Privatizing Policy Feedback

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panels brings together various perspectives on policy feedback as it pertains to policy privatization, delegation, and exit. Scholarship on policy feedback has generally (though not exclusively) focused on the political effects of distributive social policies that have direct connections with government actors, identifying mechanisms through which policies once enacted generate – or suppress – new political demands and cleavages, and measuring these outcomes. Less discussed are the potential feedback effects that may or may not occur in policy areas that incorporate private mechanisms for program administration, or policies that encourage some citizens to exit the public sector altogether, for example, in the case of movements towards homeschooling. Yet given the political distinctiveness of privatized social policies and privatized forms of benefit delivery (Goss 2010; Hacker 2003; Howard 1997, 2007; Mettler 2010), there is good reason to believe that such policies may also generate distinctive types of feedback effects. The papers in this panel examine the possibilities of privatized policy feedback effects across multiple issue areas and policymaking venues.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 25: Public Policy

Individual Presentations

• State Action and the Deniability of Policy Feedback - Ursula Hackett, Royal Holloway, University of London

• Quality as Quantity: Medicare Reform and the Quiet Politics of Measurement - Philip B. Rocco, Marquette University

• Democratization’s Discontents: Policy Feedback in the Credit Welfare State - Mallory E. SoRelle, Lafayette College

• Privatized Policy Feedback: How School Choice Organizations Influence Politics - Heath Brown, City University of New York, Graduate Center and John Jay College

Chair

• Chloe Thurston Northwestern University

Discussants

• Kristin Goss Duke University

• Jacob S. Hacker Yale University