State Action and the Deniability of Policy Feedback

• In Event: Privatizing Policy Feedback

Abstract

Policymakers prefer to avoid conflicts they expect to lose, but under polarized conditions policies often attract pushback from opposing forces in legislatures and courtrooms. Using private delivery mechanisms, vague legislative language, targeting, drift, or regulations that indirectly achieve controversial aims, policymakers can shape policy feedback effects to disadvantage their rivals, avoid racial and religious controversy, and reduce the risk of successful legal challenge. Deploying an original database of laws and judicial decisions on school vouchers, voter ID, right-to-work, abortion and welfare policies, 1945-2018, I show how policymakers strategically de-emphasize the role of the state to avoid legal defeats. Judicial decisions about program constitutionality often hinge upon the question of whether or not it is the state that acts. Programs are more likely to pass and survive if the state can plausibly deny its role in producing controversial policy feedbacks.

Author

• Ursula Hackett, Royal Holloway, University of London