Stasis, Stickiness, and Policy Images

• In Event: Policy Design for Democracy: Theoretical Perspectives

Abstract

Popular culture blames partisan polarization and Congressional gridlock for all manner of democratic ills, from repeated brushes with government shut down, to dysfunctional dynamics between members of Congress, to a fraught closed-door process that leaves both voters and lawmakers in the dark as to the contents of legislation. However, this monolithic image of a broken political system fails to capture the dynamic realities of lawmaking. Despite its reputation for dysfunction, Congress continues to legislate in sporadic but meaningful ways. In the last few years alone, Congress has passed a number of important, substantive legislative priorities into law –the CARES Act in 2020, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the Respect for Marriage Act in 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, The Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022, and the Safer Communities Act, also in 2022. Further, Congress continues to pass Department of Defense Reauthorizations and Appropriations bills, Farm Bills, and other reauthorizations as needed (even if these are often later than preferred). In short, gridlock is not an appropriate overall description of Congress or of our democracy.

Punctuated Equilibrium Theory is based in the idea that institutional friction, policy images, and disproportionate information processing, together, create a policy process that is characterized by periods of stasis, interspersed by periods of drastic shifts in attention and large-scale changes. Indeed, this is one of the most widely used theoretical foundations in the study of public policy. However, the political environment has changed drastically over the past 30 years since Agendas and Instability was first released. Our manuscript delves into the systematic changes that have occurred in the US political environment, both culturally (e.g. increasing partisanship) and institutionally (e.g. increasing reliance on unorthodox lawmaking).

Our previous work indicates that the dynamics of partisan polarization and unorthodox lawmaking have slowly altered the policy process to exaggerate dynamics of stasis in some subsystems, while making other subsystems increasingly punctuated (Mallinson and Brock 2023). Policy areas that have experienced a net increase in kurtosis between 1994 and 2017 include commerce and housing, energy, health, and agriculture, while other areas such as income security, transportation, and justice administration, have experienced a net decrease in kurtosis (Mallinson and Brock 2023). This paper considers the underlying cause – we consider policy monopolies and policy images as one possible source of increasing stasis in the system. We suggest that partisan polarization has made policy images and issue ownership “stickier” over time as affective polarization and mega identities have created stronger parties as ideas, and weaker parties as organizations (Azaria 2016). We consider here which policy areas (subsystems) may be subject to these sticky policy images, and which may have lower salience, and therefore, more changeable policy images.

Authors

• Clare Brock, Colorado State University

• Daniel J Mallinson, Penn State, Harrisburg