Political scientists have devoted much attention, with good cause, to the enactment of general-interest reforms. These are reforms that involve “non-incremental change of an existing line of policymaking intended to rationalize governmental undertakings or to distribute benefits to some broad constituency” (2; italics in the original). Reforms like transportation deregulation and sulfur dioxide (acid rain) emissions trading pose real puzzles, because they defy the norm in policymaking in imposing change that is nonincremental and that achieves benefits for a broad constituency, exactly the kind of constituency that often fares poorly in a governmental system typically more permeable to organized interests. How such reforms have been achieved is the subject of important work by scholars such as Douglas Arnold, David Mayhew, and Martha Derthick and Paul Quirk. In this marvelous book, Eric Patashnik takes on a crucial question long neglected by policy scholars: What happens after such reforms are passed? Which general-interest reforms are successfully sustained, and why? He examines case studies of agriculture reform, tax reform, pension and health reform, government procurement reform, airline deregulation, and emissions trading to elucidate the conditions under which reforms prove durable. In doing so, he produces not only a helpful primer for policy entrepreneurs on how to design reforms with self-reinforcing features, but also a fine-grained scholarly analysis of the limits of previous work on policymaking. It is an instant classic that will be widely read by practitioners and scholars alike.

Patashnik’s contribution begins by pointing out that the factors that secure general-interest reforms in the first place do not guarantee sustainability. Many of the factors that come together in an epiphenomenal way to facilitate reform afterward quickly revert to their prereform status and cannot help to sustain reform in the long term. The attention of the public and the media shifts to other new issues; watchdog groups stop watching; “bought” groups do not stay bought; Congress ignores rules it set for itself, and, perhaps most perniciously, remains permeable to opposing interests, who, if they are still around, will come back to try to pick apart the reform. Indeed, Patashnik concludes that some of the factors that facilitate reform actually undermine sustainability. The side payments often needed to help secure reform increase “skepticism” about its long-term fate. Similarly, “midcourse policy corrections” are sometimes needed to achieve reform, but the more interventionist government is, the greater the possibilities for political manipulation and the unraveling of reform.

Three factors help reforms persist. First, perhaps least surprising for political scientists, are changes in political structures. Reforms are more sustainable when they undermine preexisting cozy-triangle relationships among interest groups, lawmakers, and executive agencies that had an interest in the status quo; when political transaction costs are raised or lowered to make “doing the right thing” and maintaining the reform regime easier; and when political venues change to sites where reform coalitions have greater access. In short, reforms are more likely to prove durable when the political structures that favored the status quo are replaced by those that favor the reform coalition. Nonetheless, a mere change in political structures is rarely enough to secure policy “lock-in.” And, as social scientists who study policymaking know all too well, much of politics is a repeat game, in which losers in one round often return to fight again.

Hence, a second characteristic of durable policy reforms: engagement in what Patashnik terms “creative destruction.” Unless the particular constellation of factors that facilitated reform in the first instance remain in place over the long term—highly unlikely—it is entirely possible that losers will return in later rounds of policymaking and chip away at the reform or even overturn it altogether. The novel point that Patashnik makes is that while political losers are seldom eliminated, economic losers may be. The nature of market competition is such that entities on the losing side—such as airlines that went out of business after deregulation—may simply cease to exist, removing one important antireform force entirely. Thus reforms that marshal economic forces that eliminate actors may prove more durable than those that simply (and temporarily) buy off political actors without eliminating them.

