Policy Feedback: How Policies Shape Politics PDF

Béland et al. Although the idea that existing policies can have major effects on politics and policy development is hardly new, in the last three decades we have witnessed a major expansion of policy feedback scholarship, which focuses on the mechanisms through which existing policies shape politics...

Béland et al. Although the idea that existing policies can have major effects on politics and policy development is hardly new, in the last three decades we have witnessed a major expansion of policy feedback scholarship, which focuses on the mechanisms through which existing policies shape politics and policy development. Starting with a discussion of the origins of the Public Policy concept of policy feedback, this Element explores early and more recent contributions of the policy feedback literature to clarify the meaning of this concept and its contribution to both political science and policy studies. After exploring the rapidly expanding scholarship on policy feedback and mass politics, this Element also puts forward new research agendas Policy Feedback Policy Feedback that stress several ways forward, including the need to explain both institutional and policy continuity and change. Finally, the last section discusses the practical implications of policy feedback research through a discussion of its potential impact on policy design. This title is also available as Open Access on How Policies Cambridge Core Shape Politics About the Series Series Editors Elements in Public Policy is a concise and M. Ramesh authoritative collection of assessments of the National University of Singapore (NUS) state of the art and future research directions in public policy research, as well as substantive new research on key topics. Edited by leading Michael Howlett Simon Fraser University, British Columbia Daniel Béland, Andrea Louise scholars in the field, the series is an ideal https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press Xun Wu medium for reflecting on and advancing the Hong Kong University of understanding of critical issues in the public Science and Technology sphere. Collectively, the series provides a forum for broad and diverse coverage of all major topics in the field while integrating Judith Clifton University of Cantabria Campbell and different disciplinary and methodological approaches. Eduardo Araral National University of Singapore (NUS) R. Kent Weaver Cover image: Pulvas/Shutterstock ISSN 2398-4058 (online) ISSN 2514-3565 (print) https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Elements in Public Policy edited by M. Ramesh National University of Singapore (NUS) Michael Howlett Simon Fraser University, British Columbia Xun WU Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Judith Clifton University of Cantabria Eduardo Araral National University of Singapore (NUS) POLICY FEEDBACK How Policies Shape Politics https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press Daniel Béland McGill University Andrea Louise Campbell Massachusetts Institute of Technology R. Kent Weaver Georgetown University  University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108940542 DOI: 10.1017/9781108938914 © Daniel Béland, Andrea Louise Campbell, and R. Kent Weaver 2022 This publication is in copyright. 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When citing this work, please include a reference to the DOI 10.1017/9781108938914 First published 2022 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-94054-2 Paperback ISSN 2398-4058 (online) ISSN 2514-3565 (print) Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.  Policy Feedback How Policies Shape Politics Elements in Public Policy DOI: 10.1017/9781108938914 First published online: May 2022 Daniel Béland McGill University Andrea Louise Campbell Massachusetts Institute of Technology R. Kent Weaver Georgetown University Author for correspondence: Daniel Béland, [email protected] Abstract: Although the idea that existing policies can have major effects on politics and policy development is hardly new, in the last three decades we have witnessed a major expansion of policy feedback scholarship, which focuses on the mechanisms through which existing policies shape politics and policy development. Starting with a discussion of the origins of the concept of policy feedback, this Element explores early and more recent contributions of the policy feedback literature to clarify the meaning of this concept and its contribution to both political science and policy studies. After exploring the rapidly expanding scholarship on policy feedback and mass politics, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press this Element also puts forward new research agendas that stress several ways forward, including the need to explain both institutional and policy continuity and change. Finally, the last section discusses the practical implications of policy feedback research through a discussion of its potential impact on policy design. This Element also has a video abstract: www.cambridge.org /PublicPolicy_Beland_abstract This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core Keywords: policy feedback, mass politics, policy change, policy