Policy-Adaptive Politics: Transformative Benefits & Bipartisan Belief Change

• In Event: (Post-)Pandemic Politics

Abstract

Can personal policy experiences change Americans’ political beliefs in our era of polarization and pervasive government distrust? Major social enactments have historically precipitated their own political support, reshaping Americans’ experiences, expectations, and engagement in program-perpetuating ways. Yet compared to empowering individual encounters with Social Security or GI benefits, mixed evidence of political impact among citizens benefitted by contemporary programs increasingly poses the specter that Americans are now too partisan for policy to ‘create new politics.’ I bridge and extend past feedback scholarship, leveraging random allocation of limited Universal Preschool (“UPK”) seats in New York to test a tractable microtheory of policy-adaptive politics. Difference-in-differences with original panel data yields causal evidence that UPK transforms parent preferences: one semester doubles the likelihood of viewing childcare as a government responsibility. Conservative ideology neither disrupts nor diminishes the effects of a seat. Life changing policies can still be politically meaningful, engendering new and nonpartisan beliefs about government's role.

Author

• Sophie Jacobson, Harvard University