A third characteristic of sustainable reforms is the generation of positive feedback effects. These are feedbacks at the elite level, changes in beliefs and behaviors among interest groups and political elites that alter the political environment and create a self-sustaining dynamic for the reform (there are seldom feedback effects among the public; the mass beneficiaries of general-interest reforms, such as consumers or taxpayers, typically remain dispersed and unorganized). One such elite feedback is the creation of new constituencies, such as interest groups with a stake in the reform’s continuation, who work to protect their new benefits. A second feedback is realized in the increased cohesion of those groups helped by the reform, and decreased cohesion among those groups who benefited from the prereform regime. For example, firms within a given industry may have very different business models and fare very differently under reform; this diversity can undermine the cohesiveness of trade groups that had formed around the old policy. Changes in beliefs constitute a third feedback. When a reform sweeps away government subsidies in a given sector, groups that view the reform as highly credible will decide to discontinue pressing the government for subsidies, while those who think the reform has little credibility will continue to seek subsidies as under the old system. A fourth feedback of sustainable reforms is a change in group images, where groups that benefited from the earlier regime are discredited during reform, either stigmatized, as with Big Tobacco, or “unmasked,” as with Big Agriculture and its inability postreform to hide behind the family farmer image. When reforms contain these positive feedbacks, they generate a self-reinforcing dynamic that helps shore up the new policy regime and prevent its unraveling.

Ultimately Patashnik offers a two-by-two box in which reform sustainability is driven by two main factors, the stability or fluidity of the interest-group environment and the size of the investments actors make in the new status quo. If groups do not make large investments in the new status quo and the group environment remains stable, there is a high probability that the reform will be reversed. In these instances, reform has not changed fundamental conditions sufficiently; the old regime reconstitutes itself. Alternatively, if there are no large investments and the group environment does change, a slow erosion of the reform is likely—a new set of actors is involved, but they have not invested much in the new status quo and so chip away at it. In the converse situation, when groups do make large investments, reform is more likely to stay in place. This takes two forms: if the group environment is stable, groups must simply learn to live with the new status quo; if there are new groups as well, reform will stay in place because the new group environment increases the costs of countering the reform effort—some new actors are proreform and will act vociferously against erosion.

The empirical chapters, which are a fascinating read, bring out several important points. One is that shifts in institutions are key. Institutions prove more important to sustainability than individual actors; as enthusiastic as policy entrepreneurs may be, they turn to other issues, or they leave the scene altogether through retirement or defeat at the ballot box. A reform is on more stable footing when it has introduced institutional change. But a second crucial point is that not all shifts in institutions are equally effective in securing stability. The most successful reforms dismantle old institutions (like sunseting the Civil Aeronautics Board, which had protected airlines before deregulation) or create new ones (the sulfur dioxide allowance banking system). The next most successful institutional shifts transfer government authority from one structure to another (not quite as secure, because the original institutional venue still exists and may mitigate against reform). The least successful institutional changes simply layer new authority on top of old ones; here, old actors can easily resurface, reassert their authority, and undermine change.

The second set of important insights has to do with interest-group feedbacks. Here, interest groups are more important than publics. The citizen beneficiaries of general-interest reforms are difficult to organize, and so sustainability depends on third parties—interest groups—who also have an interest in the new status quo and who act as proxy representatives for ordinary citizens. Patashnik does not make this point directly, and such proxy representation is not the primary purpose of such groups, but the fact that they have congruent interests secures benefits for the otherwise unorganized publics. And as with institutional shifts, different levels of change secure sustainability to greater or lesser degrees. The most successful reforms create new interests with a strong stake in the reform (like the new carriers who supported airline deregulation) and eliminate old groups (although that is less common). The next most successful are reforms that weaken the organized interests who had a stake in prereform policy. This is not as successful as elimination, however, because such interests can regroup and fight reform later.

Patashnik’s rich analysis does raise some questions. One set of questions has to do with which reform characteristics are necessary for sustainability and which are sufficient. Do reforms last only when there is a significant shift in institutions and a sweeping away of old interest groups antithetical to reform? Is one or the other sufficient? The two-by-two box seems to suggest that the size of group investments is really the driving factor. When such investments are smaller, reform dissolves; the second factor, the fluidity of group identities and memberships, appears chiefly to drive the speed and completeness of that dissolution, not whether it will happen. Likewise, large group investments in the new status quo help achieve sustainability; the nature of the group environment seems to matter mainly for the degree of entrenchment (a stable environment with the same actors having a slightly higher chance of unraveling than an environment with new actors and coalitions?).

