Timothy J. Conlan, Paul L. Posner, and David R. Beam categorize and explain the factors governing policymaking across eight domestic policy issue areas since 1981. They offer a typology that will serve as an insightful tool for teaching public policy and include copious summaries of the politics behind many specific policy changes. This analysis is a useful antidote to one-dimensional models of politics and an answer to claims that major policy change is infrequent, requiring special and rare circumstances. Yet the project is methodologically limited, with post hoc storytelling using flexible and overlapping labels.

The foundation of Pathways of Power is a 2 x 2 table asking two fundamental questions to categorize a policy debate: 1) Is it driven mostly by ideas or interests? And 2) is participation narrow or broad? According to the model, experts drive narrow debates about ideas (called “expert”); interest groups drive narrow debates about interests (called “pluralist”); political parties drive broad debates about interests (called “partisan”); and public symbolism drives broad debates about ideas (called “symbolic”). The authors find a roughly even mix of these types of policymaking (which they call “the four pathways of power”), except that the partisan category is becoming more common. They find multiple types of policy debates within each of the issue areas they track (health care, gun control, farm policy, tax legislation, welfare policy, financial regulation, federal mandates, and budget policy and reform). Political conflict, they find, is high in partisan debates and low in pluralist and symbolic debates. Resulting policy changes are larger in partisan- and expert-driven cases and incremental in group-driven cases. Pluralist debates also produce more sustainable policies compared to those driven by parties or public symbolism.

The authors should be credited for the broad and diverse issues they tackle, though they are not fully representative of Washington policy debates. By design, they focus on legislation rather than agency rulemaking or court decisions, they only include domestic policy, and they mostly cover successful cases of policy development and adoption (even though the vast majority of legislative efforts fail). Compared to issues on the congressional agenda, their issues are of higher public salience and are broader in nature. The three issue areas where they devote the most focus (budget, tax, and federal mandate policy) feature more conservative policy proposals than other issue areas. Most case-selection methods would be biased in some fashion; the authors select on the basis of their own expertise, which shows in their in-depth understanding of each area’s development. Yet a full accounting of congressional issues would likely show a lot more narrow areas driven by interest groups and experts and fewer where public symbolism plays a dramatic role.

The book’s main method is a qualitative categorization of policy debates; each classification is reasonable and explained in detail. Many policy debates could easily have been placed in another category by a different set of coders, however; most issues are properly seen as incorporating actors with interests and ideas and could be placed on a continuum from limited to broad participation, rather than fitting squarely in one of the four boxes. To take one example, debates over national health care in 1993 and 2009 involved important roles for parties, groups, public symbolism, and experts. The typology would be particularly difficult to use in advance to predict how a policy debate will develop. Some of the outcomes the authors predict with their typology (such as the level of conflict and the size of a policy change) are associated with the evidence used for their initial categorization.

Nonetheless, the book advances perceptive answers to important questions. First, how do we know whether a policy change is sustainable? Consistent with work by Eric Patashnik, the authors show how the initial enacting coalition behind a public policy change matters for its sustainability: If a policy change goes against the interests of the most important actors in a field, it may not last for long. Policy experts may be particularly bad at the long game because they hope to set optimal policy without regard to satisfying important constituencies. Second, when can a small group of interest groups or experts keep policy questions to themselves? The authors admirably separate this question from the question of when interests or ideas dominate a political conflict, but it is still hard to know in advance when outsiders will succeed in widening the scope of conflict. Third, why does some legislation pass Congress easily with limited opposition? The book points to the role of focusing events that play out in the public eye, moving policy discussions toward symbolic goals.

One limitation of the authors’ categorization is that it pays less attention to the action within Congress and the administration. Research by Scott Adler and John Wilkerson points to the critical role of impending deadlines and reauthorization in driving the amount and focus of lawmaking. Many of the policy changes described in this book also required painstaking compromises, satisfying many specific leaders and constituencies inside government. Policy entrepreneurs often make use of experts and interest groups in internal coalition building, rather than simply allowing government to serve as a forum for competition among outside groups. Individual leadership skills can matter for outcomes; important work by Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman shows that legislators have very different rates of effectiveness in advancing their bills through Congress. When discussing specific stories, Pathways of Power is clear about the role of individual policymakers and the context within Congress; yet its typology largely assumes that Congress as a whole responds to outside forces (parties, interest groups, experts, or the public).

Despite a few limitations, the book offers a great mix of broad political knowledge and analyses of particular policy changes. It will be useful for introducing analysts and practitioners to the larger trends and systematic factors driving policymaking. The pathways toward policy change identified and analyzed here, though not mutually exclusive or fully representative, are great lenses for viewing policy history and contemporary debates. It does not hurt that this is a great read, making it appropriate for use in the classroom or in the halls of Congress.