The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave Review

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The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave ReviewI thought it appropriate to pass along the following review:
Robert A. Campbell (Capilano University), The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 4 (October 2011), pp. 1089-1090.
Reviewed work(s): Mark Lawrence Schrad. The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Pp. ix, 302. $65.00.
Having just finished reading Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010), I was looking forward to another book on prohibition. Both Okrent and Mark L. Schrad share a dislike of the dry cause. Yet Okrent's work is a finely nuanced political history of American prohibition that accepts that some (but not much) good came of the dry years. Schrad's impatience with prohibition is obvious and immediate. To him, "the prohibition of alcohol was a mistake--a historic policy gaffe and a political fiasco" (p. 3). Schrad then uses the dry movement in three countries as a vehicle to examine how and why bad policies are implemented.
Schrad argues that policy makers knew that prohibition was a "`suboptimal' policy option" (p. 3) that was likely to fail. Despite these realizations, countries as similar as Canada and the United States and as different as Russia and Iceland adopted forms of prohibition during roughly the same time period. To unravel this puzzle, Schrad examines the dry movement in three countries: the United States, Russia, and Sweden. The Russians and Americans adopted prohibition, but the Swedes never did, despite a very organized dry movement that had widespread support.
To explain what happened, Schrad invokes what he calls historical institutionalism. For him institutions are very broadly conceived, "embodied in both formal organizations and informal rules" (p. 13). Historical institutionalism helps us to understand how "political struggles and outcomes are constrained by the setting in which they take place" (p. 13). The temperance campaigns also forged the "first truly global transnational advocacy networks" (p. 27). These networks transmitted temperance ideas from one country to another where they were filtered and reframed by local conditions.
This work is deeply immersed in the theoretical literature of policy studies, a body of scholarship with which I am largely unfamiliar. Much of the prose I found quite dense, which may be more of a reflection of my ignorance than any fault of the author. Yet I was impressed with his research and analysis of the prohibition movement. Schrad does an excellent job of compressing the history of prohibition in the United States into one main chapter, no small feat considering the vast literature on the subject. Perhaps even more impressive, he does not rely solely on secondary sources for Sweden and Russia. He delved into the archives of both countries.
Schrad tells a tale that is familiar and persuasive. The temporary success of prohibition was a result of World War I as much as anything else. The war increased the pace of decision making; brought new actors, including the military, to the policy'making process; and reframed the debate along nationalist lines. The impact of the war on the dry cause in the United States is well known, but its influence in Russia is probably less so. Russians, still smarting from their loss to Japan earlier in the century, adopted prohibition as part of the war mobilization movement in 1914. This policy survived the overthrow of the tsar who imposed it. The Bolsheviks continued it, even though V. I. Lenin would have loved the taxation revenue from vodka. Not surprisingly, Joseph Stalin was more pragmatic, and vodka sales resumed in 1925.
Sweden is perhaps the most intriguing example because the Swedes went a different direction than the Americans and the Russians. Prohibition was popular in Swedish society, and an unofficial 1909 plebiscite went overwhelmingly in the favor of the dry cause. Yet the Swedes were more divided than the plebiscite might suggest. Before the war began Ivan Bratt, a Stockholm physician and moderate, initiated a national discussion in search of a compromise. Sweden remained neutral during the war, and national concern became more focused on the loss of trading partners. Rather than prohibition Sweden adopted Bratt's system of individual control through rationing and separated the profit from the liquor trade by "entrusting the municipal sale of alcohol to a central company" (p. 101) that used liquor profits for philanthropic purposes. Norway, with a similar corporatist social structure, "fell victim to prohibition" during the war (p. 115), even though Norway was also neutral. That conundrum struck me as worth pursuing more in this otherwise well'written and creative book.The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave Overview

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