Lindblom, Charles Edward
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carwardine, Richard. 2006. Lincoln. New York: Knopf.
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Schuster.
Gienapp, William E. 2002. Abraham Lincoln and Civil War
America: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press.
McPherson, James M. 1990. Abraham Lincoln and the Second
American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Thomas, Benjamin P. 1952. Abraham Lincoln: A Biography. New
York: Knopf.
Jennifer L. Weber
LINDBLOM, CHARLES
EDWARD
1917–
Raised in Turlock, California, Charles Edward Lindblom
attended Stanford University and then went to graduate
school at the University of Chicago. Shortly after he began
teaching economics at the University of Minnesota in
1939, the department chair rebuked Lindblom “for giving
a talk to an undergraduate club on … Lange’s concept of
market socialism.” He subsequently “met with many
other sharp intolerances” from faculty and did not receive
tenure. After moving to Yale, he found greater diversity of
thought but nevertheless “was heavily influenced by the
intolerances of the discipline of economics” (Democracy
and Market System, 1988, p. 17).
Although the tensions were framed in terms of “good
economics,” not ideological disagreement, the response to
his dissertation (Unions and Capitalism, 1949) was telling:
Whereas the text offered a symmetrical analysis depicting
corporate and union power relations on a collision course
likely to lead to serious problems including inflation,
reviewers were sure the author was calling for limits on
collective bargaining. Lindblom’s subsequent work reveals
that he already was contemplating restraints on corporate
executive discretion.
Lindblom’s research questions and methodology were
so out of favor that the Yale economics chair urged him to
resign, predicting he would “die on the vine” and never be
promoted to full professor. However, coteaching and
scholarly collaboration with Robert Dahl led to a joint
appointment in political science and a gradual shift of
attention toward a discipline that recognized the land-
mark nature of his work. Lindblom chaired the political
science department from 1972 to 1974 and later was
named to Yale’s most prestigious chair as Sterling Professor
of Economics and Political Science. He served as president
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of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies and
of the American Political Science Association.
Lindblom helped found the Institution for Social and
Policy Studies, intended to move the university’s social sci-
ences into interdisciplinary conversation while enhancing
their relevance to public issues. As director from 1974 to
1980, Lindblom led mapping projects designed to frame
research questions with the professional care normally
reserved for the conduct of research. Present-day research
on the not-for-profit sector traces partly to an exploratory
ISPS project, as do Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter’s
evolutionary economics and Robert Lane’s studies of mar-
ket and personality.
In a presidential address to political scientists titled
“Another State of Mind” (1982), Lindblom argued that
“conventional theory is embarrassingly defective. It greatly
needs to call more heavily on radical thought” (p. 20). At
four regional political science meetings, he asked audi-
ences: “Suppose—just to limber up our minds—that we
faced the fanciful task of designing … a political/eco-
nomic system that would be highly resistant to change.
How to do it?” A “simple and fiendishly clever” approach
would be “to design institutions so that any attempt to
alter them automatically triggers punishment” (“The
Market as Prison,” 1982, p. 324). Far from fanciful, some-
thing approaching that arrangement occurs as market sys-
tems imprison policy, sometimes via tangible constraints,
as when officials fear businesses will move if “excessively”
regulated. More insidious and fundamental are imprison-
ments of mind, a wide range of helpful policy options
becoming unthinkable because their adoption would
require deviating from tightly held and carelessly exam-
ined beliefs about corporation and market.
Politics, Economics, and Welfare (1953, with Robert
Dahl) remains the most systematic comparison yet
attempted of the price system, hierarchy, polyarchy, and
bargaining as political-economic processes of rational cal-
culation and social decision-making. It closes with an
insight still fresh generations later: “Through what social
processes should action take place? Clearly the answer …
(depends on another) question: What kind of human
being is wanted?” (p. 523).
The idea of incrementalism introduced therein was
refined in “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’ ” (1959),
which still garners hundreds of citations annually. The
core idea, derived in part from Lindblom’s training in
marginalist economic analysis, was a challenge to the
Western political tradition’s extreme faith in reason:
Analysis is inevitably incomplete, excessively costly, and a
poor guide to big changes; political interactions negotiat-
ing smaller changes often are both more feasible and more
reliable. A Strategy of Decision (1963, with David
Braybrooke) and The Intelligence of Democracy (1965)

offered detailed treatments of mutually adjusting interac-
tion as a method of analyzing and determining policy
moves, the latter still unparalleled regarding forms of
mutual adjustment other than bargaining.
