This book is a must read for every student of U.S. politics. In the course of analyzing the role of the “right-wing troika”—the American Legislative Exchange Council, State Policy Network, and Americans for Prosperity—in the recent “stark rightward shift” in policy making across the states (p. xiv), Alexander Hertel-Fernandez offers many general insights into U.S. legislative politics, political parties, wealthy individuals, and organized interest groups, especially business firms.
The setting is state legislatures, many of which operate with little public scrutiny and suffer from extremely limited resources: their members are part-time, poorly paid “citizen legislators,” with little or no personal staff, who meet in curtailed legislative sessions. Legislators naturally turn to helpers like the “right-wing troika” for intellectual fodder, debating points, model bills, and electoral support. Just as Grant McConnell once argued, private power tends to prevail.
The book thoroughly documents the history, organizational structure, activity, and impact of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which enlists a large portion of all U.S. state legislators, provides them with social networks and pleasant perks, and gives them “model bills” that ALEC’s corporate sponsors pay big dues and fees to help craft. It describes the extensive State Policy Network (SPN) of state- and regional-level conservative think tanks (operating in all 50 states) that blitz the public and legislators with press releases and reports, mobilize grassroots activists to push for legislation, and provide the intellectual underpinnings for new legislation. It also offers a close look at the highly organized Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Koch brothers’ “800-pound gorilla” that brings together a large network of very wealthy, extreme conservatives; engages them in policy discussions; and directs their large contributions (totaling $400 million or more per electoral cycle) toward Koch-friendly right-wing candidates and causes. AFP does not sleep between elections; its state directors and paid staffs get deeply involved in state policy making. Nothing on the Left comes remotely close.
The book notes occasional tensions between AFP’s libertarianism and ALEC’s advocacy of government help for business, but these are exceptions. It points out many links among ALEC, SPN, and AFP in terms of common donors, ideas, and personnel, and outlines specific cases of close coordination. The “troika” characterization seems well justified.
But how much influence does it actually wield over policy making? Even with a mass of observational data and rigorous statistical analysis, causal inference is difficult. Yet the book’s account is remarkably persuasive. The troika’s impact looks quite substantial, especially in these days of Washington gridlock when state policies are often pivotal. Case studies and interviews, aggregate data on legislation, and individual data on legislators (surveys, bill sponsorship, roll-call voting) indicate that several major policy trends of our time owe a great deal to the right-wing troika.
Especially closely analyzed are two major cases: 19 states’ rejection of federally funded Medicaid expansion, which cut the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of health insurance coverage roughly in half, and the post-2010 cascade of measures to defund and restrict public employee unions, which severely cut the membership, mobilizing power, and political clout of what had been the strongest state-level organizational representatives of working people. The troika’s fingerprints appear all over these and a number of other instances of state policy making that have worked against democratic policy responsiveness (e.g., rejection of minimum wage increases, clean-air measures, and gun control) and popular participation in politics (e.g., voter ID laws.)
Given the troika’s assiduous efforts at secrecy, merely identifying legislation as derived from ALEC’s model bills is a major challenge. Hertel-Fernandez cleverly used plagiarism-detection software to identify bills and laws that were substantially copied from ALEC’s models. This enabled him to calculate the number of ALEC-influenced bills introduced (a very large number) and to compute enactment rates overall and in particular states. The book pins down strong connections between the introduction or enactment of ALEC bills and the limited resources of particular legislatures and individual legislators. It also demonstrates links from particular types of corporations (particularly big, politically active ones worried about threats of state regulation) to their support for SPN and ALEC and to resulting bills and legislation. Bivariate relationships in figures and tables are often bolstered by multiple regressions in the appendixes.
ALEC’s success has been greatest in Republican-controlled states, but it has extended to many entirely Democratic-controlled states as well, where its success rate has actually been nearly two-thirds as great! This striking finding—perhaps underemphasized in the book—highlights a major problem for the Democrats: their wealthy and corporate donors tend to push them in certain directions that are unpopular with most Americans, including embrace of some business-friendly measures (e.g., the nonregulation of internet-based firms) and the failure to advocate some highly popular policies concerning jobs, incomes, health care, pensions and the like.
By the same token, the book’s focus on legislative politics may lead to an underappreciation of the importance of elections (which, after all, produce the extremely conservative GOP legislators and governors who most eagerly back ALEC’s model bills) and the enormous importance of big money (including AFP money) in shaping the state political settings within which the troika operates.
From a broader perspective, this book is best viewed as an outstanding account of little-understood mechanisms by which certain conservative political actors in the wider society—particularly business firms, wealthy individuals, and ideological activists—go about affecting political outcomes. It is consistent with various accounts of a “right turn” among those actors and in our political system as a whole, which in turn has probably resulted from historical events that occurred over the course of decades: heightened economic competition from low-wage countries abroad, which set U.S. capital against U.S. labor and (with help from automation) severely weakened workers’ political power; the civil rights revolution and the move of the white South into the GOP; social tensions accompanying women’s liberation, gay and lesbian rights, and high levels of immigration; and other events that helped produce today’s strong and highly conservative, ALEC-friendly Republican Party. In short, the right-wing troika has probably served as a vehicle—a fast-moving, highly effective vehicle—for broader social forces.
For those seeking to slow down the troika, Hertel-Fernandez offers some rays of hope. Secrecy and low visibility have been important to its success. After Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, revelations of ALEC’s role in promoting permissive gun legislation provoked a public backlash, and about one-third of ALEC’s corporate affiliates temporarily dropped their memberships. This points toward a Schnattsneiderian strategy of expanding the scope of conflict by shining bright light on the troika, light that this book will surely help provide. The book also offers concrete suggestions to the center Left for counterorganizing political power across the states, suggestions based on careful scrutiny of the troika itself.
