Gesture or Catalyst? Symbolic Policy Feedback and Costly Policy Implementation

• In Event: Student Research: Public Attitudes, Communication, and Policy Acceptance

Abstract

Climate goals are pushing governments worldwide to enact policies whose near-term costs fall hard on specific groups—emission caps, vehicle bans, infrastructure mandates—for benefits that accrue to society over the long run. Jacobs (2011) calls these policy investments, which routinely stall once implementation begins, as cost-bearers push back and enforcement weakens (Patashnik, 2008). To prepare the ground, governments often lead with symbolic action—setting targets, electrifying fleets, running demonstration projects—before imposing binding rules. Since Edelman (1964), symbolic policies, limited in material impact but strong in signaling, have long been dismissed as stand-ins for real action. Recent work complicates that view (Boussaguet & Faucher, 2024; Tallent et al., 2026), yet how the same kind of action catalyzes change in some jurisdictions while stalling reform in others remains poorly understood.

Returning to Edelman's (1964) critical distinction that subsequent scholarship has overlooked, we identify two kinds of symbolic policy. Referential symbolic policies point to concrete government actions that can be checked against observable reality—what the state has done, committed to, or demonstrated. Condensation symbolic policies compress emotion, identity, and political meaning into slogans, pledges, and designations, without external referents. Drawing on policy feedback theory (Pierson, 1993; Mettler, 2002) and legitimacy theory (Suchman, 1995), we argue both operate through resource and interpretive channels affecting government elites and mass publics alike, yet pull in opposite directions as they either reinforce or erode legitimacy. Referential actions accumulate administrative capacity and make policy direction hard to reverse, establishing cognitive legitimacy; they also let citizens read later regulatory demands as shared undertaking rather than top-down imposition, establishing moral legitimacy. Together, these build the legitimacy base for costly policy implementation. Condensation actions, unmatched by self-binding behavior, expose a rhetoric–practice gap that erodes both forms of legitimacy.

We test this in China's new energy vehicle program, where 290 prefectural cities share common national incentives but exercise substantial discretion in local implementation. Combining 7,128 local policy (2009–2023) with city-year panel data, we find that, contrary to linear expectations, costly policies and NEV adoption trace a robust U-shape across specifications. Referential symbolic policies flatten the trough and shift it later; condensation policies deepen and advance it. We address endogeneity through lagged policy measures and placebo tests using falsified timing and conventional vehicle sales, neither of which reproduces the observed patterns. Alternative channels—fiscal capacity, industrial spillovers, and information diffusion—tested as competing mediators, do not absorb the moderating effects. Process tracing in four theoretically sampled cities, drawing on interviews with local stakeholders, is consistent with a legitimacy-based mechanism.

The paper makes three contributions. First, it extends policy feedback theory to symbolic policies, a category largely bypassed as a source of meaningful feedback. Second, it specifies cross-type feedback between symbolic and costly policies—a pathway acknowledged in general but rarely examined. Third, by recovering Edelman's own distinction between referential and condensation symbols, it reconciles a long-standing contradiction and clarifies when symbolic action enables costly reforms.

Author

• HAOTIAN PAN, Renmin University of China
  Presenting Author