design, public policy, politics © Daniel Béland, Andrea Louise Campbell, and R. Kent Weaver 2022 ISBNs: 9781108940542 (PB), 9781108938914 (OC) ISSNs: 2398-4058 (online), 2514-3565 (print)  Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Theoretical Perspectives on Policy Feedback 2 3 Policy Feedback and Mass Politics 13 4 Policy Feedback and Policy Change 31 5 From Theory to Practice: Policy Feedback and Policy Design 69 References 75 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press  Policy Feedback 1 1 Introduction The claim that existing policies shape the politics of policy development is hardly new and can be traced back to the work of scholars such as E. E. Schattschneider (1935: 288), who, more than eighty-five years ago, famously wrote that “new policies create a new politics.” Yet the concept of policy feedback that is widely used today to explore how existing policies shape politics and policy development over time is much more recent (Orloff 1993; Pierson 1993; Skocpol 1992; Weir, Orloff, and Skocpol 1988). What is specific about policy feedback is its temporal emphasis on policy development and its claim, in policymaking and politics more generally, that policies are not only effects but potential causes (Pierson 1993, 2004a). Over the last three decades, in exploring new empirical and theoretical grounds, the scholarship on policy feedback expanded to focus on the variety of causal mechanisms through which existing policies shape politics and policymaking over time (Béland and Schlager 2019a, 2019b; Campbell 2003, 2012; Jacobs and Weaver 2015; Mettler 2005; Mettler and SoRelle 2018; Patashnik 2008; Patashnik and Zelizer 2013; Weaver 2010). The main objective of this Element is to review and assess early and more recent contributions to the literature on policy feedback to clarify the meaning of this concept and its contribution to both political science and policy studies. This Element focuses on three related bodies of literature, which cover the most central aspects of the scholarship on policy feedback. Each of the following three main sections features a critical literature review and, in the case of Sections 3 and 4, an agenda for future research on the topics covered. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press Section 2 reviews the early literature on policy feedback. As suggested, the concept of policy feedback emerged within historical institutionalism (HI), which has made a strong contribution to both political science and policy studies. Simultaneously, while the section shows that turning to HI is essen- tial to understand the genesis of policy feedback as a concept, it also suggests that other traditions such as punctuated equilibrium (PE) theory and the social construction of target populations have also contributed directly to the field. Section 3 discusses the evolving literature on policy feedback and the polit- ical behaviors and attitudes of mass publics. The section suggests that public policies can influence the behaviors and attitudes of members of the public, with effects on subsequent politics, because (1) they heighten or diminish levels of political participation among those affected, increasing or diminishing political inequality within or between politically relevant groups, and (2) they affect attitudes toward the role of government (sometimes versus the market), support  2 Public Policy for incumbents and parties, and perceptions of program recipients. These feedback effects vary in their strength and durability. Section 4 focuses on how policy feedback affects policy change. As sug- gested, policy feedback mechanisms that affect prospects for policy change are of several distinct types, including economic returns, sociopolitical mechan- isms, informational and interpretive mechanisms, fiscal mechanisms, and state capacity mechanisms. Within each of these categories, both self-reinforcing and self-undermining mechanisms exist. Simultaneously, these policy feedback mechanisms can operate in both strong and weak forms, with their impact conditional both on the exact nature of those feedbacks and on how they interact with “exogenous” contextual factors that vary widely across political systems and policy sectors. The final section turns our attention to the potential contribution of policy feedback research to the world of practice, with a particular focus on policy design. As argued, each of the policy feedback mechanisms outlined in Section 4 can be used by both those seeking to reinforce and those seeking to undermine the status quo to advance their interests. Moreover, efforts to use feedback mechanisms to achieve policy objectives are subject to several con- straints, notably the necessity of compromise to achieve policy change and the difficulty of anticipating the effects of some policies. Some strategies, such as “frontloading” policy benefits to secure public support, are likely to be employed by proponents of changes to current policy. 2 Theoretical Perspectives on Policy Feedback https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press 2.1 Historical Institutionalism and the Concept of Policy Feedback The concept of policy feedback emerged in the 1980s within and at the same time as HI, a broad approach to politics and public policy that is distinct from two other contemporary types of new institutionalism: organizational institu- tionalism, which focuses on cultural legitimacy and the institutional develop- ment of organizations, and rational-choice institutionalism, which focuses on institutional constraints on individual choice (Campbell 2004; Hall and Taylor 1996; on new institutionalism, see Campbell 2004; Lecours 2005; Peters 2011). As the label implies, HI focuses in large part on the evolution and impact of institutional processes over time. It is particularly attentive to the temporal sequence of institutional processes as they unfold over time (Pierson 2004b). Intellectually, HI is closely related to the idea of Bringing the State Back In, the title of a widely cited edited volume published in the mid-1980s (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985). Developed in reaction against behavioralist and structuralist approaches that focus on systems theory and class power,  Policy Feedback 3 respectively, this idea is closely related to the claim that states have a certain level of autonomy vis-à-vis economic and social forces located outside of it (e.g., Campbell 2004; Fioretos, Falleti, and Sheingate 2016; Immergut 1998; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992). Historical institutionalism emerged in the United States, a country where systems theory and other behavioral approaches to politics had somewhat marginalized the study of the state (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985). Yet drawing on existing US scholarship on the state and public policy helped historical institutionalists bring the state back in. The work of Hugh Heclo (1974), who emphasized the role of bureaucrats and policy learning in the development of public policies, proved especially influential. Martha Derthick’s (1979) study of Social Security development in the United States drew attention to the role of bureaucrats in defining and expanding the program, a practice closely related to state autonomy. Stephen Skowronek’s (1982) book Building a New American State, which documented the creation of an administrative state in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, moved the concept of the state to the center of what became known as American Political Development (APD), a historically minded scholarship on politics and public policy closely related to what would become HI (on APD, see Orren and Skowronek 2004; Vallely, Mettler, and Lieberman 2016). While born in the United States, HI strongly emphasizes the importance of comparative and international research, stressing how institutions – which are broadly defined as norms and rules that typically include public policies them- selves – vary from country to country, which makes comparative research https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press highly relevant. Even some of the early HI studies focusing on the United States have a comparative angle, in part because their objective is to explain what is specific to the United States (e.g., Amenta 1998; Orloff 1993; Skocpol 1992; Weir 1992). Early HI scholarship focused primarily on fiscal and social policy (Immergut 1992; Orloff 1993; Pierson 1994; Pierson and Weaver 1993; Steinmo 1996). To understand the status of policy feedback within both HI and political analysis more broadly, we can turn to the distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic effects of institutions (Jacobs 2016: 341). First, according to Alan Jacobs (2016: 341), A synchronic institutional argument identifies a short-run effect of prevailing political-institutional arrangements on the relative political influence of pol- itical actors. Arguments about synchronic institutional effects... take actors’ political capacities and policy demands as given and then assess the ways in which the “rules of the game” favor or disadvantage particular types of actors and demands over others.  4 Public Policy An early example of synchronic analysis within HI is the work of Ellen Immergut (1992) on “veto points.” Studying the politics of health care reform in three European countries, Immergut (1992) suggested that, compared to France and Sweden, the institutional configuration of the Swiss political system, especially federalism and direct democracy, created more institutional oppor- tunities for physicians in Switzerland to successfully oppose health care reforms that they opposed. In general, veto points concern how formal “political institu- tions shape (but do not determine) political conflict by providing interest groups with varying opportunities to veto policy” (Kay 1999: 406). This is clearly an example of synchronic analysis that stresses how stable “rules of the game” such as federalism and direct democracy shape the constraints and opportunities of political actors involved in the policy process. This type of synchronic analysis about how formal political institutions influence policy behavior has been applied to different policy areas (e.g., Bonoli 2001; Immergut, Anderson, and Schulze 2007; Tsebelis 2002). In contrast, Jacobs (2016: 344) draws our attention to diachronic factors and processes in