Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted

by Eric M. Patashnik

Reforms at Risk is the first book to closely examine what happens to sweeping and seemingly successful policy reforms after they are passed. Most books focus on the politics of reform adoption, yet as Eric Patashnik shows here, the political struggle does not end when major reforms become enacted. Why do certain highly praised policy reforms endure while others are quietly reversed or eroded away?


Patashnik peers into some of the most critical arenas of domestic-policy reform--including taxes, agricultural subsidies, airline deregulation, emissions trading, welfare state reform, and reform of government procurement--to identify the factors that enable reform measures to survive. He argues that the reforms that stick destroy an existing policy subsystem and reconfigure the political dynamic. Patashnik demonstrates that sustainable reforms create positive policy feedbacks, transform institutions, and often unleash the ''creative destructiveness'' of market forces.



Reforms at Risk debunks the argument that reforms inevitably fail because Congress is prey to special interests, and the book provides a more realistic portrait of the possibilities and limits of positive change in American government. It is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of U.S. politics and public policy, offering practical lessons for anyone who wants to ensure that hard-fought reform victories survive.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Political Science

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Earl Pike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be a primer for all citizens to understand the complicated and butterfly like effect that policy implementation causes. Chapters are broken into examples that follow the impetus and application of policy changes and plots their course toward success or failure. Further, it helps to understand how awful policy can persist, even in light of office changes. The political climate can use more sane clarity that this text provides.

[Elyse Martel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great perspective on the importance of long-term planning and self-reinforcing dynamics in policy reform.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book features a simple yet shockingly original insight, as well as a few stellar case studies of policy reform, but might not offer many surprising stories to those versed in the past 40 years of U.S. policy-making.

Patashnik's main argument is that while political scientists have often focused on how major reform initiatives become law, few have looked at how those reforms either survived or became diluted in the years after that bright moment of change, and fewer have tried to explain why different reforms followed different paths. While laws like the Tax Reform Act of 1986 or the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996 acquired much publicity on passage, the public as a whole quickly lost interest, and further changes often happened sub rosa. Patashnik hopes to draw these reform stories back into a longer narrative.

Patashink argues that in order for a reform to survive, it must not only make real changes in policy, it must change the underlying institutional configuration of the interest groups affected by it, and must therefore prevent the old iron triangles of bureaucracies, congressional committees, and interest groups from reasserting themselves. He shows that the tax act of 1986 was largely a failure over the long-term because the host of interest groups that demanded special tax treatment, and the power of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, were not reformed, so once publicity moved on the old tax loopholes began to blossom again. By contrast, he shows how laws like the Airline Deregulation of 1978 and the sulfer dioxide trading regime in the 1990 Clean Air Act persevered because they created new interest group coalitions. The former quickly bankrupted many of the "legacy carriers" like TWA, Pan Am, and Eastern Airlines and also created a host of low-cost airlines that were adverse to re-regulation. The sunset provision that abolished the Civil Aeronautics Board by 1984 also prevented any latent bureaucracy from reasserting itself. For the clean air act, the creation of SO2 trading allocations created a financial interest for existing utilities to perpetuate the trading regime, and provided a much-celebrated model for cap-and-trade proponents everywhere.

In each of these cases, too, Patashink shows how supposedly temporary giveaways to special interests to allow reform passage affected the subsequent history. The exemptions demanded by Senator Robert Byrd for dirty high-sulfur West Virginia coal allowed the perpetuation of many expensive scrubber programs when more cheap Western coal may have moved reform quicker. And the growth of counter-cyclical payments to farmers after the 1996 act cushioned the blow of reform but eventually lead to a re-expansion of the agricultural welfare state in the 2002 act. Still, in each case there was at least a patina of reform that survived fruitfully into the new eras.

As far as I can tell, there was almost no original research done to write this book, so nothing told, or re-told here, will be that surprising. But by merely putting these different reforms into the wider perspective of policy sustainability (to use a much abused contemporary term), Patashnik has performed a valuable and original service.

[Bcbobe · Rating 4 out of 5]

For being political science research, this is a great book. It considers a factor of policy making that is thought about less by political scientists, policy makers, and the public: the sustainability of policy. Patashnik demonstrates why policies fail and why they often times become entrenched in American public policy. Some important factors that Patashnik influences the success of a policy includes: large scale investments made by the private sector, insulation of decision makers from interest groups, etc.

[Jon Gauthier · Rating 4 out of 5]

The passage of a reform law is only the beginning of a political struggle. Reform enactment could indicate a sharp, permanent break with prior patterns of governmental activity. It may signal that the political climate has fundamentally changed in ways that will redound to the benefit of ordinary citizens. By itself, however, the passage of a reform act does not settle anything.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dense. It had an interesting argument and good case studies, though.