18
But the FAA’s lower presence at these hearings suggests one of two things—that FAA is
attempting to contract the scope of conflict, in Schattschneider’s terms, by declining invitations to
appear, or because FAA’s proportion of testimony is lower because Congress uses hearings to
castigate FAA or to seek non-FAA driven solutions. Regardless, the mean tone
9
of testimony by
members of Congress is much more negative when specific events are mentioned (-0.571) than
when no event is on the agenda (-0.3125). What motivates greater Congressional attention is the
desire to speak out over policy failure. By contrast, the tone of FAA testimony remains stable,
from an event-related -0.1 to a “normal” -0.09.
This negative attitude toward existing policy is accompanied by greater congressional
attention to the aviation safety problem. Members of Congress account for a quarter of all
testimony when an event is live on the agenda, as opposed to one fifth of the testimony when an
event is not prominent. Indeed, members of Congress are the only major group of federal actors
that appear more often in the wake of disasters than in more normal times.
There is scant evidence of the creation or mobilization of unions or of consumer groups that
are devoted to serving passengers’ interests (which, with the vast increase in air travel in the
United States since the industry was deregulated, is roughly congruent with the broad public
interest). This finding will be further explored in the conclusion to this chapter.
Conclusions
The aviation security domain shows considerable prima facie evidence of learning from
prior disasters. I summarize this learning in terms of Peter May’s three categories of learning in
Table 5. My consideration of political and social policy learning is largely speculative, while the
instrumental learning conclusions are supported by the data described here.
Evidence of instrumental learning most clearly includes the substantive policy change that
has followed the major aviation security incidents in the late 1980s through the 2001 attacks.
These changes include changes to policy instruments to address more clearly emerging threats
from explosives, and, after September 11, to address the flaws in passenger screening systems
that allowed the terrorists to commandeer the four airplanes. Evidence of social policy learning
includes, in particular, the shift in treatment of aviation security from a problem of the
transportation sector to a national security problem, with national consequences for policy design
and implementation. Even if it emerges that, in the end, aviation security is viewed as less a
9
Tone is a measure of the witnesses attitude toward current policy, where +1 indicates a witness believes
that current policy is adequate or too stringent and need not be changed, and -1 where a witness believes
that policy should be changed. The data reported here are from my congressional testimony data set.
Convention