political and policy analysis. “Central to diachronic institutional analysis is a fundamentally historical analytical move: the examination of how political structures have, over time, shaped the political capacities and the policy demands that actors bring to the political battlefield” (Jacobs 2016: 344). Just as the concept of “veto points” is an example of synchronic institu- tional analysis, policy feedback is an example of diachronic institutional ana- lysis (Jacobs 2016: 345). For HI, policy transforms policies into institutions that have much explanatory power in and of themselves. As an exploratory mech- https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press anism, therefore, policy feedback is about the diachronic (temporal) political effects of policies, which are no longer seen only as the effects of politics but also as a potential cause of it, over time (Pierson 1993). The claim that existing policies can shape politics and policymaking antedates the advent of the concept of policy feedback, including Heclo’s (1974) above- mentioned work on policy learning. Policy learning suggests that existing policies affect the ways in which political actors perceive potential policy alternatives. This discussion about policy learning leads the HI scholar Ann Shola Orloff (1993: 89), when introducing the concept of policy feedback, to quote Heclo (1974: 315): “What is normally considered the dependent variable (policy output) is also an independent variable... Policy inevitably builds on policy, either in moving forward what has been inherited, or amending it, or repudiating it.” This quote not only points once more to the shift from policy as an effect to policy as a cause (Pierson 1993) but also suggests that the institutional effects of existing policies over time can lead to both self-reinforcing and self-undermining pro- cesses, depending on the context (Jacobs and Weaver 2015). In other words, the  Policy Feedback 5 development of these policies is not always about path dependence, which generally refers to how institutions reproduce themselves over time in a specific direction that becomes harder and harder to change as these institutions mature (Pierson 2000). Yet, as we will discuss more systematically in Section 4, most of the scholarship on policy feedback has focused on self-reinforcing rather than self-undermining mechanisms. Thus, the focus has been much more on how policy institutions can foster continuity rather than path-departing change (Jacobs and Weaver 2015). This situation is reflected in the literature review provided in the present section, which focuses primarily on self-reinforcing feedback effects. Within the HI literature, the term “policy feedback” first appeared in a volume titled The Politics of Social Policy in the United States coedited by Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol (1988). Yet this volume does not explore policy feedback in a systematic manner, something that will only be done a few years later (Orloff 1993; Pierson 1993, 1994; Skocpol 1992). Taking a closer look at some of these seminal publications from the early to mid 1990s is appropriate because it allows us to illustrate three focal points of the early policy feedback literature, which are explicitly discussed and theorized in it: state capacities, interest groups, and lock-in effects (Pierson 1993; Skocpol 1992). 2.1.1 State Capacities In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Skocpol (1992: 58) explains how policy feedback can take the form of an expansion of state capacities (on this issue, see also Orloff 1993: 90). This is the case because, as they are being implemented, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press “policies transform or expand the capacities of the state,” while changing “the administrative possibilities for official initiatives in the future, and affect later prospects for policy implementation” (Skocpol 1992: 58). According to Skocpol (1992: 59), a policy can be understood as successful if it leads to an expansion of the “state capacities that can promote its future development, and especially if it stimulates expansion.” Here, the idea is that newly established policies can contribute to state-building in a way that, through self-reinforcing processes, promotes future policy expansion. In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Skocpol (1992) illustrates this type of policy feedback with the development of the Bureau of Pensions, which was tasked with administering benefits for Union veterans in the aftermath of the US Civil War (1861–5). Because of the gradual expansion of these benefits, Skocpol (1992: 58) suggests, “the Bureau of Pensions became one of the largest and most active agencies of the federal government.” The development of Civil War pensions increased state capacities while creating a bureaucratic lobby  6 Public Policy within the federal government that supported the expansion of the program over time. In the end, however, the relationship between partisan patronage and Civil War pensions weakened support for them and even political momentum for the creation of a broader system of old-age pensions in the United States before the New Deal (Skocpol 1992). An even more striking case of how policy feedback can increase state capacities and stimulate the formation of bureaucratic lobbies that support the expansion of existing policies is the case of US Social Security, which Derthick (1979) documented long before the concept of policy feedback emerged as an analytical concept. Later scholars have further documented policy feedback related to state-building in the case of Social Security (Béland 2005). Enacted in 1935, Social Security is an earnings-related pension program operated by the federal government. Soon the bureaucrats in charge of the management of Social Security emerged as knowledgeable and skillful allies of the program, which they protected against cutbacks during World War II, when the program faced much political opposition from both within and outside the federal government, at a time when the relatively new program had yet to build a strong constituency of beneficiaries (Cates 1983; Derthick 1979). Later, during the post–World War II era, bureaucrats and political appointees operat- ing within the Social Security Administration (SSA) promoted the expansion of the program by framing the agenda of the regularly held advisory councils tasked to evaluate and make recommendations about the then growing federal social insurance program (Derthick 1979). Over time, SSA officials lobbied Congress and presidents in support of Social Security expansion and the enact- https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press ment of new social programs such as Medicare, which was adopted in 1965 (Berkowitz 2003; Derthick 1979). Other factors also contributed to the expan- sion of Social Security and the federal welfare state in the post–World War II era, but the state capacities and internal lobbying power of SSA, itself a by- product of Social Security development, played a major role in the politics of social policy in the United States (Béland 2005; Derthick 1979). 2.1.2 Interest Groups The second type of policy feedback discussed in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers is about how existing public policies can shape the “social identities, goals, and capabilities of groups that subsequently struggle or ally in politics” (Skocpol 1992: 58). This type of policy feedback concerns the impact of existing policies on the development over time of interest groups that have a stake in the policy process (Pierson 1993: 598–605). As Skocpol (1992: 59) puts it, “public social or economic measures may have the effect of stimulating  Policy Feedback 7 brand-new social identities and political capacities” that may mobilize to preserve existing policies. In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Skocpol (1992: 59) shows how the development of Civil War pensions fostered the emergence of interest group organizations organically tied to these public policies. The key organization was the Grand Army of the Republic, the largest organization representing Union veterans. In her analysis, Skocpol (1992: 111) suggests that the expansion of Civil War pensions over time stimulated an increase in the membership of the Grand Army of the Republic, which, in turn, “intensified the interest” of this organization “in pension legislation and administration.” This feedback loop led the Grand Army of the Republic to “set up a Washington-based Pensions Committee to lobby Congress and the Pension Bureau” (Skocpol 1992: 111). More generally, the work of Skocpol (1992) and others (Pierson 1993) suggests that the nature of existing public policies shapes the formation of interest groups and their political mobilization over these policies and within the policy arena. Clearly massive economic and social programs that allocate benefits to large segments of the population are more likely to stimulate the emergence of large and powerful constituencies associated with important interest group organizations that are likely to get involved in the debates over the future of these programs. Conversely, more targeted programs might gener- ate weaker constituencies and related interest groups that have less political clout when the time comes to discuss the future of these programs (Pierson 1994). These general remarks are illustrated by the HI scholarship on US social https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press policy concerning the contrast between social assistance benefits directed at “dependent” populations and social insurance benefits directed at “advan- taged” populations. For instance, Skocpol (1990) wrote about the political weakness of social assistance programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which would end in 1996 as a consequence of the controversial federal “welfare reform” (Weaver 2000). For Skocpol (1990), programs for the poor such as AFDC are “poor programs” that should be replaced by measures offering universal coverage that create broader constituencies and, consequently, more resilient social policies in the long run. Although evidence suggests that some targeted programs such as US Medicaid, which provides health insurance to disadvantaged families and citizens, can grow to generate broader political support over time (Howard 2007), massive social insurance programs