The Politics of Problem Solving: Housing, Pensions, and the Organization of Interests

1 Policy-Focused Political Science

In contrast to the large body of American politics research that makes generalizations by removing the policy specifics from the inquiry – for example, generalizations about elections, incumbency advantage, or legislators – policy-focused research starts with the policy and seeks to understand why policy developed as it did and how policy gives rise to certain forms of politics (ibid). Moreover, when policy is the starting point, it becomes clear that the organization of interests is usually an important part of the explanation.

One simple but powerful idea articulated by Wilson (1995, 330–340) is that the nature of the costs and benefits of a policy – whether they are concentrated or distributed – influences the kind of interest group politics that emerges. If a policy benefits a well-defined, concentrated group in a significant way, and the costs of the policy are spread across a large group, such as through gradual increases in general taxes, it is common to find a politically engaged, organized group of beneficiaries with little to no active opposition. Similarly, if the benefits of a proposed policy are distributed but the costs are concentrated, there is usually great resistance from the cost side and little activity by beneficiaries.^[1] Others have offered more detailed definitions of what it means for costs or benefits to be concentrated or distributed: Moe (2015), for example, explains that even when the affected group of people is large, a substantial material benefit can still spur mobilization and give rise to vested interests, such as with Social Security. Elsewhere, I have argued that large, direct, regular, and economic costs and benefits are most likely to inspire interest group activity (Anzia 2022a). Underneath this is the basic point that policy affects the organization, activity, and intensity of interests – and that oftentimes, the result is dominance of a policy sphere by a single interest group rather than pluralism or meaningful group competition.

Arnold (1990) uses similar ideas to explain congressional behavior and predict when legislators will consider the preferences of inattentive publics. Attentive publics make their preferences known and are already politically engaged. But legislators also consider the likelihood that a policy decision they make will activate inattentive publics, and that depends on features of the policy decision. Arnold proposes, for example, that large policy changes that affect people in close proximity to one another are more likely to be noticed than small changes that affect a geographically disparate, unconnected group. Legislators also consider whether any noticeable changes are traceable to their actions, which is less likely when the causal chain between policy decision and outcome is long. For example, when legislators approve the construction of a new building, the causal chain to the construction of the building is short: they make the decision, then the building is built. In contrast, the causal chain would be long if, for instance, legislators were considering whether to invest in education to boost economic growth: many steps would have to occur between the education investment and the ultimate goal of greater economic growth. One interpretation is that on many policies much of the time, the mass public remains inattentive. Legislators not only anticipate this but also can try to design policy to avoid activating the inattentive publics that either bear the costs or would reap the benefits.^[2]

These theories shed light on how the “normal” politics of an issue depends on features of the policy, but what, then, can disrupt the normal politics in these cases of one-sided interest group structures and inactivated inattentive publics? Schattschneider (1960) notes that it is often the weaker side that expands the scope of conflict, bringing in a broader audience in hope of changing the outcome. Kingdon (2011) argues that when governments suddenly take up an issue, it is often because the problem has gotten much worse, or because of a crisis. In these moments, there is an opportunity to thrust policymaking into the public arena, and policy reforms that long seemed impossible suddenly become possible (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). But these moments of opportunity usually do not last for long. Eventually, public attention will die down, and the governmental agenda will turn to other matters. Moreover, even when the scope of conflict expands, the dominant interest groups and attentive publics are still there – temporarily in a defensive position, but still there. A reasonable strategy for them is to delay, limit the damage (to their interests), and wait out the storm, at which point the normal politics that was favorable to them will likely return (e.g., Wilson 1995; Kingdon 2011; Anzia and Moe 2017).

One takeaway is that in many policy areas, interest groups are the regular political players; it is the mass public engagement and activation of opposition that are unusual. Another is that research on problem-solving politics cannot be divorced from research on the politics of problem creation. During moments of issue activation, the surge of public and media attention can be misleading: it can give the false impression that open conflict is normal for the issue and that the interest group is relatively weak. That is why it is equally important to understand what came before the open conflict – and how interest groups influence policy in quieter ways (Schattschneider 1960; Culpepper 2011).