Neither critics nor followers did especially well by
disjointed incrementalism. Many readers reduced the con-
cept’s nuances to the oversimplified notion of small steps,
degenerating into arguments that Aaron Wildavsky subse-
quently pilloried as the search for the “magic size” of an
increment. Some perceived incrementalism as overly con-
servative (Dror 1964, Etzioni 1966), seemingly blaming
the decision strategy for conservative tendencies in U.S.
politics, or perhaps failing to recognize that, in principle,
“A fast-moving sequence of small changes can more speed-
ily accomplish a drastic alteration of the status quo than
can an only infrequent major policy change” (“Still
Muddling, Not Yet Through,” 1979, p. 520).
Goodin and Waldner (1979) argued that actually prac-
ticing incrementalism would be more difficult than it
sounds. Some theoretical understanding is needed to decide
where and how to intervene, and to determine how long to
monitor a policy trial before deciding whether to change it.
They pointed as well to difficulties posed by threshold and
sleeper effects and questioned the idea that small changes
are always less dangerous and more reversible. To the claim
that reforms can be thought of as experiments, they found
nontrivial difficulties in actually learning from early trials. A
number of analysts pointed to circumstances where the
value of incrementalism would be reduced, including
Schulman’s (1975) recognition that large-scale policy
choices such as the lunar program sometimes have to be
undertaken completely if they are to work at all.
Lindblom acknowledged the validity of some of these
insights but found that the critics had not really proposed
an alternative way of grappling with the basic predicament:
“Incremental policy making is weak, often inefficacious,
inadequate to the problem at hand; and the control over it
often falls into the wrong hands. It is also usually the best
that can be done,” given the imprisoning effects of corpo-
ration and market, gross political inequalities, and elite-
catalyzed impairments in political thinking by citizens,
government functionaries, and social scientists (Democracy
and Market System, 1988, p. 11). Neo-incrementalists
recently have begun to take up the challenge, responding
to the critics’ concerns and extending incrementalist
thought to deal better with inequality and with institu-
tional malfunctioning (Collingridge 1992; Hayes 2001).
Lindblom returned to studying the economic side of
political life in Politics and Markets (1977), winner of the
APSA Woodrow Wilson Award, which concluded, “The
large private corporation fits oddly into democratic theory
and vision. Indeed, it does not fit” (p. 356). The work gar-
nered sufficient public notice to evoke an attacking ad by
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Lindblom, Charles Edward
Mobil in The New York Times. The “privileged position of
business” and political-economic inequalities were central
in The Policy-Making Process (1993, originally written in
1973), a soon-classic text for policy-oriented courses. The
Market System (2001) summarized the great merits of
market systems as social coordinating mechanisms, simul-
taneously offering an elegant overview of systemic defects
not encompassed in conventional analyses of market
failure.
Usable Knowledge (1979, with David Cohen) argued
that professional social inquiry is “incapacitated in con-
tributing to social problem solving because of its own
metaphysics, fashions, traditions, and taboos” (p. 95).
Inquiry and Change (1990), another APSA best book
award winner, analyzed inequality as a barrier to rational-
ity while contrasting the analysis-heavy ideal of scien-
tifically guided society with a more egalitarian and cogni-
tively realistic self-guiding society. Among many barriers
to self-guiding society, foremost is impairment, Lindblom
argued: Not only corporation and government, but fam-
ily, school, church, and media hamper development of
capacities for probing problems and possibilities. Social
scientists can assist people in understanding and shaping
their societies by conducting partisan analysis challenging
the status quo better than by aiming for avowedly neutral,
supposedly authoritative knowledge that actually is for-
ever unattainable.
Although following in the tradition of the
Enlightenment, then, Lindblom’s “aspiration to improve
social problem solving … pursues inquiry and the
resourceful utilization of its results more than it pursues
firm knowledge. Thus, it rewrites Kant’s ‘Dare to know!’
as ‘Dare to inquire!’ ”(Inquiry and Change, p. 301).
SEE ALSO American Political Science Association;
Corporations; Corporatism; Economics;
Incrementalism; Marginalism; Norms; Pluralism;
Political Science; Public Policy
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY WORKS
Lindblom, Charles E. 1949. Unions and Capitalism. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Lindblom, Charles E. 1959. The Science of “Muddling
Through.” Public Administration Review 19:79–88.
Lindblom, Charles E. 1965. The Intelligence of Democracy:
Decision Making Through Mutual Adjustment. New York: The
Free Press.
Lindblom, Charles E. 1977. Politics and Markets: The World’s
Political-Economic Systems. New York: Basic Books.
Lindblom, Charles E. 1979. Still Muddling, Not Yet Through.
Public Administration Review 39 (6): 517–526.
Lindblom, Charles E. 1982. Another State of Mind. American
Political Science Review 76 (1): 9–21.