A second question concerns whether sustainable reform in some areas is possible at all, since reform would aim at the very heart of congressional prerogatives. The chief case in point is tax expenditures. The gradual accretion of tax breaks in the years after the 1986 Tax Reform Act pruned so many is not too surprising in that giving away such breaks to narrow interests is a central activity of the Congress. Reducing other perennial congressional favorites, such as earmarks or deficit spending, seems just as unlikely. Is there any way to structure such reforms—that are both “winnerless” and strike at the heart of congressional reelection needs—to achieve sustainability?

A third open question is the role of contingency. Patashnik cites the importance of timing in the sustainability of reform. The durability of the 1996 welfare reform was enhanced by its implementation in the context of a strong economy (its work requirements and lifetime eligibility limits were easier to swallow at a time when jobs were plentiful). Conversely, the sustainability of the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act, aimed at reducing market distortions in and overall levels of farm subsidies, was undermined by a precipitous drop in commodity prices beginning in 1998. Congress responded with large “emergency” payments to farmers that resulted in an increase in subsidies rather than the decline the reform had promised; by 2000, almost half of all farm income came from government payments rather than market income. The element of contingency raises the question: What is the importance of timing versus reform design? Were there reforms that contained ostensibly self-reinforcing elements that crumbled nonetheless due to poor timing? Were some reforms sustained by the luck of timing, even if they were missing key design elements? If so, what does that say about the power of these reform design elements compared to the influence of sheer context?

A fourth question concerns the period specificity of the work. Patashnik’s point about the market sweeping away actors who have an interest in undermining reform—ridding the system of such actors in a way politics itself seldom does—is one the most fascinating arguments in the book. The case studies date from the 1970s on, perhaps because one of the factors enabling general-interest reforms was the weakness of the parties and the consequent rise of ideas as drivers of policy change that obtained during this period. But it is also the era of neoliberalism and the use of market mechanisms (deregulation, emission credit trading, and so on). Were there general-interest reforms prior to this period? If so, what kinds of mechanisms were employed then to secure sustainability? Were they less successful than the market mechanisms extolled here?

A final point is more a comment than a question and concerns the book’s theoretical contribution. In his discussion of policy feedbacks at the elite level, Patashnik rightly invokes scholars such Theda Skocpol, Paul Pierson, and Jacob Hacker, who have made tremendous theoretical and empirical contributions to this research agenda. Interestingly, however, he does not cite a debate among comparative historical institutionalist scholars about what is missing in feedbacks research, a debate to which I think he makes a great contribution. As James Mahoney and especially Kathleen Thelen have pointed out, the policy feedbacks literature has failed to specify sufficiently the mechanisms by which policies shape subsequent politics. And yet that is exactly Patashnik’s contribution—showing precisely how policy designs can reshape the political landscape in self-reinforcing ways. Perhaps he did not cite this debate because it originates among comparativists and his focus is understandably on the United States, where the forces railing against reform sustainability are particularly acute. And it is the case that the mechanisms enforcing sustainability are different in the pluralist and permeable United States than in more traditionally bureaucratic states. Nonetheless, he does show mechanisms at work, helping open up the black box around feedback effects. He should be less reticent in claiming this important contribution.

In sum, Eric Patashnik has written a fascinating and enormously important book that tells us how policy designs help shape the long-term sustainability of general-interest reforms. While previous policy feedback scholars have looked at the self-protective dynamics of redistributive policies, where mass constituencies rally to preserve their benefits, this category of policies presents a special puzzle. The beneficiaries are dispersed and unorganized: What factors protect change in their absence? The key is in the ways in which these reforms foment institutional change and alter the interest-group landscape. It is a brilliant book that confirms Patashnik’s place among the top scholars examining the interaction between political science and public policy.