that create large constituencies can prove more resilient in the longer term under certain conditions. For instance, this is likely to be the case when these programs generate powerful third-party allies such as governors. The case of the US Medicaid program for low-  8 Public Policy income people (Rose 2013) suggests that even programs with weak benefi- ciaries can become resilient over time if they generate strong political allies. Large social insurance programs are especially likely to become resilient when they target politically “advantaged” groups like older people, as is the case with US Social Security (Campbell 2003; Pierson 1993). The example of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), one of the most powerful interest groups in the United States, illustrates this reality; this interest group organization expanded at the same time as Social Security, before getting involved in the politics of the Social Security reform (on the AARP, see Lynch 2011). Policy feedback can also shape concrete interest group organizations over time, a topic studied by Kristin Goss (2012) in her book The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice. In this qualitative analysis of the collect- ive mobilization of women in the United States over more than a century, Goss (2012: 18) looks at the impact of policy feedback on concrete social move- ment organizations, an approach that allows her to explore “how different types of feedback effects interact to affect the scope and nature of groups’ policy engagements.” Goss (2012: 184) demonstrates how policies created in the 1960s shaped the collective action of women in the United States by offering “tangible antidiscrimination protections that women’s groups rallied to defend and expand” as well as “resources (networks, conferences, money) to support women’s organizing.” 2.1.3 Lock-In Effects https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press Within the HI tradition, the most widely cited publication on policy feedback is Paul Pierson’s (1993) article “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change.” Although it appeared only a year after Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Skocpol 1992), one of the books Pierson engaged with, this review essay provided a much more systematic take on policy feedback than anything that had been published on the topic before. In his article, Pierson (1993) explored issues such as the cognitive side of policy feedback associated with policy learning and the potential influence of existing policies on mass politics, thus anticipating what would become a central avenue for policy feedback research in the years and decades to come. Another key contribution of Pierson’s seminal article was to introduce the concept of “lock-in effects” to the policy feedback literature. Drawing on a recently published book by the economist Douglass North (1990), Pierson (1993: 608) showed how  Policy Feedback 9 Policies may create incentives that encourage the emergence of elaborate social and economic networks, greatly increasing the cost of adopting once- possible alternatives and inhibiting exit from a current policy path. Individuals make important commitments in response to certain types of government action. These commitments, in turn, may vastly increase the disruption caused by new policies, effectively “locking in” previous decisions. Pierson (1994) applied the concept of policy feedback as lock-in effects in his book Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. In this influential book, lock-in effects are especially central to the discussion about pensions reform, with reference to US Social Security. As Pierson (1994: 172) suggests in his analysis of lock-in effects, “sunk costs resulting from previous decisions in pension policy created lock-in effects that greatly constrained Reagan’s options on Social Security.” 2.1.4 The Multiple Faces of Policy Feedback Over time, HI generated other perspectives on policy feedback that built on the early scholarship discussed in Sections 2.1–2.1.3 to explore the multifaceted nature of how existing policies can shape the politics of public policy (Béland 2010; Béland and Schlager 2019b). One of these approaches concerns the claim that, just like public policies, state-regulated private social benefits can shape politics over time. Particularly influential here is the work of Jacob Hacker (2002) on how, in the United States, the development of private health and pension benefits has led to the emergence of a “divided welfare state” (the title https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press of his book), in which feedback effects from both public and private social benefits are closely intertwined in both their social functions and the political effects they generate over time. Therefore, it is possible to argue that private benefits “may impact political mobilisation and public expectations in much the same way that widely distributed public benefits do, creating strong political incentives for the maintenance or encouragement of existing private networks of social provision” (Béland and Hacker 2004: 46). The example of health care in the United States perfectly illustrates this claim, as both public policies such as Medicaid and Medicare and private institutions such as health insurance have shaped the politics of reform, including the enactment in 2010 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (Jacobs and Weaver 2015). More generally, even when it does not explicitly refer to the concept of policy feedback, the extensive literature on welfare state development demonstrates that the private side of policies can shape and constrain public policy reform over time (Béland and Gran 2008; Esping-Andersen 1990; Howard 1997; Klein 2003).  