New Directions in Policy Feedback and Mass Publics Studies

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Session Description

Feedback studies on mass publics are going through exciting times. Drawing from a rich scholarship, recent research has started to push new frontiers. This panel takes stock of these developments and aims to mainstream their insights by discussing their theoretical and methodological implications for feedback studies. Four new directions are paid particular attention. First, echoing a call by Campbell (2012), some works have provided a fuller account of citizens’ lived experiences with the state by examining how multiple policy experiences feed back into citizens’ political attitudes and behaviours (e.g. Bruch, Marx Ferree and Soss, 2010; Hern, 2019; Shanks-Booth and Mettler 2019; Rosenthal, 2021). Yet, departing from the prevalent focus on single policy experiences poses a series of challenges, including methodological challenges to standard research designs based on an a priori policy selection. Second, alongside a focus on individual-level feedback effects of experiences with the state, a few scholars have started to study the collective dimension of policy feedbacks, either at the level of specific social and racial groups (Garcia-Ros, Lajevardi, Oskooii and Walker, 2021; Simonsen, 2021) or generations (Svallfors, 2010; Dupuy, Verhaegen and Van Ingelgom, 2021). These studies theoretically redefine or expand feedback mechanisms by putting emphasis on their interpretive or normative component. However, the issue of how collective and individual-level feedbacks combine and are to be theorized is still largely unchartered. Third, attention is being directed towards contingencies within policy feedback effects. Here, scholars show that the political effect of policies often varies based on the characteristics of the recipients (e.g. Lerman and McCabe 2017; Michener 2019) and the contexts within which they are situated (e.g. Clinton and Sances 2017). Last, another path of further research, which cuts across the other three, is to move feedback studies on mass publics, a mostly US-based scholarship, to other policy contexts as recently suggested by Béland and Schlager (2019). A main issue is to assess how the results and theories about a submerged state and a targeting welfare state, as the US is sometimes depicted, illuminate European cases, where the welfare state is still largely universal (Bussi, Dupuy and Van Ingelgom, 2022), or African cases, where public service is patchy and developing (Hern, 2017) - thereby supporting further elaborations and developments in feedback studies on mass publics.

Sub Unit

• Partner Associations / French Political Science Association

Cosponsor

• Division 25: Public Policy

Individual Presentations

• Engaging People on Probation or Parole in New Jersey - Hannah Walker, University of Texas at Austin; Tova Wang, nvf; Melissa R. Michelson, Menlo College; Ariel Rebecca White, MIT

• Visible and Proximate Policies? Normative Policy Feedbacks in Europe - Samuel Defacqz, Université Laval; Claire Dupuy, UCLouvain; Virginie JN Van Ingelgom, Université catholique de Louvain

• Political Participation as Labor: Impacts of Punitive Experiences Black Women - Sally Nuamah, Northwestern University

• Learning Citizenship: How Adolescent Experiences Shape Political Understandings - Sarah Bruch, University of Delaware; Justis Freeman Freeman, Research for Action; Aaron Rosenthal, Simmons University; Alyn Turner, Research for Action

Chair

• Jane R. Gingrich University of Oxford

Discussants

• Andrea Louise Campbell Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Jamila D. Michener Cornell University