Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted (Princeton Studies in American Politics) - Softcover

Patashnik, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691138974 ISBN 13: 9780691138978

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Reforms at Risk is the first book to closely examine what happens to sweeping and seemingly successful policy reforms after they are passed. Most books focus on the politics of reform adoption, yet as Eric Patashnik shows here, the political struggle does not end when major reforms become enacted. Why do certain highly praised policy reforms endure while others are quietly reversed or eroded away?


Patashnik peers into some of the most critical arenas of domestic-policy reform--including taxes, agricultural subsidies, airline deregulation, emissions trading, welfare state reform, and reform of government procurement--to identify the factors that enable reform measures to survive. He argues that the reforms that stick destroy an existing policy subsystem and reconfigure the political dynamic. Patashnik demonstrates that sustainable reforms create positive policy feedbacks, transform institutions, and often unleash the ''creative destructiveness'' of market forces.



Reforms at Risk debunks the argument that reforms inevitably fail because Congress is prey to special interests, and the book provides a more realistic portrait of the possibilities and limits of positive change in American government. It is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of U.S. politics and public policy, offering practical lessons for anyone who wants to ensure that hard-fought reform victories survive.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eric M. Patashnik is associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. His books include Putting Trust in the US Budget: Federal Trust Funds and the Politics of Commitment.

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"Important reforms may be enacted, but what happens after that? Do the new laws take hold or do they fade away? What accounts for the striking variety in results? In this excellent new book, Eric Patashnik sets a new standard in addressing these questions."--David Mayhew, Yale University

"Eric Patashnik has written a fascinating account of why some general-interest policy reforms stick and others fall apart. By looking at general-interest reform as a dynamic process that unfolds over time--rather than as a single moment of legislative triumph--Patashnik offers a compelling analysis of what kinds of reforms are likely to create coalitions and conditions that will sustain them over time. This is political science at its best, a must-read for policymakers and scholars across the disciplines."--Julian Zelizer, Princeton University

''Seemingly momentous policy reforms are often unceremoniously abandoned in subsequent policymaking. In this penetrating and important book, Eric Patashnik explores the political circumstances that enable reforms to endure. Using a wide-ranging set of case studies--from taxes to agriculture to healthcare, among others--he shows that lasting reform is partly a matter of strategy and design."--Paul J. Quirk, University of British Columbia

"This book is clearly focused on a simple, important question: over time, why do some general interest reforms succeed more than others? Patashnik is absolutely right that scholars and journalists have focused far more on the enactment of reform than its subsequent implementation. Reforms at Risk fills a large void in the public policy literature."--Christopher Howard, College of William and Mary

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Reforms at Risk

What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are EnactedBy Eric M. Patashnik

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13897-8

Chapter One

Introduction: General-Interest Policymaking and the Politics of Reform Sustainability

To innovate is not to reform. -Edmund Burke

There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to institute a new order of things. -Niccolo Machiavelli

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. -Alexis de Tocqueville

On October 22, 1986, lawmakers from both parties gathered on the South Lawn of the White House and applauded as President Ronald Reagan signed into law the most comprehensive revision of the federal tax code in a half century. The landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986 eliminated or curtailed dozens of shelters, loopholes, and other tax breaks enjoyed by powerful corporations and well-heeled investors. By withdrawing tax preferences from a favored few, the federal government was able to sharply lower tax rates for millions of low- and middle-income Americans without increasing the federal budget deficit. While the tax reform law was not flawless, it made the federal tax system fairer and more efficient. At the signing ceremony, Reagan called the Tax Reform Act "the best antipoverty bill, the best pro-family measure, and the best job-creation program ever to come out of the Congress of the United States." "At last. It's a day to stop and take unashamed satisfaction in a triumph of the whole over the parts," editorialized The New York Times. Only a few months earlier, it looked like this historic day would never arrive. Hundreds of high-priced Washington lobbyists worked feverishly to bury the measure in committee. But Senate Finance Committee chairman Robert Packwood (R-OR), Ways and Means Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL), and President Reagan came together to defeat the special interests.