10 Public Policy Another perspective available in the HI literature is the less developed but promising concept of “ideational policy feedback” (Lynch 2006: 199). This concept refers to how specific ideas and symbols embedded in existing policy institutions can shape the politics of policy reform over time (Béland 2010). For instance, in a book on US social policy, Brian Steensland (2008) argued that the negatively connotated term “welfare” embedded in US social assistance pol- icies contributed to reform failure in this policy area during the 1970s. This was the case because new reform proposals were seen in the mirror of the unpopular and controversial idea of “welfare,” which reduced support for them (Steensland 2008). As Steensland (2008: 10) suggests, his case study stresses the role of “interpretative feedback mechanisms,” which contrast with the “resource/incentive dimension of policy feedback processes” associated with lock-in effects (for a recent discussion of ideational policy feedback, see Béland and Schlager 2019b). For many of the HI scholars cited so far, feedback effects from existing policies appeared as only one type of institutional process among others worth studying to explain policy development. While the expansion of the literature on policy feedback suggests that it now constitutes a stand-alone theory of the policy process (Mettler and SoRelle 2018), returning to the early HI literature has the advantage of reminding us how feedback effects from existing policies do not always tell the whole story about the relationship between institutional processes and policy development. This is something we should keep in mind as we turn to the growing literature on mass politics, policy feedback, and public policy, which is discussed in Section 3. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press 2.2 Beyond Historical Institutionalism The discussion so far on HI and policy feedback should not obscure the contribution of other theoretical traditions to the early analysis of how existing policies shape politics and policy development. In this section, we discuss several other approaches that helped shape this analysis. First, we should mention the work of Theodore Lowi (1964), a US political scientist who explained how specific types of public policy generate distinct forms of politics. His typology is based on the distinction among four types of policy: constituent, distributive, redistributive, and regulatory policies (Lowi 1972: 300). Grounded in the assumption that “policies determine politics” (Lowi 1972: 299), his framework articulates the relationship between these four types of policy with related types of coercion and of politics. In this context, each type of policy is associated with a particular “arena of power” (Lowi 2009) characterized by specific political dynamics. In the United States,  Policy Feedback 11 this work generated much critical scholarship, including the widely cited work of James Q. Wilson (1973), who revisited Lowi’s typology. In his review essay, Pierson (1993: 625) explicitly mentions both Lowi and Wilson when he rejects what he calls “extremely parsimonious theory linking specific policy ‘types’ to particular political outcomes.” According to Pierson (1993: 625), their typologies are flawed for two reasons: “First,... individual policies may have a number of politically relevant characteristics, and these characteristics may have a multiplicity of consequences. Second,... policy feedback rarely operates in isolation from features of the broader political environment (e.g., institutional structures, the dynamics of party systems).” From this perspective at least, the emergence of policy feedback as a concept stems in part from a rejection of the abovementioned early policy typologies by Lowi and Wilson (for a critical discussion, see Kellow 2018). Another stream of scholarship relevant for policy feedback scholarship is the work of the US political scientists Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram on the social construction of target population theory, which stresses the relationship between policy designs and how certain groups are advantaged or disadvan- taged in society. Central to the work of Schneider and Ingram (1993) is a typology of target populations based on two criteria: whether these groups are weak or powerful and whether these groups are positively or negatively perceived. This leads to a fourfold typology: advantaged (powerful and posi- tively perceived), dependents (weak but positively perceived), contenders (powerful but negatively perceived), and deviants (weak and negatively per- ceived). This typology helps