The growth of government in the postwar years has stirred the emergence of a veritable cottage industry of books and theories on the process of policy innovation and change. Matt Grossman’s new book provides a systematic contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of policy change.
Central to Grossman’s methodology is the meticulous harvesting of 268 histories of policy change done by scholars across various disciplines, including political scientists, historians and policy analysts. These histories constitute a new universe of 790 discrete policy changes covering congressional enactments as well as executive and court decisions. The coding and analyses of these works were based on a systematic scheme that sought to apply the same taxonomy to the somewhat diverse policy histories. The broad database on policy change that is synthesized here becomes the basis for the theoretical insights in the book, but will also pay dividends for students of the policy process going forward.
The descriptive evidence amassed by Grossman provides important new information on commonalities and differences in policymaking across major policy issues in our system. Across all issue areas, he finds a status quo bias, but also finds that government responsibility grows when policy change is enacted. Constituencies dependent on government become entrenched, consolidating their gains and springing forth with expansions when a window of opportunity opens.
Grossman emphasizes the continuity and similarities across policy areas, dismissing the utility of issue typologies put forward by Theodore Lowi (“American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies and Political Theory,” World Politics 16 [no. 4, 1964] 677–715) and James Wilson (The Politics of Regulation, 1980, pp. 357–94). Yet he nonetheless presents data showing intriguing differences in such areas as policy productivity across the 14 policy areas defined by the Public Agenda Project, with environmental and health policy leading the way. Bipartisanship was common in macroeconomics, agriculture, and several other issues, but policy actions in most policy areas were liberal in nature. Yet even for the most polarized policy areas, bipartisan action was usually necessary in order to move legislation forward to enactment. Interesting data are also presented on the nature of governing networks across these policy areas as well, showing differences in centralization, density, bipartisanship, and legislative–executive ties across the 14 areas.
The author uses the data to challenge many established theoretical frameworks about the policy process. His analysis of policy histories leads him to conclude that policy change is driven more by endogenous networks of institutional entrepreneurs and elites that collaborate at the core of government than by exogenous factors such as public opinion, elections, research, and focusing events.
Policy change does not require agreement on public agendas for elite coalitions to enact legislation, just as agreement on agendas does not necessarily predict policy action. Macro politics and ideological polarization fail to predict policy productivity, and public opinion is sufficiently ambiguous and malleable to enable elites to safely take the initiative. Using data from his policy histories and the policy agenda project, he actually finds that public opinion polls and media coverage are negatively associated with the passage of important legislation.
The strength of the author’s use of policy histories is the breadth and depth of analysis of important episodes of policy change that have not heretofore been synthesized. However, Grossman is the first to recognize the challenges associated with doing a secondary analysis of secondary analyses. If the diverse range of policy historians got it wrong, then those errors will be replicated in the book. Because the individual authors had their own rubrics and frameworks, they suffer from inconsistencies that can limit confidence in the findings presented here. For instance, Grossman suggests that policy histories have a tendency to ignore long-standing factors that are present in the background. Thus, if the authors did not consistently probe for the impact of the opinions of attentive and inattentive publics, it is likely that this dimension will not be consistently addressed by the meta analysis in this book.
Perhaps for these and other reasons, caution is advised when drawing systematic conclusions from this kind of database. Indeed, the findings of this study are as complex and ambiguous as the policymaking process itself. Thus, while endogenous factors were important in nearly 80% of the 790 policy enactments covered in the analysis, exogenous factors, such as research, focusing events, and public opinion, were important in half of these cases as well. In short, rather than shattering established theories about macro politics and public agendas, the author’s data suggests that policy decisions are driven by internal governance networks that are also informed and shaped by familiar exogenous variables. In fact, networks anticipate and reinforce changes in public opinion, ideas, and issue salience, reflected in policy changes across such diverse areas as cigarette smoking, education testing, and gay marriage.
The challenge presented by this analysis is to deepen our understanding about the relationships between endogenous policy networks and exogenous factors. Other work in political science featuring the centrality of policy elites suggests that exogenous factors, such as public opinion and issue framing, are ushered in by the anticipated reactions of the elites themselves. Douglas R. Arnold’s formative treatment of congressional policymaking (The Logic of Congressional Action, 1991) suggests that the views of inattentive publics are factored into important congressional decisions by congressional elites eager to avoid the potential mobilization of “silent majorities” by prospective opponents. So while Grossman is right that broader publics are not members of governing networks themselves, this does not necessarily imply a democratic deficit if the networks have incentives to account for these publics in their policy decisions. It is not clear whether and how the policy histories covered in his book accounted for the anticipatory behavior of governing elites.
The study’s exclusion of the failure to enact policy change may have led to an underestimation of the roles of inattentive publics and latent values, for these factors may have their most formative impact for nondecisions. In these cases, systematic bias may be so pervasive that it keeps certain issues from coming to a vote or even from gaining a hearing in Congress. One thinks of gun control over the past decade or middle-income tax increases as two cases in point where congressional fear of silent majorities is sufficient to keep these issues off the policymaking agenda.
I also fear that the exclusion of policy failure may have also led the author to underemphasize the implications of the intensity of recent party polarization for the policymaking capacity of governing elites in such areas as transportation policy and budgeting, the latter of which is marked by prolonged stalemates and crippling government shutdowns. I wonder how much of Grossman’s observations about the cohesiveness and capacity of governing networks reflect the weighting for historically liberal policy innovations present during much of this period. The more recent period of polarization is characterized by the disappearing center and party majorities who are far more obsessed with exogenous primary voting publics than with elite consensus and governing norms. Contemporary Washington has seen very little of the consensus of cross-partisan coalition building that characterized much of the period studied.
Nonetheless, we must applaud Grossman for moving the study of policy formation forward through a novel database and for the questions and puzzles raised by his theoretical assertions. Both features of Artists of the Possible should stimulate new waves of much-needed scholarship in years to come.
