Policy Creates Constituencies

Does public policy matter? When we think about this question, our attention is naturally drawn to the specific aims of the policy at hand. So, if we pass a law to improve education, our measures of success might be improved standardized test scores or higher graduation rates; for environmental policy, we look at whether the air is cleaner or whether the populations of endangered species are growing.

But a lively group of political scientists has argued that, when we ask whether policy matters, we need to think much more broadly, taking into account how policy affects important values of participation, voice, representation, and equality. These scholars -- who include Andrea Louise Campbell, Helen Ingram, Suzanne Mettler, Paul Pierson, Anne Schneider, Theda Skocpol, and Joe Soss -- make the case that, in a host of subtle ways, public policy structures democracy itself.

Put simply, public policy profoundly influences who counts and who doesn't. It does so by influencing the resources and skills that people can turn toward participation, the belief that their participation will affect political outcomes, and the stake they have in government action.

Public policies create politically relevant constituencies. The political scientist E.E. Schattschneider observed 75 years ago that new policies create new politics. In today's parlance, public policies produce feedback effects on political and civic engagement.

Which brings us to the health-reform debate. Opponents of health reform have argued that passage of the bill will boomerang, dooming supporters' electoral prospects in the midterm elections and planting the seeds for repeal once the Congress changes partisan control.

Studies of policy feedbacks raise serious questions about these assumptions. If the GI Bill, Social Security, and other far-reaching social policies are any guide, the health-care bill's repeal would seem unlikely. Rather, health care reform would be expected to restructure health-care politics in several ways: Beneficiaries could have greater civic resources (money, time) and civic capacity (health) to devote to political participation; they could develop stronger psychic bonds to their government, encouraging greater civic involvement; and they could come together in an interest-based constituency to defend and expand the new programmatic benefits afforded to them.

Of course, this argument assumes that health care reform is a well-designed policy -- that it is, indeed, the sort of good policy that makes for good politics, to paraphrase President Obama. We should have a pretty good sense of this by November 2010.