The Great Broadening

How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics

Bryan D. Jones, Sean M. Theriault, Michelle Whyman

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226625942, 9780226625805
• eBook ISBN: 9780226626130
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Governo americano

Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing through the 1970s, the United States experienced a vast expansion in national policy making. During this period, the federal government extended its scope into policy arenas previously left to civil society or state and local governments.

With The Great Broadening, Bryan D. Jones, Sean M. Theriault, and Michelle Whyman examine in detail the causes, internal dynamics, and consequences of this extended burst of activity. They argue that the broadening of government responsibilities into new policy areas such as health care, civil rights, and gender issues and the increasing depth of existing government programs explain many of the changes in America politics since the 1970s. Increasing government attention to particular issues was motivated by activist groups. In turn, the beneficiaries of the government policies that resulted became supporters of the government's activity, leading to the broad acceptance of its role. This broadening and deepening of government, however, produced a reaction as groups critical of its activities organized to resist and roll back its growth.
 

PART 1

The Internal Dynamics of the Great Broadening

Before the Great Broadening, the federal government was limited to far fewer activities than afterward. The new system exploded on a more tranquil system like a supernova, but its energy quickly faded. The result was a radically different system after the Great Broadening than before. What made this expansion possible? Causal processes differed more within the cauldron of the Great Broadening than they did before or after. The pace of policy-making increased, opening up many more opportunities for entrepreneurship. We explore these internal processes in the next three chapters.

TWO

Crossing the Legitimacy Barrier

Although the Great Broadening happened within a short period of time, it was a huge and complex event during which many issues came to be viewed as serious problems that required government action. What were the dynamics that fostered this explosion? We argue in this chapter that government faces two distinct kinds of issues: those that fit naturally into what government had already been doing and those for which government took responsibility for the first time. For simplicity’s sake, we simply refer, respectively, to these as old and new issues.

We contend, and demonstrate later in the book, that different political dynamics underlie these two sets of issues. Old issues fit into preexisting frames based in partisan and ideological differences and interest-group politics. New issues do not immediately fit into such frames, and hence require some degree of recalibration as parties and groups adjust. Political leaders struggle to decide whether an issue should be addressed by the federal government or left to civil society or the states and localities. If the new issue is to be addressed by government, then how is it to fit in the preexisting frames structuring political conflict? One consequence of this dual struggle is that considerable organizational and policy innovation can emerge. During the cauldron of the Great Broadening, we would expect a great deal of such policy innovation to occur as new issues crowd the government’s agenda. We provide both qualitative and quantitative evidence in support of this conjecture later.

The Two Faces of Policy Agendas

How the disadvantaged (or anyone else for that matter) get their policy proposals taken seriously (even if they are not adopted) is known in political science as the agenda-setting issue. The notion was born of the debate about the operation of American democracy that began in the 1950s and then exploded in a spirited and intense firefight about the extent to which the United States was democratic. But it was more: it was a debate about the very nature of political science, the scholarly discipline most concerned with power, rule, and authority (Dahl 1963).

Agenda-setting presents two distinct faces. The first face involves the simple selection of potential issues that could be addressed by policy-makers. Think of sitting at a window as traffic moves by. What attracts your attention? What do you notice? Certainly not everything. Just as individuals are limited in what they perceive in a complex and dynamic reality, so too are institutions (Jones 2001). Policy-makers can take cognizance of only a subset of the potential issues. Government decision-making institutions have limited capacities to access and react to issues, so there must be selectivity regarding which problems are addressed and which are ignored.

Examples of this issue-juggling aspect of policy selection abound. Both the press and members of Congress accused President Jimmy Carter of shoveling too many proposals at once onto the legislative branch. As Carter (1979, 371) admitted midway through his term, “Congress can only deal with so many issues simultaneously because, quite often, one of two committees in the Congress have to handle a series, a wide range, of issues.” If one issue is addressed (i.e., is on the formal legislative agenda) the agenda space for other issues is more constrained. Though not particularly controversial, this understanding of agenda-setting is often unacknowledged in many models of legislative decision-making (Jones and Baumgartner 2005).

The second face implies that some issues are not viewed as legitimate for government to address, perhaps because the groups pressing those issues are viewed as less worthy than those already engaged in the process. Or perhaps the issues themselves are thought of as beyond the pale. This face of agenda-setting has a connotation of disadvantaged groups breaking through the barriers set by the powerful, who—consciously or not—acted to deny them access to serious consideration by government officials.

