Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-fvjsw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T12:04:42.799Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Study of Policy Development

Part of:JPH 30th Anniversary Most Cited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Paul Pierson
Paul Pierson
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button.

What do we mean by the term “policy history”? In conventional usage, “history” refers to one of two kinds of investigation: the study of something that happened at some point in the past, or the study of how something came to be what it is. It is this second usage—the idea of policy history as an unfolding story of policy development—that I want to examine in this essay. Understanding the sources of policy often requires that we pay attention to processes that play out over considerable periods of time.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 17 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Directions in Policy History , January 2005, pp. 34 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2005

References

Notes

1. This essay presents an introduction to issues explored in much more depth in Pierson, Paul, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I would like to thank Julian Zelizer for very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

2. McDonald, Terrance J., ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, 1994)Google Scholar; Bates, Robert et al. , Analytic Narratives (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar.

3. See, for example, Binder, Sarah, Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock (Washington, D.C., 2003)Google Scholar, and Mayhew, David, Divided We Govern (New Haven, 1991)Google Scholar.

4. Derthick, Martha, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, D.C., 1979), 9Google Scholar.

5. Patashnik, Eric, “After the Public Interest Prevails: The Political Sustain-ability of Policy Reform,” Governance 16 (2003): 203–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Arguments about what is now often termed “policy feedback” are usually traced back to sources such as Lowi, Theodore's classic article, “American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics 16 (1964): 677–715CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lowi's argument, however, is really about the structure of issues and the associated (diffuse or concentrated) winners and losers. It is not an argument about how specific structures of public policy can influence politics. Recent strands of work on this topic stem largely, in my view, from lines of argument set down by Theda Skocpol and her collaborators in the 1980s. See especially Weir, Margaret and Skocpol, Theda, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,” in Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985), 107–162CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Esping-Andersen, Gosta, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990)Google Scholar.

8. Swank, Duane, Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huber, Evelyn and Stephens, John, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets (Chicago, 2001)10.7208/chicago/9780226356495.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pierson, Paul, ed., The New Politics of the Welfare State (Oxford, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Huber and Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State, 32.

10. Ibid, 28–29, emphasis added.

11. Iversen, Torben and Soskice, David, “An Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences,” American Political Science Review 95 (2001): 875–89410.1017/S0003055400400079CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)10.4159/9780674043725CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Hacker, Jacob, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (Cambridge, 2002)10.1017/CBO9780511817298CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Campbell, Andrea Louise, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mettler, Suzanne, “Bringing the State Back In to Civic Engagement: Policy Feedback Effects of the G.I. Bill for World War II Veterans,” American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 367–380CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Schattschneider, E. E., Politics, Presures, and the Tariff (New York, 1935)Google Scholar.

16. Howard, Christopher, The Hidden Welfare State (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar; Hacker, The Divided Welfare State.

17. Reuschemeyer, Dietrich, Stephens, Evelyn Huber, and Stephens, John, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago, 1992), 32–34Google Scholar.

18. McAdam, Douglas, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago, 1982), 3Google Scholar

19. For a detailed discussion, see Pierson, Paul, “Big, Slow-Moving, and … Invisible: Macrosocial Processes in the Study of Comparative Politics,” in Mahoney, James and Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Princeton, 2003), 177–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar.

21. McCubbins, Matthew D., Noll, Roger G., and Weingast, Barry R., “Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 3 (1987): 243–277Google Scholar; McCubbins, Matthew D. and Schwartz, Thomas, “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms,” American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984): 165–179CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Of course, this was a standard conclusion of implementation research, which of course was well placed to examine unintended consequences precisely because it examined what happened after policies were enacted–although typically considering only a limited stretch of time. The classic in this genre is Pressman, Jeffrey L. and Wildavsky, Aaron, Implementation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973)Google Scholar.

23. March, James and Olsen, Johan, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Simon, Herbert A., Models of Man (New York, 1957)Google Scholar.

24. Jervis, Robert, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar.

25. Levitt, Barbara and March, James G., “Organizational Learning,” Annual Review of Sociology 14 (1988): 323CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. Hayek, Friedrich, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Rules and Order (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Hirsch, Fred, The Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar; Schelling, Thomas, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Perrow, Charles, Normal Accidents (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Jervis, System Effects.

27. Kahler, Miles, “Evolution, Choice, and International Change,” in Lake, David A. and Powell, Robert, eds., Strategic Choice and International Relations (Princeton, 1999), 165–196Google Scholar.

28. Huber and Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State; Hacker, Jacob and Pierson, Paul, “Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State,” Politics and Society 30 (2002): 227–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Hacker and Pierson, “Business Power and Social Policy.”

30. Moe, Terry, “Power and Political Institutions,”paper presented at the Conference on Crafting and Operating Institutions, Yale University,New Haven,2003Google Scholar; Thelen, Kathleen, “Historical Institutionalism and Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 369–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. Bachrach, Peter and Baratz, Morton S., “The Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56 (1962): 947–952CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lukes, Stephen, Power: A Radical View (London, 1974)10.1007/978-1-349-02248-9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Polsby, Nelson W., Community Power and Social Theory (New Haven, 1963)Google Scholar; Wolfinger, Raymond A., “Nondecisions and the Study of Local Politics,” American Political Science Review 65 (1971): 1063–108010.2307/1953498CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. Gaventa, John, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana, Ill., 1980)Google Scholar.

34. Keyssar, Alexander, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000), 107–116Google Scholar

35. Ibid, 107.

36. Ibid.

37. John Myles and Paul Pierson, “The Comparative Political Economy of Pension Reform,” in Pierson, ed., New Politics of the Welfare State, 305–33.

38. Skrentny, John D., The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)Google Scholar; Mettler, “Feedback Effects of the G.I. Bill”; Hacker, The Divided Welfare State.