School voucher programs—loosely defined to encompass a range of policies that indirectly subsidize private school attendance—grew slowly over the second half of the twentieth century, seeing a modest but short-lived rise in the decades following Brown v. Board. It was not until the 2000s that vouchers took off. In 2000 there were a total of eight such programs. Yet by 2019, there were 62, across 28 states, serving more than 500,000 students. As vouchers rose in prominence over the last 20 years, core design features of the new policies also changed, shifting from tuition grants funded through legislative appropriations toward a model more reliant on indirect subsidies through the use of tax expenditures.

What explains the timing and nature of this growth in school voucher programs? In America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State, Ursula Hackett argues that the expansion and evolution of voucher programs were products of policy elites’ learning about the strategic advantages of obscuring the government’s role in subsidizing private schooling. By deliberately delinking government policies from their potential and realized on-the-ground outcomes, including the maintenance of racial segregation, the subsidization of private religious schools, and the transfer of resources from public to private schools, policymakers were able to improve the political palatability of voucher programs and, more consequentially, to insulate voucher policies from future legal challenges.

Central to Hackett’s argument is the concept of attenuated governance, a strategy whereby policymakers conceal the role of the state in shaping ultimate policy outcomes. Policymakers can pursue this strategy by incorporating design and delivery features into their programs that empower third-party providers and individuals (“policy attenuation”), distancing the government from direct responsibility for contentious policy outcomes. They might also pursue it by describing the goals and operation of programs using language that deemphasizes the role of the government (“rhetorical attenuation”). As Hackett argues, the biggest payoffs to policy success and durability come from incorporating both types of attenuation strategies at the same time because the combination of design and communication attenuation “offer[s] the greatest degree of plausible deniability in court about the connections between the state and a controversial policy commitment” (p. 53). The focus on attenuated governance’s success in navigating court challenges speaks to the types of policies that may lead policymakers to embrace such delinking strategies: those that touch on the foundational issues that have long structured conflicts over the course of American political development. Because school vouchers frequently touched on these deep conflicts over race, religion, and the proper balance of civic institutions, policymakers eventually came to see the political appeal in attenuated governance.

Hackett develops the theoretical framework in the book’s first two chapters, describing the concept and uses of attenuated government and situating it within the three foundational challenges of race, religion, and communitarianism versus individualism at the heart of American political development. The book then presents three chapters involving state-level political battles over the use of school vouchers that cut across these foundational struggles of race, religion, and civic institutions. The final two chapters and conclusion show how these earlier battles and moments of policy learning set the stage for the rise of tax credit scholarships by the late 2000s, as well as more recent experimentation with educational savings accounts. Drawing from an impressive range of newly collected qualitative and quantitative evidence, Hackett reveals the process of political learning concerning the potential weaknesses of pro-voucher policies and policy elites’ subsequent strategic maneuvering to improve the chances of their proposals being adopted and standing up to court challenges. Although the central question focuses on the recent proliferation of voucher programs, the approach taken is deeply historical. By delving into the earlier voucher efforts and the constitutional challenges they engendered, Hackett can contrast the design and rhetoric of successful and sustainable policies in more recent years to the failures of earlier periods in which attenuation was shallower.

The book makes significant inroads into our understanding of American political development, education policy, and the politics of policy design. Those interested in the politics of the United States’ hidden welfare state will find the book’s conceptual innovations especially valuable. Hackett usefully disaggregates the hidden (or submerged) state into two dimensions of hiddenness: the role of the state may be hidden by obscure and complex policy designs or by the use of rhetoric that attempts to make the state’s role more hidden. In highlighting these two dimensions, as well as the ways policymakers may creatively combine them, the book makes a strong case for revisiting the origins story of purportedly hidden welfare programs other than school vouchers to see if (and when) policymakers may adopt attenuation as a deliberate strategy.

In addition, in both conceptualizing how attenuated governance operates and insulates and revealing how policymakers over time have considered the risks and rewards of specific types of voucher strategies, Hackett offers an alternative account for the sustainability of modern voucher programs beyond those centered exclusively on asymmetric information arising from a context of low citizen visibility and powerful private stakeholders. It is not just citizens’ lack of recognition of the role of the government (and the openings this creates for private stakeholders) that sustains and expands submerged programs. Instead, Hackett’s account clearly reveals that programs relying on attenuated governance also emerge through the deliberate actions of policymakers aiming to craft policies that will be legally defensible, especially when the goals may be controversial.

Finally, in addition to delving into the specific policy area of school vouchers, which has been understudied within the hidden welfare state literature, Hackett brings the study of hidden welfare state politics into venues that have received less attention, namely state legislatures and courts. The states are ideal arenas for the types of experimentation, learning, and diffusion described in the book, and educational provisions and positive rights in state constitutions generate particular legal opportunities and constraints.

That school vouchers seem so particularly ripe for this type of policymaking and state-level experimentation, yet are subject to specific state legal and constitutional constraints, raises questions about how well the framework generalizes to other types of voucher programs and to other hidden welfare state programs, including those that are more likely to be implemented at the federal level. Although Hackett anticipates these concerns by including other examples of attenuated policy design, rhetoric, and resulting political struggles throughout the book (for example. in the areas of mortgage credit and abortion access) the question of how attenuated strategies operate outside of school voucher politics remains.

That Hackett does not apply the same degree of detailed analysis to every other potential policy area is hardly a critique of the book; instead it suggests important areas for future work. Fortunately, Hackett’s book provides a roadmap for how to structure and carry out this type of work and encourages those of us who study the hidden welfare state to think more deeply about what it means that the state is hidden and why.