It is no accident that the agenda-setting debate in the academy took place as the Great Broadening gained steam. Political scientists and sociologists noticed how previously inactive groups were bombarding government with demands for action on issues that did not fit the mold of the issues inherited from long-standing political tradition. Some of these older issues had preoccupied the federal government since the founding of the Republic. Others were added over time—especially during the New Deal. Groups demanded policy action in areas previously left to civil society, asked for federal interference into discriminatory practices of state governments, and wanted expenditures in areas that the federal government had previously ignored.

The new issue revolution associated with the Great Broadening changed the intellectual debate over the role of government. It affected the nature of the discussion about American democracy, shifting it from a debate about balanced interests and the role of political parties to one based in the resistance of American institutions to the demands of the less fortunate and those excluded from the ongoing formal policy debate.

Over time many of the initiatives of the excluded gained serious attention, and in many cases stimulated real policy action. In some cases conservatives pushed back, stalling or even reversing policy momentum. Some of this push-back was bipartisan, as in the case for deregulation of some regulated industries during the Carter administration. In other cases, conservatives added to the broadening of government, particularly in areas such as criminal justice.

Nevertheless, in most cases the issues remained, if not on the center stage of government action, then at least in the close background. The question of denying some issues or groups access to the government’s agenda has been replaced by the question of how much intervention is necessary. In short, the question of government involvement has shifted from “Whether to act?” to “How much to act?”

We make three critical claims in this chapter. The first, noted above, is that the American political system processes issues differently, depending on whether the policy-making system has regularly dealt with the issue before (“old issues”) or whether it is a fresh issue that must be defined and understood (“new issues”). In the former case, the issues generally are understood according to earlier framings. These framings can be partisan, ideological, or group-based; the key is that they are stable. The system, in fitting the new issues into preexisting frames, often struggles to determine the proper fit. Is the issue a legitimate function of government? Or should it be left to civil society? If it is legitimate, should the federal government get involved, or should the issue be left to the states and localities? Should new agencies be established, or should the new function be assigned to existing bureaucracies? How do the parties decide what positions to take on the emerging issues?

The second claim is that the political system evolved under the pressure of the new issues that bombarded the system in the 1960s and 1970s. The entire political system changed as the new issues gained access to the system. In this chapter, we trace these changes by analyzing how political scientists and other observers evaluated the system during this period. Admittedly our examinations will be partial, but the flavor of the changing emphasis of the literature is undeniable. Later in the book we document this transformation quantitatively, showing just how policy changes altered the entire political system and how it operated.

The final claim is that the magnitude of new issues demanding policy attention necessitated rapid policy innovation during the relatively brief period of the Great Broadening. As a consequence, the entire system developed structures designed to foster such innovation. But those structures have been winnowed in the ensuing period, leaving the system less able to address current issues. These “downstream” changes include increasing partisan polarization and decreased analytical capacity.

Agenda Broadening and the Legitimacy Barrier

As we noted in chapter 1, Theodore Lowi (1967) argued that the old American public philosophy resting on the distinction between public and private spheres was dead. It had been replaced by a public philosophy based in the pluralist group struggle—what he called “interest-group liberalism.” He decried this as an undemocratic public philosophy, as he saw policy-makers delegating their policy responsibilities to organized interests. Lowi’s analysis implies that it was the rapid increase in issues that caused the crisis in the old public philosophy. The choice of the mechanism that a political system uses to address issues is secondary to the overload of new issues. Other scholars confirmed Lowi’s early diagnosis as the Great Broadening proceeded—the public-private distinction was dead.

James Q. Wilson (1979) emphasized what he termed the “legitimacy barrier”—what issues were treated as appropriate concerns of government. Like Lowi, Wilson saw a systematic destruction of the public-private distinction and went further to argue that this destruction had fundamentally altered the conduct of politics: “Once the ‘legitimacy barrier’ has fallen, political conflict takes a very different form. New programs need not await the advent of a crisis or an extraordinary majority because no program is any longer ‘new’—it is seen, rather, as an extension, a modification, or an enlargement of something the government is already doing” (41). The strategies that groups use when they are dealing with a well-understood political terrain in which the conflict is about “how much” to intervene is different in kind than conflict about “whether” to intervene.

