Don’t be misled by the title of this book. Andrew Karch and Shanna Rose do not mean to suggest that the states are naturally open and receptive to the national polices directed at them from Washington. Nor do they think the states are merely reactive. Federalism’s many pieces present themselves here as major players in all aspects of national policy making. Their influence is felt on both the formulation and the implementation of federal initiatives, and they are as significant for their indifference and hostility to federal action as they are for their enthusiasm and support for it. In no small measure, the individual American states in Responsive States determine the fate of the initiatives that come their way. At issue is how they respond.
The contribution of the book lies in bringing federalism into the larger, ongoing discussion of the politics of public policy in political science. To achieve this, Karch and Rose follow Herbert Wechsler’s classic assessment of “The Political Safeguards of Federalism” (Columbia Law Review, 54, 1954). Writing in the era of Brown v. Board of Education, Wechsler found the significance of the states less in the rights and powers formally reserved to them by the Tenth Amendment than in the way they themselves structure government and politics at the national level. National elites are attentive to the states, because local political interests are engrained in the organization of the institutions they inhabit. Federalism is a pervasive, inescapable influence, because the states are the foundation on which various modes of national representation are built. As interests are transmitted back and forth across these boundaries, parchment barriers take a back seat to the complexities of intergovernmental relations. Even as American politics becomes more national over time, the states maintain their influence on national decision making.
Although Responsive States is fully attuned to the relatively recent appearance of powerful intergovernmental lobbies like the National Governors Association, the book’s conceptual framework opens up the study of the states’ relationship to national policy across a wide swath of American political development. Anchoring the states’ influence in the structure of national representation implies that they have always been major players in national policy making. This reorientation pushes the analysis of federalism beyond the standard progression of historical periods and categories (dual federalism, cooperative federalism, coercive federalism) and timeworn clichés like states as “laboratories” of experimentation for potential national action. The states’ interests are, rather, omnipresent in politics at the center, and because their interests change from time to time depending on the circumstances, national support for policies affecting them remains contingent on their ever-evolving assessments. The upshot is a decidedly policy-based approach to political development. At any given time, one policy formulated at the top may produce positive feedback from below and “lock in,” whereas another policy produces indifference or hostility and fails to take hold. Sustainability will vary across policies, so wherever we break into the story of federal–state relations, we are likely to find a highly varied and seemingly inconsistent pattern of interactions.
This is, to say the least, a densely textured picture of intergovernmental relations. The hard part, analytically speaking, is to bring some order to these “extraordinarily fluid” (p. 16) boundaries and changeable relationships. Karch and Rose point out that one of the limitations of the literature on policy feedback to date has been its reliance on single case studies or paired comparisons, and they are to be commended here for braving a much wider assessment. They peg the fate of national policies to two sets of factors and the interactions between them. First are factors related to policy design: fiscal generosity, administrative controls and constraints, program duration, and coalition potential. Second are factors related to timing—changes in the political mood, in partisan configurations, in economic cycles, and in the institutional capacities of the states themselves. The interaction between these two sets of factors is especially significant for policies designed for periodic renewal, because the conditions that initially gave rise to the policy may have changed dramatically by the time it is up for reauthorization.
Karch and Rose examine the significance of these variables through eight in-depth case studies: the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921), Unemployment Insurance (1935), Medicaid (1965), General Revenue Sharing (1972), Superfund (1980), No Child Left Behind (2002), ACA Medicaid Expansion (2010), and ACA Health Insurance Exchanges (2010). The cases seem to be chosen to illustrate the range of possibilities, and to that end, they show the basic explanatory elements combining in different ways for a wide variety of outcomes. We see plainly just how difficult it is to generalize: no two cases are exactly alike. The authors are appropriately modest in their claims. What we learn is that, although the presence of a certain variable (e.g., generosity, duration, interest support) “favors” a certain outcome (e.g., sustainability), there are no sure tickets. The case studies “neither conclusively demonstrate that a particular condition was necessary to the outcome,” nor do they “uncover the frequency with which specific conditions and outcomes arise” (p. 36). We are left then with a vivid picture of a very messy state of affairs. Whether there is something of a more general nature yet to be discovered about these interactions or whether this finding is itself an insight into the essential character of a “policy state” is just one of the important questions this study brings to the fore.
Researchers should read Responsive States as a challenge. The book outlines an ambitious agenda, and there are several tacks that might be taken in carrying the project forward. Those uncomfortable with messiness and prone to seek patterns might want to start with a more systematic selection of cases. There is, to be sure, a social-policy tilt to the cases the book examines, which itself raises the question of whether the fickle effects of federalism might be domain specific. The book leaves the impression that self-reinforcing dynamics rarely take hold, but that implication is left hanging. On its face at least, it is difficult to square with the penetration of the states by national power on so many different fronts.
One can imagine this book spawning a cottage industry of scholarship that holds some variables constant to show the role of others. One might select for cases by presidential administrations, by matching parties—state and national—or by a given stage in the economic cycle. Or one might pick cases in the same policy area but over different eras; for instance, public works, farm subsidies, or medical assistance. Applications like those might help narrow the field of likely suspects in the way of interest groups and state-level administrators. Depending on the number of cases studied, it might then be possible to assess the effects on feedback of remaining elements, perhaps holding additional variables constant within smaller sets. Without some effort in this direction, it is hard to see why or how one should expect the Sheppard-Towner Act to line up with Superfund. In contrast, if the idea is to continue the emphasis on policy variation, it might be interesting to see how much institutional factors—configurations of state authority, political parties—“matter” as opposed to, say, interest groups or economic cycles and to select cases with that end in mind.
At a more conceptual level, more attention might be given to federalism as such, with regard to policy implementation and feedback effects in particular, as opposed to decentralization more generally. As an example from Responsive States, consider No Child Left Behind, rolled out with great fanfare by President George W. Bush in 2002 and supported by a wide coalition in Congress. Karch and Rose refer repeatedly to state officials and the complexity of the task at hand, but the question arises whether the most important obstacles to enforcement of standards did not occur at the local, school-board level, which left states with weak enforcement levers more or less at their mercy. Here, comparisons with similar efforts elsewhere without federalism, but with a strong tradition of localism—for instance, in Britain—come to mind. Or perhaps a comparison of American states with differing degrees of central or local government control might underscore the impact of what the authors propose as a distinctive structural form.
Finally, there would seem to be much more to be said about policy design. Karch and Rose tell us more about the importance of design than about the designers themselves. The reader wants to know about those who are making these design choices, especially the choices that seem to prepare for obvious footfalls going in. Are these decisions based on strategic calculation, or are they simply expedients? Do they represent actual compromises in the design process, or are they based on anticipated responses in execution? How fully do the designers of policy understand the diverse environments as they plan? Do those who design policies learn anything from previous successes and failures? Do they take into account the possibility of policy overload on limited administrative capacities in different states through an awareness of other demands? Are such issues even on their mind? Do they compete with the political pressures of the moment? We realize that these are questions that stray pretty far from the purposes of Responsive States, but they are nonetheless stimulated by its rich content.
