Activating Slack

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Conceptual Clarification 101 (Table 12)

Abstract

This is the second in a two-paper series analyzing the phenomenon of slack in U.S. law and political economy. Slack, or the pervasive disuse of resources, was introduced as a concept by Cyert and March (1963). Hirschman (1970) further developed the concept, explaining how both economic resources and political resources were often left disused; adopting a functionalist perspective, he suggested that organizations could activate slack resources to respond to crisis. In “Slack in American Law and Political Economy” I built on Hirschman, suggesting that slack also results from incumbents’ strategic action to entrench wealth and power by keeping resources disused. As organizations adapt their legal environments to entrench slack, it may not be so easily undone during a crisis. That paper explained the dynamics of slack by analyzing four cases: property rules and land access for urban agriculture; restrictive zoning rules and the housing affordability crisis; off-cycle local elections and depressed turnout; and anti-fusion voting laws and the two-party system.

This paper returns to these illustrative cases to examine the strategies by which actors respond to and work to activate slack. Drawing on my prior research on land use and election law, I compare how policy entrepreneurs and organizations have tried to activate disused economic and political resources, and to reform rules that lock in slack. Their strategies include founding anti-slack organizations; flipping default rules; rendering slack visible; altering incentives; shifting scale; avoiding veto points; and working with unlikely allies. The paper closes by considering the normative implications of activating slack, and how flourishing could provide a criterion to judge when slack ought to be activated. Doing so would counsel for deploying the strategies described above to activate slack in some contexts, while also promoting slack when certain resources are best left unused.

Author

• Nate Ela, Temple University