By Sarah Brown, Journal Manager with Dr. Elizabeth Koebele, co-editor
The theme of this quarter’s highlights collection from Policy & Politics is Policy Feedback Theory (PFT), an increasingly popular theory of the policy process that is featuring more regularly on public policy syllabi. In a nutshell, PFT considers how past policies (re)shape the political context in which new policies are formed.
Our first article in this collection has been one of our most popular and highly cited since its publication in 2022: New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: Combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback by Sebastian Sewerin, Benjamin Cashore and Michael Howlett. Here, the authors argue that policy science scholarship is better at explaining policy change in retrospect, rather than formulating forward-looking recommendations about how to achieve major or paradigmatic change. Potentially even more concerning, existing scholarship emphasises the importance of external shocks in initiating major policy change, which doesn’t augur well for proactively tackling the major problems of our time such as climate change. In their article, the authors identify two conceptual and theoretical gaps that might limit how policy scholars think about major or paradigmatic change: 1) a lack of shared understanding of what ‘policy change’ is, and 2) a focus on (changing) policies in isolation rather than on policies as part of complex policy mixes. Against this background, they argue that combining insights from policy design, policy mix and policy feedback literature allows us to identify other pathways towards initiating and achieving policy change.
In a similar vein, our next article, by Wesley Wehde and David Crabtree, examines the policy feedback effects from COVID-19 on social welfare support. This research focusses on a central question: can experience with one set of policies result in support for a set of different, but related, policies? In exploring this, the authors develop a new dimension of policy feedback effects missing from prior studies – outcome distance. They examine what they term a “middle-distance outcome” and apply this concept to the case of welfare attitudes in the United States. Their findings suggest that views on broader welfare initiatives may have become more supportive as a result of the pandemic and associated policies. This implies that specific policies may increase support for other, somewhat related policies through their feedback effects. The context for their research, the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, helps support the claim previously made by members of the media and the US president, Joe Biden, that Americans’ experience of COVID-19 and federal response policy may have increased support for social welfare.
Our final article by Viviana Ramírez and Ricardo Velázquez Leyer examines the impact of self-reinforcing and self-undermining policy feedback on Mexican social policy. The context for this research was the conditional cash transfers programme (CCT) for poor families in Mexico, terminated in 2019. CCTs sought to fight poverty under a social investment logic by paying regular money transfers to poor households given under conditions related to the use of health services, the uptake of food and nutritional supplements, and the enrolment and attendance of children and adolescents in school. The first CCT of its kind to be introduced at national level, it was maintained and developed by three successive federal administrations, delivering positive results to a significant proportion of the population. A policy with these characteristics would have been expected to generate stability, yet it was swiftly terminated with practically no opposition. The article analyses how self-undermining feedback developed during the duration of the programme in response to the policy’s, ‘hard’ design and implementation of conditionalities, causing beneficiaries to become apathetic and eventually leading to the policy’s uncontested termination. Essentially, self-undermining feedback mechanisms counterbalanced the self-reinforcing mechanisms derived from the benefits supplied by the programme. These findings might encourage the examination of policy feedback in similar contexts where seemingly popular policies are unexpectedly terminated, and provide lessons for policy-makers regarding the design and implementation of social programmes.
We hope you have enjoyed this collection of highlights from Policy & Politics on Policy Feedback Theory. If you are interested in other recent collections from Policy & Politics, please check out our annual reading list blog at 2023 Policy & Politics Reading List – Policy & Politics Journal Blog (policyandpoliticsblog.com).
The articles featured in this collection are free to access via the links below until 31st January 2024:
- New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback (Sewerin et al.) https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16528864819376
- Examining policy feedback effects from COVID-19 on social welfare support: developing an outcome distance dimension (Crabtree and Wehde)https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16684225165558
- The impact of self-reinforcing and self-undermining policy feedback on Mexican social policy: the end of the conditional cash transfer programme (Ramírez and Velázquez Leyer) https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16813697853773
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