Studies of American public policy tend to be highly specialized, with scholars focusing on individual programs such as Social Security, Medicare, or the G.I. Bill. Much has been gained from this approach, especially in terms of carefully documenting how policies create their own politics. In The Policy State: An American Predicament, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek demonstrate the benefits of employing a more expansive perspective. The authors “elaborate a view of the whole” (p. 4), offering an ambitious assessment of how the policy state in its entirety has reshaped American politics—sometimes for the better, but often for the worse.

The Policy State begins with the observation that the early American state was “a very different state from the one we know today” (p. 16). Although the book is neither a chronological treatment of American policy making nor a comprehensive summary of the expansive range of activities undertaken by the government, its primary objective is to document “a historical reconfiguration of…government’s driving motives” in the United States (p. 36). The authors argue that early American government was primarily concerned with upholding a traditional set of rights—of slaveholders over slaves, husbands over wives, and employers over employees—and accompanying structures. Their point is not that government did less but rather that what it did “represented an opposite set of governing principles” (p. 6).

Indeed, the contrast with the contemporary American state is stark. Today, government and policy are largely synonymous, so much so that the forward-looking policy motive—with its commitment to designated goals or courses of action and the articulation of guidelines for their achievement—is sometimes viewed as the raison d’être of government. Orren and Skowronek contend that this policy orientation is only possible because state formation in the modern United States features the “dilution of rights and the erosion of structure,” both of which “entail a relaxation of constraints on the policy motive” (p. 34). They trace the growth of the policy state to a series of seismic events that began during the second half of the nineteenth century and accelerated during the twentieth century, including the emancipation of four million slaves following the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Rights Revolution. These events had the collective effect of “eroding the boundaries and dissolving the distinctions that once constrained policy’s reach” (p. 6). As a result, the dominant motive of governance shifted from defending rights to creating policy.

With traditional rights destabilized and long-standing structures hollowed out, the policy state has broadened the government’s range of options. The enhanced administrative capacity of state governments and the extended policy reach of the American presidency epitomize this institutional reformulation; similarly, the growing number of executive branch agencies facilitated the “infusion of additional stakeholders into the policy calculus” (p. 111). The constitutional framework once served as a containment structure, but now—with American government “stretched every which way” (p. 90)—it has become an opportunity structure. With more and more institutional pathways to policy, “incumbents in every office have become policy entrepreneurs, advancing programs to secure their positions and enhance their power” (p. 17).

The authors’ analysis of contemporary American politics describes a government that is more inclusive, on the one hand, but also more dysfunctional and volatile, on the other. Orren and Skowronek identify a perpetual churning in which the proliferation of available options “makes achievements provisional, protections unreliable, and commitments dependent on who is next in charge” (p. 6). One need look no further than the transition from the Obama to the Trump administration to see how, in such an environment, electoral change can lead to attempts at policy rollback, reversal, and retrenchment.

With its emphasis on volatility and its description of an increasingly unmoored polity, The Policy State poses a stark intellectual challenge to canonical theories of the policy process. One leading analytical framework invokes policy feedback or path dependence, emphasizing the difficulty of dislodging existing policy arrangements because of their impacts on mass publics, interest groups, and government elites. In contrast, Orren and Skowronek portray the emergence of the policy state as a process of “path clearance” whereby “pivotal events toppled fixed relations of authority and pried the door open to programmatic solutions” (p. 13). Similarly, punctuated equilibrium theory focuses on patterns of stability and change in the making of public policy, attributing periods of stability to the existence of policy monopolies that combine dominant political understandings with institutional arrangements that reinforce those understandings. Scholars working within this second tradition must grapple with the possibility that punctuations are more frequent and durable policy monopolies rarer in the contemporary United States.

At the same time, however, these well-established theories of the policy process suggest that it may be necessary to qualify some of the sweeping claims advanced in The Policy State. The Trump administration has experienced mixed success in its attempts to unravel the accomplishments of its predecessor, with some policies proving more durable and sustainable than others. Indeed, the proliferation of institutional pathways implies that a growing number of policy entrepreneurs can mobilize to defend existing arrangements. Recent experience suggests that they will. One constructive way to extend the analysis in The Policy State would be to identify and attempt to explain this variation in policy volatility.

One of the book’s few noteworthy omissions highlights the possible intellectual payoff that such an effort might provide. Government spending is an obvious metric of the policy state’s contemporary magnitude, and—as Orren and Skowronek acknowledge—total government spending in the United States skyrocketed during the twentieth century. Entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid represent the bulk of this massive expansion. However, the authors devote virtually no attention to the role such programs have played in the emergence and ramifications of the policy state. This omission is especially striking in light of the “entitlement” label that is applied to these programs. One of the key insights of The Policy State is the recognition that the dominant motive of governance shifted from rights to policy, yet entitlement programs seem to blur this distinction: they are widely perceived to confer a set of rights, albeit of a very different sort from the rights that the authors argue typify earlier eras in U.S. history. Indeed, the battle over whether entitlements should be understood as individual rights has been one of the argumentative fault lines in American politics for decades. Moreover, these entitlement programs represent some of the most politically resilient public policies in the contemporary United States.

Another topic that merits greater attention is the relationship between the policy state and partisan polarization. An important consequence of the policy state, according to Orren and Skowronek, is the erosion of localism. Social divisions were “scattered and submerged” in early America, and decentralization created a “cushion for consensus” (p. 178). By the second half of the twentieth century, however, the policy state had thrust contentious issues like civil rights, abortion, and religion onto the national stage. The authors advance the “rather modest claim” that the “expansion of the policy space at the national level, encompassing potentially all issues of economy and society, is an important enabler of polarization today, and likely also one of its several causes” (p. 173). To be sure, a significant number of Americans are disillusioned with the shortfalls of the policy state. However, recent studies of affective polarization and the identity-based sources of the current partisan divide raise questions about the relative importance of policy concerns.

Having documented several negative repercussions of the policy state—dysfunction, instability, gridlock, and polarization—the authors do acknowledge its positive contributions. In early America, “rights were trumps when some people did not have them; structure was a more dependable constraint when it locked certain issues out. Recovering that lost ground is neither possible nor desirable” (p. 196). These and other gains should be celebrated, but they cannot dislodge a sense that American democracy is not healthy in the early twenty-first century. It has never been easy to identify a nationally cohesive public interest in the United States, but “polarization in the context of a fully developed policy state poses more than a challenge. It is more an existential threat, potentially denying authority to every state action” (p. 196). Yet for those disheartened by the current state of affairs, The Policy State does not offer even a partial remedy for the broken state of our union. The authors refuse to endorse alternatives such as deliberative democracy or juridical democracy, concluding instead with the observation that the Trump presidency “has accelerated a crisis of authority that has been building for decades” (p. 198). This pessimistic and uncomfortable assessment is sure to resonate with both scholars and casual observers of American politics alike.

In sum, Orren and Skowronek provide a wide-ranging and illuminating assessment of contemporary American governance. In an era of academic specialization, the book demonstrates the value of stepping back to offer a general appraisal of the current state of affairs. The subfield of American politics would be stronger if more scholars adopted the approach exhibited in The Policy State.