When constituents' focal concerns reach the level of emergency, more inroads on liberty are permissible as proper personal sacrifices in the interest of certain public goals. The commissioner may, therefore, gamble on curtailment of freedom in the interest of health and safety, even under close scrutiny by civil libertarians and the news media. Prisons can be locked down, curfews can be ordered, evacuations from dangerous areas can be required, medication can be increased, and immunization can be made a condition of access to community schools and pools. Such emergencies, however, are usually temporary; the commissioner must be extremely sensitive to the diminishing sense of emergency and quickly match it by decreasing the restrictions on freedom of choice and action. Crisis conditions are an important prerequisite of restrictions that must be policed, such as lock-downs, curfews, and quarantines. Unless the danger is seen as real and pressing, enforcement usually requires more policing than scarce resources will allow and more staff commitment than the fading danger will support.
Sometimes emergencies provide opportunities for an imaginative commissioner. Research by a number of scholars demonstrates how a "foot in the door"-that is, a very limited action in accord with a public commitment-leads later to a more extensive action, consistent with the first small maneuver.8 A crisis may require clients and constituents to make visible, small sacrifices, or slight extra efforts, that are manifestly directed toward exceptionally worthy public goods. Having publicly demonstrated their commitment once, albeit by a small step, the constituents often are willing at a later time to make greater, nonemergency sacrifices in the interest of progress toward those same goals.
Thereby, some proportion of clients and constituents may become new supporters of the commission and its idealistic goals. In the field experiments of Freedman and Fraser, 50 to 75 percent of those who first took modest actions showing a commitment to an altruistic goal were willing, when asked later, to take much more demanding actions to demonstrate that commitment-an astounding number when compared to controls.
Although embarrassing, some low-frequency, high-cost, high-visibility, but inevitable tragic events may also provide opportunities for resource mobilization for reform. A publicized discovery that mental patients are being abused in a state mental health center could lead to the discrediting of the center and the commissioner responsible. However, the incident could also lead to new hiring practices and improved quality of care for patients. In the same way, welfare fraud could lead to allegations of neglect and theft by the commissioner, but it could just as easily lead to improved regulation and services, improvements that the commissioner had long been seeking.
If the incidents call attention to important but not focal concerns, the events can potentially redirect focal concerns. If the incidents mobilize support to push the commissioner to initiate some program that is really needed, they can also marshal the constituency support necessary to affect that program. If the commissioner can accept and be challenged by the criticism, adversity can be turned into opportunity. At such junctures, accepting responsibility and allowing constituents to influence the launching of new programs may be the commissioner's most powerful weapons in securing resources and allocating them to new, needed programs. Public involvement, of course, can be only a flash in the pan, if the concern shifts quickly to indifference again.
Again, the commissioner copes by recognizing political patterns, relying on intuition to assess the relative power position of the constituents and the direction in which the power relationships are changing. The astute commissioner has many options. A commissioner may choose to join or to form coalitions that offer the minimum necessary power at the lowest cost in concessions, very much as W. A. Gamson would have predicted. On the other hand, the commissioner may act primarily to modify the power structure by bringing the least powerful groups together to oppose the more powerful. T. A. Caplow observed such power balancing in families, and R. M. Emerson proposed its presence in all social systems. Conversely, both the "lowest cost" and structure-changing principles often give way to a power maintenance principle. The members of low-cost coalitions and power-balancing coalitions can often be enticed out of the coalitions by a desire to affiliate with more powerful figures. They then find themselves in a coalition that contains those groups currently highest in power and that acts to maintain the current power advantages of those groups. What goals do these options fit?
When commissioners prefer the status quo, they promote coalitions that maintain the structure. When they wish to change the status quo, they back the coalitions that bring less powerful constituents together to increase their power so that it equals or exceeds that of the more powerful coalitions. In either case, they promote those coalitions that demand fewest concessions in return for their support. When they judge that the opposing coalitions have equal power, commissioners may foster or join no coalition at all and allow each to neutralize the others. A school superintendent, caught between powerful proponents of birth control instruction and equally powerful opponents, may stand aside. The stalemate maintains a desired status quo.
Partly because of uneasiness about the commissioner's use of the coercive power of the state and partly because the innovative actions of any political entrepreneur carry the entrepreneur's special stamp, any mistakes tend to be attributed to the commissioner personally. Commissioners are almost routinely accused of personal incompetence, neglect, deception, cover-ups, and even character flaws. Thus, one necessary condition to effective coping is a reserve of self-esteem that allows a commissioner to absorb considerable hostility without being baited into a public fight. Said one commissioner, "If you're right you don't need to get mad; if you're wrong you can't afford to get mad. I say that, and it's true, but I still get mad. I just try not to show it." It also helps to understand the dynamics of political entrepreneurship in impossible jobs and to recognize the social forces that stimulate personal accusations.