scholars understand how policies targeting specific https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press populations are likely to be designed, and how the social constructions embed- ded in concrete institutional and programmatic designs might shape later policy development through feedback effects. The final theoretical tradition we turn to in this section, the PE approach, is especially relevant for the development of policy feedback theory, which is why it requires systematic attention. Punctuated equilibrium is associated with the work of Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (see, e.g., Baumgartner and Jones 1993/2009, 2002; Jones and Baumgartner 2005, 2012). Based initially on US experience, the PE approach argues that “Policymaking at equilibrium occurs in more or less independent subsystems, in which policies are determined by specialists located in federal agencies and interested parties and groups. These interests reach policy equilibrium, adjusting among themselves and incremen- tally changing policy” – a process that they acknowledge “can be profoundly undemocratic” (Baumgartner and Jones 1993/2009: xvii–xviii). Also critical to the PE approach is the flow of information in a policy sector, as well as the limited cognitive capacity and attention spans of policymakers, which tend to  12 Public Policy filter out information deemed extraneous and policy options that do not fit with dominant policy paradigms favored by actors in the policy subsystems where policy is usually made (Jones and Baumgartner 2005). The result, Baumgartner and Jones argue, is likely to be “periods of stability and incremental drift punctuated by large-scale policy changes” (Baumgartner and Jones 1993/ 2009: xviii) that are “oftentimes disjoint, episodic and not always predictable” (Jones and Baumgartner 2012: 1). These punctuations are frequently initiated when dissident – often newly emergent – groups manage to involve other political actors, widen the scope of political conflict (often by redefining the issue), and shift the political venues where political decisions are made. Policy crises and other “focusing events” often play an important role in these disrup- tions. Yet these disruptions do not always result in policy change; the interests that benefit from the status quo will use their resources to try to reassert their dominance over policymaking and limit policy changes that harm their interests. There is much that is shared by the HI and PE perspectives on policy feedback, notably with respect to difficulties in moving away from the status quo that are generated by the unequal distribution of resources as well as shared definitions of policy problems and appropriate responses that are shared by key policy actors. Both incorporate elections and partisan ideological differences, but they are not the primary focus of either the HI or the PE perspective (Jones and Baumgartner 2012: 5–6). There have been important dialogues between the two (see Pierson 2004b), but there are also important differences in the two approaches – some terminological, some merely of emphasis, and others more https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108938914 Published online by Cambridge University Press central to the research endeavor. One of the most important – and most confusing – differences is in termin- ology. Historical institutionalists generally refer to elements of current policy that cause it to be stable or expand over time as “positive feedbacks” and those that undermine it, causing it to become less stable or expansive (e.g., lower spending on environmental enforcement or decreased eligibility and lower benefits for public income transfers), as “negative feedback.” Writers in the PE tradition, drawing on systems theory approaches, define negative feedback processes as those in which “a disturbance is met with countervailing actions, in a thermostatic-type process” that generally leads to a reversion to the status quo ante, while positive feedback involves disturbances to the status quo in which “change begets change, generating a far more powerful push for change than might have been expected” (Jones and Baumgartner 2012: 3). To reduce terminological confusion, we will largely follow the language of Jacobs and Weaver (2015), drawing on Greif and Laitin (2004), in labeling elements of the policy status quo that tend to hold it in place or lead to its expansion as  Policy Feedback 13 “self-reinforcing” and those that tend to make current policy more subject to reduction, termination, or transformation as “self-undermining.” Other differences between the two perspectives are more in emphasis. The PE approach gives more attention to the bounded rationality and attention limita- tions of policy elites. More generally, it gives greater emphasis to the micro- foundations of policymaking in information-processing practices, while HI researchers tend to focus more on macro-level forces. Historical institutionalist researchers tend to focus more on relatively slow-moving adaptions of the policy status quo (e.g., the phenomenon of policy drift), while PE researchers give more attention to short-term disruptions, which are often interpreted as exogenous sh