though itsupplements) the kind of mental quality thatreadily connects discrete phenomena over timeand repeatedly checks connections” (p. 252).The focus in this mode of thinking is thus noton past and present events themselves, butrather on time itself—or rather on the ability tothink across time.

The ability to think across time also implies theability to transcend time. Thus characterized,

thinking in time streams resembles, at least inan ideal form, the four-dimensional thinking ofKurt Vonnegut’s imaginary aliens, the Tralfama-dorians, in Slaughterhouse Five , who can see that

All moments, past, present and future,always have existed, always will exist…hey can see how permanent all themoments are, and they can look at anymoment that interests them. It is just anillusion we have here on earth that onemoment follows another one, like beadson a string, and that once a moment isgone it is gone forever. (Vonnegut, 1969,p. 27)

Similar to the Tralfamadorian view, the abilityto automatically engage in constant (andpresumably accurate) historical analogizing is

also, in its ideal form at least, an attempt totranscend, and thus exist outside of, time. AsManseld suggested, historical analogizing is aproblem because the passage of time rendersknowledge of past events and their contextsincomplete, and analogizing is thus constrain-ed because it is subject to time. Reexiveanalogizing suggests an ideal state in which theconstraints of time are lifted and analogies canthus be perfectly drawn.

Similar to Tralfamadorian thinking as well,Neustadt and May even suggest that thinkingin time streams might be “either in the genes ornot, and if not, nothing can be done” (p. 263).They reject this suggestion, but suggest only

weakly instead:

The majority of humankind, ourselvesincluded, learn to think in streams of

time as we learn to think mathe-matically—if we do either or all—fromteachers and books. It probably alsofollows that the learning comes throughpieced-together stories about real peoplebetter than through abstract con-structions from philosophy or socialsciences, or even through inventedcharacters in ction (a close question).

We are not condent that anyone whoreads can gain prociency, if what hereads is history, and what he does isgovern, but we cannot think of anybetter way. (pp. 263–264)

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If the relatively inscrutable nature of thinkingin time streams renders it incapable of beingsystematically taught, it seems relativelyinappropriate as a subject to be taught in MPA/

MPP programs, because it would confer noidentiable skill (and listing Tralfamadorianthinking as a skill on a resume might not be

well received). Rather than a skill, I wouldsuggest that thinking in time streams be takenin its perfect, Tralfamadorian, form as an idealagainst which the level of skill in historicalthinking, through institutionalist models,analogizing, or some other conception ofhistory, might be judged. Thus a goal for future

research into the role of history in public affairseducation would be to provide specic criteriathat would qualify as perfect thinking in timestreams, against which specic curricula andinstruction might be judged.

CONCLUSION

This article has provided a brief historicaloverview of some of the ways in which bothskills and expertise, and history, have beentreated and discussed in public administration,public policy, and cognate academic elds. Mygoal has been to suggest how historical thinkingmight be integrated, specically as a skill, intoMPA, MPP, and similar programs. I comparedthree conceptions of history—as a warehouseof analogues, a set of historical institutionalistmodels of stability and change, and as astream—in terms of the likelihood that theymight serve as the basis for useful skill buildingin MPA/MPP programs. My conclusion is thathistorical institutionalist models possess the\greatest promise for integrating historical skillsin MPA/MPP programs. Historical analogizing,though obviously a useful skill, is in mostinstances more likely to be less portable thanhistorical institutionalist models and less usefulas a tool for navigating the fragmented organi-zational terrain of the new governance.Thinking in time streams is not obviously askill that can be learned—and if it can be

learned, it is not clear how it could be integratedinto MPA/MPP curricula; its potential liesinstead, I have suggested, in its possible role ofdening an ideal point against which skill at

applying historical institutionalist models, andhistorical analogizing, might be judged.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richardson Dilworth is associate professor ofPolitical Science and director of the Center forPublic Policy at Drexel University. He is theauthor and coauthor of numerous articles,

author of the book, The Urban Origins ofSuburban Autonomy (2005), and the editor ofthree books, most recentlyCities in AmericanPolitical History (2011).


Dilworth_Historical Thinking as a Skill in Public Affairs Graduate Education

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