The case for the case study; what Imelda Marcos, Nikita Khrushchev, and Niccolo Machiavelli could teach the American Political Science Association

Washington Monthly, June, 1989 by Suzanne Goldsmith, Katherine Boo

The administration's sensitivity to organizational behavior served it well as the crisis peaked. Two puzzling cables from the Kremlin arrived--one, long and rambling, seemed to accede to the demand to withdraw the missiles; the other, terse and official, appeared to retract that offer. What to do? Realizing that the different cables could reflect different Soviet power blocs, Kennedy simply ignored the second and responded to the first. The next day, Khrushchev agreed, and the world's closest brush with full-scale nuclear war was over.

Staying awake

The missile crisis combines two of the case study method's best attributes: excitement and nuance. "Part of what I'm trying to do is to teach them about institutions and how they actually work," says Fritz Mayer, a former case-study instructor at Harvard who now teaches public policy at Duke. "The problem with the quantitative approach is that it misses some of the subtlety, some of the flavor, of real politics." In class, students will sometimes join a role-playing exercise, in which they'll defend a point of view from the personal and institutional perspective of the actual people involved. "It's a high-pressure situation," says James Lieber, a master's student at the Kennedy School. "There's a lot of information coming in. There are very serious people representing very different positions, ranging from the joint chiefs to the attorney general."

You don't need the world poised on the brink of nuclear war in order to have an effective case study. One of Lieber's favorites is an examination of racial politics in suburban Cleveland. Specifically, the case revolves around the decision faced by the Ohio Housing Finance Agency over whether to finance a program meant to promote integration in Shaker Heights. Aimed at preventing the racial "tipping" of neighborhoods, it provided low-interest loans for whites buying in black neighborhoods, and, to a lesser extent, blacks buying in white neighborhoods.

"Suppose I say this is a great policy because it preserves integrated neighborhoods," Lieber says. "And somebody else looks at me and says, `And some bunch of white people has decided how many black people it's okay to have in a neighborhood, and then they'll steer them someplace else. You are in effect dispersing a black power base before it can consolidate, so you can't elect black political representatives.'

"So all of a sudden," Lieber says, "I feel confused--how can I seek integration without doing all this stuff that this other person has said is racist? Analysis of these things frequently reveals ramifications that people hadn't seen earlier."

Other examples that have gained students' enthusiastic endorsement:

Should the government finance kidney dialysis for everyone who needs it? "You had two students screaming at each other," says Sandeep Puri, a Kennedy School graduate. "This topic segued into another: the whole issue of whether to legalize laetrile, which became a discussion of paternalism, actually--when do you relax John Stuart Mill's absolute prohibition against paternalism. What about cigarettes and alcohol?"