The politics of deregulating the civil aviation industry

The study analyzes the political developments culminating in the adoption of deregulation as a policy alternative in the field of government aviation policy. Commercial aviation was one of the first industries affected by the deregulation trend in the current period of national regulatory reform. In 1978, President Carter signed into law the Airline Deregulation Act which restricted the authority of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) to regulate commercial airlines for the first time since 1938. The law provided for the eventual termination of airline economic regulation and the CAB. The purpose of the study is to determine how deregulation came to be an acceptable reform alternative.

Government documents, including congressional hearings and reports, a variety of contemporaneous reports, public speeches, and memoranda, were principal sources for the study. Book length studies of airline regulation provided background information and historical perspectives on the deregulation initiative. Journal articles, news journals and papers, and trade journals were also consulted. Finally, the documentary sources were supplemented with 11 personal interviews conducted in the summer of 1980 in Washington, D.C. with participants in the reform process.

Two major conclusions are developed in the study. First, the analysis illustrates several features of the process and politics of airline deregulation which contradict conventional assumptions about the dynamics of the policy process and the character of regulatory politics. Treatments of the policy process which emphasize the stability, perpetuation, and incremental elaboration of existing policy frameworks are not compatible with the airline case. Aviation reform was a case in which a policy termination proposal was not defeated. On the contrary, deregulation became increasingly acceptable during the reform process. Furthermore, the regulatory agent served as a major advocate of deregulation rather than an opponent as assumed in most studies of regulatory politics. Administrative deregulation played a major role in passage of the reform bill.

A second conclusion developed in the study is that the adoption of the deregulation alternative was not the result of a major transformation in the politics of regulation. The politics of deregulation is presented as a continuation of the politics of regulation. Traditional political relationships characteristic of airline regulation were not fundamentally altered in order to make deregulation an acceptable policy alternative. Rather, deregulation was adopted because of the use of six deregulation strategies and the existence of conditions which enhanced their effectiveness. The de regulation strategies are: (1) the articulation of a policy alternative, (2) policy evaluation, (3) political packaging, (4) strategic compromise, (5) strategic staffing, and (6) administrative deregulation.