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The Political Effects of Policy Drift: Policy Stalemate and American Political Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2020

Daniel J. Galvin Open the ORCID record for Daniel J. Galvin [Opens in a new window]  and
Jacob S. Hacker
Daniel J. Galvin*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University
Jacob S. Hacker*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Yale University
*
E-mails: [email protected], [email protected]
E-mails: [email protected], [email protected]
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Abstract

In recent years, scholars have made major progress in understanding the dynamics of “policy drift”—the transformation of a policy's outcomes due to the failure to update its rules or structures to reflect changing circumstances. Drift is a ubiquitous mode of policy change in America's gridlock-prone polity, and its causes are now well understood. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the political consequences of drift—to the ways in which drift, like the adoption of new policies, may generate its own feedback effects. In this article, we seek to fill this gap. We first outline a set of theoretical expectations about how drift should affect downstream politics. We then examine these dynamics in the context of four policy domains: labor law, health care, welfare, and disability insurance. In each, drift is revealed to be both mobilizing and constraining: While it increases demands for policy innovation, group adaptation, and new group formation, it also delimits the range of possible paths forward. These reactions to drift, in turn, generate new problems, cleavages, and interest alignments that alter subsequent political trajectories. Whether formal policy revision or further stalemate results, these processes reveal key mechanisms through which American politics and policy develop.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , October 2020 , pp. 216 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors thank Chloe Thurston, Paul Pierson, Andrew Kelly, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

References

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36. Core features include the right to free association, self-organization, collective bargaining, and concerted action; the law's commitment to firm-level bargaining (the “employer-employee dyad”); its requirement that the union with majority support in a single bargaining unit serves as the “exclusive representative” of all workers in the same unit; its centralized regulatory structure and certification authority; the “mutual obligation” of employers and employees’ representatives to bargain; its negligible penalties for employer interference in union elections; and its non-universal coverage (e.g., exclusion of farmworkers).

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76. Some states developed more generous eligibility standards, higher earned income disregards, and stronger linkages to other social benefits; others implemented more stringent work requirements, increased penalties for failure to work, and shorter time limits.

77. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Setting the Baseline: A Report on State Welfare Waivers (Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, June 1997).

78. Tommy Thompson, “W-2, Wisconsin Works,” Division of Economic Support, 1996, http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/search.asp?id=1516. Also see, e.g., Virginia Ellis, “California's Welfare-to-Work Program Shows Success,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1994.

79. Other advocates, like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, sought to flood the program with enrollments to force its conversion into a guaranteed basic income. Also see Kazuyo Tsuchiya, “Johnnie Tillmon (1926–1995),” Black Past, January 23, 2007, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/tillmon-johnnie-1926-1995/.

80. Weaver, Ending Welfare as We Know It.

81. Ibid., 203–204.

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85. Weaver, Ending Welfare as We Know It, 211–17.

86. Ibid., 205.

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91. Steven F. Hipple, “Labor Force Participation: What Has Happened Since the Peak?” Monthly Labor Review, https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/pdf/labor-force-participation-what-has-happened-since-the-peak.pdf; Kathy Ruffing, “How Much of the Growth in Disability Insurance Stems from Demographic Changes?” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 27, 2014, https://www.cbpp.org/research/how-much-of-the-growth-in-disability-insurance-stems-from-demographic-changes.

92. Erkulwater, Disability Rights and the American Social Safety Net, 21.

93. The act charged the SSA with developing expanded criteria that would include mental disorders, experiences with pain and musculoskeletal disorders, and the combined effects of multiple impairments. Greater weight was also to be given to evidence provided by the applicant's physician. See Liebman, Jeffrey B., “Understanding the Increase in Disability Insurance Benefit Receipt in the United States,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (2015): 123–50CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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95. The new model operated from the premise that “assessing an impairment could not be done in isolation from assessing the environment in which a person functioned and societal expectations about what constituted “normal” behavior and abilities.” Erkulwater, Disability Rights and the American Social Safety Net, 19.

96. Autor, “The Unsustainable Rise of the Disability Rolls in the United States”; see also Liebman, “Understanding the Increase in Disability Insurance Benefit Receipt.”

97. The prevalence rate is “the ratio of the number of disabled-worker beneficiaries in current-payment status to the number of persons insured for disability benefits.” OASDI, The 2018 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees.

98. Dylan Matthews, “In Defense of Social Security Disability Insurance,” Vox, March 8, 2018. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/6/16735966/social-security-disability-insurance.

99. Autor, David H. and Duggan, Mark G., “The Growth in the Disability Insurance Roles: A Fiscal Crisis Unfolding,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 (2006): 71–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Autor, “The Unsustainable Rise of the Disability Rolls in the United States.”

100. Autor, “The Unsustainable Rise of the Disability Rolls in the United States.” By 2018, however, projections had become more sanguine. The Trustees wrote: “Even under the high-cost assumptions, however, the combined OASI and DI Trust Fund reserves on hand plus their estimated future income are sufficient to fully cover their combined cost until 2030. Under the intermediate assumptions, the combined starting fund reserves plus estimated future income are sufficient to fully cover cost until 2034 … under the low-cost assumptions, the DI program and the combined OASDI program achieve sustainable solvency.” OASDI, The 2018 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees.

101. Burke and Barnes, “Layering, Kludgeocracy and Disability Rights.”

102. Thomas F. Burke and Jeb Barnes, “Republicans Want to Reform Disability Insurance. Here's Why That's Hard,” Washington Post Monkey Cage, February 17, 2015.

103. Later called the National Council on Disability (NCD).

104. National Council on Disability (formerly National Council on the Handicapped), Toward Independence: An Assessment of Federal Laws and Programs Affecting Persons with Disabilities—With Legislative Recommendations: A Report to the President and to the Congress of the United States (Washington, DC: National Council on Disability, February 1986), https://www.ncd.gov/publications/1986/February1986.

105. Burke and Barnes, “Layering, Kludgeocracy and Disability Rights.”

106. Ibid.; Bagenstos, Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement.

107. Tense layering is from Kay, Adrian, “Tense Layering and Synthetic Policy Paradigms: The Politics of Health Insurance in Australia,” Australian Journal of Political Science 42 (2007): 579–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burke and Barnes, “Layering, Kludgeocracy and Disability Rights”; Bagenstos, Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement.

108. Burke and Barnes, “Layering, Kludgeocracy and Disability Rights,” 108.

109. Ibid.

110. Burke and Barnes, “Republicans Want to Reform Disability Insurance.” Also see Rebecca Vallas, Shawn Fremstad, and Lisa Ekman, “A Fair Shot for Workers with Disabilities,” Center for American Progress, January 28, 2015, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015/01/28/105520/a-fair-shot-for-workers-with-disabilities/.

111. OASDI, The 2019 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds (Washington, DC: Social Security Administration, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TRSUM/).

112. Chloe N. Thurston, At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

113. Ibid., 161–63, 164.

114. At different junctures, other boundary groups included African Americans, low-income citizens, veterans, and farmers. Thurston, Chloe N., “Policy Feedback in the Public-Private Welfare State: Advocacy Groups and Access to Government Homeownership Programs, 1934–1954,” Studies in American Political Development 29 (2015): 250–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.