Legal maneuvers can help explain the rapid recent growth of privatized forms of governance, such as voucher schemes and tax expenditures. Although privatization seems to exacerbate principal-agent problems and reduce credit-claiming opportunities, attenuating the relationship between the state and the controversial policy outputs can be politically expedient for policymakers fearing legal losses, because it helps defend such policies in court. This chapter introduces readers to the concept of attenuation: the process by which policymakers in local, state, or federal government hide the state’s role in promoting a particular policy output. Anticipating constitutional challenge, elites use strategic policy design and rhetoric to advance their policy goals.

I conclude that the hidden state grows because elites find it useful, strategically, to attenuate their policy designs and communications when their side in America’s foundational struggles is temporarily dethroned by rival ideas and institutions. Policymakers face strategic decisions about the combination of policy design and presentation most conducive to passing and sustaining their policy reforms, decisions with consequences for the shape and scope of the state. By choosing attenuated governance – publicly distancing government from politically contentious purposes – those elites commodify public services and complicate lines of democratic accountability. Understanding the origins, operation, and effects of attenuated governance helps illuminate the contours of state development and the strategies policymakers adopt to deal with its tensions and contradictions.

Chapter 2 demonstrates that disaggregating the hidden state into underlying dimensions is theoretically valuable. The rhetorical and policy design dimensions are analytically separable. They occur in different spheres of political activity: policymaker communications and policy design. Combining these two dimensions produces different sorts of politics, with implications for the survival and growth of attenuated policies. I term these phenomena “two dimensions of attenuated governance.” Vouchers – policies which deliver public money to individuals for the purchase of services in private markets that would otherwise be provided by the government direct – are a source of empirical observations of attenuated governance.