What's Next? The liberal-conservative split over social regulation is probably deepest in the areas of environmental and workplace health and safety regulation, though it extends to other kinds of regulation as well. The government pursued social regulation with great vigor in the 1970s, but Republican President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) sought to curb those controls in the 1980s, with some success.

Regulation by agencies such as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) slowed down considerably for several years, marked by episodes such as a dispute over whether NHTSA should proceed with a federal standard that, in effect, required auto-makers to install air bags (safety devices that inflate to protect occupants in many crashes) in new cars. Eventually, the devices were required. Social regulation began to gain new momentum after the Democratic Clinton administration took over in 1992. But the Republican Party, which took control of 83