The American ‘‘War on Poverty’’ can serve as a case in point for this institutionalist
perspective. In contrast to the New Deal, which introduced its social policies by a law
(the Social Security Act of 1935) that provided relatively clear guidelines as to which
social risks were to be insured by government, the War on Poverty proposed a
strategy of ‘‘maximum feasible participation’’ (‘‘maximum feasible misunderstanding’’
in Moynihan’s (1969) famous phrase). The idea was to Wght poverty by politically
empowering the poor and other disadvantaged groups. This strategy was
legitimized by the pluralist philosophy of government, which hoped that by correcting
unequal access to the interest group process, government outcomes would be
made more in line with the public interest. However, the result was much money
misspent and few results. Substantive justice would have been better served, according
to Lowi, by deliberating in Congress about the ends and means of anti-poverty
policy, and then drafting a new law. Formal procedures and not informal processes