For scholars and journalists alike, the importance of general-interest reforms like the 1986 Tax Reform Act goes beyond their substantive policy accomplishments. These stunning reform victories signal that American national government has the capacity to overcome parochial concerns and serve a larger public interest. The American state can fulfill its core purpose of promoting the general welfare.

Unfortunately, many of the accomplishments of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 have been gradually eroded. The remarkable 1986 coalition between supply-side Republicans and tax-reforming Democrats has "disintegrated" over the past twenty years, leaving the reform vulnerable and defenseless. Although important "vestiges" of the celebrated measure remain, tax policymaking dynamics have largely regressed to their pre-1986 ways. Politicians of both parties have been keen to create special tax preferences for capital gains income, educational savings accounts, and the energy industry. Some of these new tax preferences have failed to achieve their own purposes because they offer subsidies to activities that would take place without them. Since the late 1980s, the core principles of tax simplification and horizontal equity have been honored mainly in the breach. The federal tax code has become less neutral, less economically efficient, and far more opaque and convoluted. While individual tax shelters have been curbed, tax shelters for corporations have proliferated. These developments have been demoralizing to politicians, public interest lobbyists, and policy experts alike. "The Tax Reform Act of 1986 was a great leap forward," said former Congressional Budget Office director Robert D. Reischauer. "Now we're slowly undoing the good that we did then." "I feel like crying," said Senator Bob Packwood (R-OR), one of the prime movers of the 1986 reform.

The failure of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 to consolidate its gains and re-configure political dynamics is just one example of a larger and more worrisome phenomenon-the reversal or unraveling of general-interest reforms after their adoption. By general-interest reform, I mean a non-incremental change of an existing line of policymaking intended to rationalize governmental undertakings or to distribute benefits to some broad constituency. Examples of general-interest reforms include agricultural reform, transport deregulation, procurement reform, and private pension reform. The targets of general-interest reforms are the policy sins and social pathologies of the day before yesterday. The long-term sustainability of reform projects, however, depends on what happens to them tomorrow. By sustainability, I mean the capacity of a reform not only to maintain its structural integrity over time, but to use its core principles to guide its course amid inevitable pressures for change.

The threats to reform sustainability are multiple and mutually reinforcing. They include interest group power, rent seeking behavior, and parochialism. Narrow interests can be expected to press their particular demands up to a point where the organizational costs in effort exceed the expected benefits of winning. But clientelism is not the whole of the sustainability problem. Threats to reform sustainability also include the rational ignorance and myopia of mass publics, the political allure of empty symbolism, and the temptation of politicians to serve the organized and meddle with markets rather than promote more general-interests. In sum, the passage of a reform law is only the beginning of a political struggle. Reform enactment could indicate a sharp, permanent break with prior patterns of governmental activity. It may signal that the political climate has fundamentally changed in ways that will redound to the benefit of ordinary citizens. By itself, however, the passage of a reform act does not settle anything.

A PREVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT OF THIS BOOK

General-interest reforms are frequently adopted with great fanfare, but their success simply cannot be taken for granted. The losers from reform cannot be counted on to vanish without another fight, and new actors may arrive on the scene who will seek to undo a reform to further their own agendas. Rather than a one-shot static affair, policy reform must be seen as a dynamic process, in which political forces seeking to protect a general-interest reform may be opposed by forces seeking to undermine it. Indeed, sustaining reforms against the threats of reversal and erosion may be even tougher than winning the reforms' adoption in the first place. To draw an analogy from everyday life, losing weight is hard, but the real challenge is keeping it off.

Yet if making reforms stick is a formidable task, it is not an impossible one. The sustainability of reforms turns on the reconfiguration of political dynamics. Concentrated interests must be prevented from reasserting themselves. This may entail the disabling of power structures that shield narrow groups from democratic accountability. Equally important, the reforms must produce a self-reinforcing dynamic. Often that may involve a Schumpeterian process of "creative destruction" in which group identities and coalitional patterns shift, would-be rent seekers are divided, political expectations change, and social actors become invested in the new policy regime.

After reform, governance should become less particularistic or more technically or administratively rational. In some cases, the scope of the government's interventions...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691138974
• ISBN 13: 9780691138978
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar