Scientific and technological policy issues are not and should not be exempt from the norms of democratic governance. This article examines two major theories of democracy, analyzes their commonalities and differences, and derives criteria for evaluating various forms of public participation in policymaking. The author argues for a new category of participation, participatory analysis, that includes forms of participation that satisfy democratic criteria and emphasizes the importance of learning among participants. Different types of participatory analysis may be best suited to different kinds of policy problems .

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Risk communication is seen as an important adjunct to the process of siting locally noxious facilities. To understand how risk communication might function in such a process, one needs to understand the political context that gives rise to public opposition to such facilities in the first place. This analysis draws on a variety of data to describe the decline of deference, a situation in which a hostile and alienated public is mobilized primarily through ad hoc voluntary organizations, and is increasingly reluctant to defer important decisions to institutional elites. Risk communication programs must be designed to offset the trends that result in the decline of deference. This conclusion differs markedly from the conventional wisdom that risk communication is merely a device for providing information to citizens so sthat they may make more rational decisions. ~~

U.S. states have led the federal government in instituting policies aimed at promoting renewable energy. Nearly all research on renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) has treated RPS adoption as a binary choice. Given the substantial variation in the renewable energy goals established by RPSs, we propose a new measure of RPS ambition that accounts for the amount of additional renewable energy production needed to reach the RPS goal and the number of years allotted to reach the standard. By measuring RPS policy with more precision, our analysis demonstrates that many factors found to affect whether a state will adopt an RPS do not exert a similar effect on the policy’s ambitiousness. Most notably, our analysis demonstrates that Democratic control of the state legislature is the most consequential factor in determining the ambitiousness of state RPS policies.

Energy policies that promote new technologies and energy sources are policies for the future. They influence the shape of emergent technological systems and condition our social, political, and economic lives. Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values demonstrates the difficulties that individuals in and out of government encounter when they try to instigate a reconsideration of these broader properties of technological systems and the policies that support them. This historical case study analyzes U.S. renewable energy policy from the end of World War II through the energy crisis of the 1970s. The book illuminates the ways in which beliefs and values come to dominate official problem frames and get entrenched in institutions. In doing so it also explains why advocates of renewable energy have often faced ideological opposition, and why policy makers failed to take them seriously.