Wilson’s analysis implies that once an issue is viewed as a legitimate one for government to address, that issue remains within the purview of government. The barrier becomes a floor. He also saw the accumulation of policies that addressed issues previously unaffected by government action, and how that would cause politics to infuse more and more issue areas.

The legitimacy barrier was certainly psychological and even philosophical. Wilson thought of it as a political barrier as well. Congress created new agencies to manage the new issues and to provide a bureaucratic rule base for the regular conduct of activity. Once they entered into the policy fray, the interest groups helped to cement the legitimacy of an issue as one appropriate for government action. Businesses first fought, and later found ways to profit, from the new normal. Political parties began to sort themselves on the new issue configurations as they determined their relative strategic advantages in the post-broadening world. Democrats moved to incorporate civil rights into their agenda, and Republicans moved to fill the vacuum by appealing to white Southerners. Environmentalism once split the parties, but over time Democrats adopted the pro-environment mantle, while Republicans defined environmentalism as antibusiness and hence antigrowth. Women’s rights, more within the purview of Republicans initially, shifted toward the Democrats. The rapid increases in the breadth of government during the Great Broadening affected both interest groups and parties. This component of crossing the legitimacy barrier is so important that we spend a great deal of the latter chapters documenting it quantitatively.

Indeed, we show that the business of government was conducted differently before, during, and after the broadening period. Before the Great Broadening, government was conducted in relatively independent “silos,” or subsystems, often consisting of relevant congressional committees, government agencies, and affected interest groups. During the broadening, issues spilled over from silo to silo as issues such as civil rights and the environment affected numerous policy areas simultaneously. Rapid changes within and between subsystems required innovative organizational and policy arrangements as networks of actors sprawled across traditional boundaries. Political parties presented innovative policy solutions to address the panoply of issues they faced. The Nixon administration, in particular, was bubbling with new ideas to consolidate and reduce the hand of government that was generated by the new programs of the Kennedy-Johnson years. Nixon proposed a guaranteed national income to replace the hodge-podge of welfare systems, a national health care system to replace the similarly chaotic health care approaches developed to address particularistic constituencies, and block grants to states and localities to consolidate the program-by-program approach of Kennedy-Johnson fiscal federalism.

The same year that Wilson published his classic essay, Aaron Wildavsky (1979) published his wide-ranging collection of essays in Speaking Truth to Power. In the chapter entitled “Policy as Its Own Cause,” he detailed the changes in how policy-making was conducted after policies were enacted. Once enacted, policies may encounter problems because they were ill-designed in the first place or because the incentives of actors to shift required continual updating as times change. Agencies adjust to the changing reality by generating new regulations or proposals for new policies. “As problems grow, solutions create their own effects, which gradually displace the original difficulty. . . . Because policy is evermore its own cause, programs depend less on the external environment than on events inside the sectors from which they come” (62–63).

This line of thinking thrives today in the idea of policy feedback. After noting that policies may be thought of as institutions, because “policies clearly do establish rules and create constraints that shape behavior,” Paul Pierson (1994, 44) continues: “Policies may create incentives that encourage the emergence of elaborate social and economic networks, greatly increasing the cost of adopting once-possible alternatives and inhibiting exit from a current policy path.” Hacker and Pierson (2012) developed the idea of “policy drift” to denote the changes that nongovernmental actors make in response to economic and social trends that require a policy to be updated if it is to remain effective. This updating may not occur because of institutional friction or agenda crowding, leading to policies that do not fit either the current circumstances or the original intent of the policies.

These ideas transcended political philosophies. Both conservative and liberal political thinkers have noted that past policies strongly affect the process of current policy-making. Well-known theorists of the left, Lowi and Hacker and Pierson, join the neoliberals (conservatives) Wilson and Wildavsky in their understanding of how the very nature of politics is transformed by the substance of policy. Interestingly, both Wilson and Hacker and Pierson use the “policy as terrain” metaphor. Both see policy as occurring on a new landscape—the entire terrain of politics is deformed by policies.

Using the Policy Agendas Project to Measure the Great Broadening

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• one / The Great Broadening
• part 1: The Internal Dynamics of the Great Broadening
• part 2: Causes of the Great Broadening
• part 3: Consequences of the Great Broadening
• Notes
• References
• Index