453
Linear Regression
Lindblom, Charles E. 1982. The Market as Prison. Journal of
Politics 44 (2): 324–336.
Lindblom, Charles. 1988. Democracy and Market System. Oslo:
Norwegian University Press.
Lindblom, Charles E. 1990. Inquiry and Change: The Troubled
Attempt to Understand and Shape Society. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Lindblom, Charles E. 1993. Concluding Comment: A Case
Study of the Practice of Social Science. In An Heretical Heir
of the Enlightenment: Politics, Policy, and Science in the Work
of Charles E. Lindblom, ed. Harry Redner, 343–373. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
Lindblom, Charles E. 2001. The Market System: What It Is, How
It Works, and What to Make of It. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Lindblom, Charles E., and David Braybrooke. 1963. A Strategy
of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process. New York:
Free Press of Glencoe.
Lindblom, Charles E., and David K. Cohen. 1979. Usable
Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Lindblom, Charles E., and Robert A. Dahl. 1953. Politics,
Economics, and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic
Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes. New York: Harper.
Lindblom, Charles E., and Edward J. Woodhouse. 1993. The
Policy-Making Process, 3rd ed. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice
Hall.
SECONDARY WORKS
Collingridge, David. 1992. The Management of Scale: Big
Organizations, Big Technologies, Big Mistakes. New York:
Routledge.
Dror, Yehezkel. 1964. Muddling Through—“Science” or Inertia?
Public Administration Review 24 (3): 153–157.
Etzioni, Amitai. 1967. Mixed-Scanning: A “Third” Approach to
Decision-Making. Public Administration Review 27 (5):
385–392.
Goodin, Robert, and Ilmar Waldner. 1979. Thinking Big,
Thinking Small, and Not Thinking at All. Public Policy 27:
1–24.
Hayes, Michael T. 2001. The Limits of Policy Change:
Incrementalism, Worldview, and the Rule of Law. Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press.
Schulman, Paul R. 1975. Nonincremental Policy Making: Notes
Toward an Alternative Paradigm. American Political Science
Review 69 (4): 1354–1370.
Edward J. Woodhouse
LINEAR REGRESSION
Linear regression refers to a linear estimation of the rela-
tionship between a dependent variable and one or more
independent variables.
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Social researchers typically assume that two variables
are linearly related unless they have strong reasons to
believe the relationship is nonlinear. In general, a linear
relationship between a dependent variable (Y ) and an
independent variable (X ) can be expressed by the equa-
tion Y = a + bX, where a is a fixed constant. The value of
the dependent variable (Y ) equals the sum of a constant
(a) plus the value of the slope (b) times the value of the
independent variable (X ). The slope (b) shows the
amount of change in Y variable for every one-unit change
in X. The constant (a) is also called the Y-intercept, which
determines the value of Y when X = 0.
Theoretically, if the dependent variable Y can be per-
fectly estimated by the independent variable X, then the y
should be precisely located on the predicted line. The
equation of the predicted line can be expressed as Y = a +
bX. The Y (“Y hat”) represents the predicted value Y.
However, actual social data never follow a perfect linear
relationship. In fact, the actual observed value of Y is
rarely on the predicted line. Therefore, it is necessary to
take the deviations between the predicted value and actual
value into account through the linear regression model. In
the linear regression model, for every X value in the data,
the linear equation will predict a Y value on the “best-fit-
ting” line. This “best-fitting” line is called a regression line.
The linear regression model should then be expressed as Y
= a + bX + e. The e is the error term, or a residual, which
represents the distance between predicted value (Y ) and
the actual Y value in the data.
The goal of linear regression estimation is to develop
a procedure that identifies and defines the straight line
that provides the best fit for any specific set of data. A
basic approach of linear regression is to estimate, by min-
imizing the residuals, the values for the two regression
coefficients (a and b) based on the observed data. In other
words, the predicted errors estimated by regression equa-
tion must be smaller than the errors made with any other
linear relationship. To determine how close the predicted
scores are to the observed scores, the method of Ordinary
Least Squares (OLS) is the most popular approach used in
the linear regression.
OLS estimates regression equation coefficients (a and
b) that minimize the error sum of squares. That is, the
OLS approach sums the squared differences between each
observed score (Y ) and its score predicted by the regres-
sion equation Y, and produces a quantity smaller than
that obtained by using any other straight linear equation.
The result is a measure of overall squared error between
the line and the data: Total squared error = Σ(Y–Y) 2.
In Figure 1 the distance between the actual data point
(Y ) and the predicted point on the line (Y ) is defined as
Y–Y. The best-fitting line to the data should thus show a
sum of absolute values of Y–Y to be the minimum, or the