Research on interest groups describes how specific types of groups and organizations work to influence policy in their preferred direction, often over long periods of time. Many groups get involved in elections – by giving money, endorsing candidates, and mobilizing supporters – but their efforts do not end there. Groups can craft model bills and try to get them passed in multiple legislatures (e.g., Hertel-Fernandez 2019). Fossil fuel companies have blocked renewable energy policy through lobbying and legal action (Stokes 2020). In local politics, lobbying by groups like chambers of commerce and real estate developers can be formal or informal: they might comment at city council meetings but also maintain ongoing relationships with city officials (Anzia 2022a). And public-sector unions in many state and local governments influence policy through both traditional politics and collective bargaining (e.g., DiSalvo 2015). Moreover, a considerable amount of interest group influence occurs through agenda-setting: blocking policies that would threaten their interests and preventing undesirable policies from ever making it onto the agenda (Bachrach and Baratz 1962; Moe 2011).

Sometimes interest groups’ efforts align with the interests of the broader public, such that successful pursuit of their goals stands to enhance social welfare, but often they do not. Regardless, the public interest is not a central concern of interest groups. Their goal is policy in their own interest, and if there is a conflict between their members and the public, groups will side with their members. We should not expect teachers’ unions to back policies that are bad for teachers nor police unions to support reforms that are bad for police officers (see Moe 2011; Hartney and Kogan 2025). In moments of weakness, these groups might have to accept concessions, and there are interesting questions about what happens when there is disagreement among group members or when a group’s different goals are in conflict. The bottom line, though, is that interest groups are there to pursue their interests – not to solve public problems.

Public policies can also strengthen interest groups (Hartney 2022), activate and spur organization of mass publics (e.g., Campbell 2012), and potentially change the trajectory of politics and policy going forward (e.g., Patashnik 2008). More generally, what is possible in policy today depends on what has happened in the past (Pierson 1993). And while theories of political institutions describe how politicians can design institutions to lock in their advantage in the future (McCubbins et al. 1987; Moe 1990), policy-oriented research notes that sometimes policies that were adopted to solve one problem end up creating new problems (Wildavsky 1987) – and can even turn out to advantage certain interests in ways that policy adopters did not anticipate (e.g., Howard 1997; Mettler 2016).

2 The Politics of Problem Creation

Public problems like climate change, widespread opioid addiction, declining reading proficiency, and the ballooning national debt do not happen overnight. Driven by markets, government policy, or both, they develop gradually over a long period of time, during which some experts and impacted individuals might recognize the problem but overall public engagement is low. Special interests thrive in these environments. Oftentimes they operate with little obstruction, contribute substantially to the creation of problems, and are a reason why policymakers do not intervene earlier.

These are central elements of both the politics of housing and the politics of public pensions, as I summarize in Table 2. Problems in these two areas have accumulated gradually thanks to seemingly small, technical decisions made by thousands of government entities over decades, with the help of imbalanced interest structures and inattentive publics.

America’s municipal governments have extensive authority over land-use regulation and thus housing development. The costs of new multifamily housing development are concentrated, which is an important reason why residents who own properties close to proposed high-density housing are highly politically engaged in voicing their opposition – the so-called “neighborhood defenders” (Einstein et al. 2019, see also Fischel 2001; Sahn 2025). While there are certainly interests that stand to reap concentrated benefits – such as real estate developers and the home-building industry – much of the benefit of city decisions to allow more housing development is distributed: people who would live in the not-yet-built housing (many of whom do not even live and vote in the city) would benefit, as would the broader public in the longer run through lower housing costs. Moreover, the causal chain between approval of new housing and lower housing costs is long, and therefore it is difficult for potential beneficiaries to trace any such outcomes to policymakers’ decisions.

Governance of public pensions is a more complex patchwork of state and local government authority, and the interest structure is even more lopsided. Government employees benefit in large, direct, economic ways from more generous pensions. Public-sector unions are among the best organized, most active interest groups in state and local politics (Moe 2011; DiSalvo 2015; Anzia 2022a; Hartney 2022). Perhaps more counterintuitively, public-sector unions benefit from keeping governments’ current pension costs down to ensure that public money is available for higher salaries and greater public-sector employment – and to keep pensions looking affordable to the public (Anzia and Moe 2019). Thus, the benefits of generous, underfunded pensions accrue to a well-defined, organized group. The costs are distributed among future taxpayers who will eventually pay the bill and/or future residents who will have to live with lower levels of government service provision (Pivot Learning 2019; Moody and Randazzo 2020; Anzia 2022b). These costs are not easily traceable to specific actions of policymakers in the distant past.

For both housing and pensions, the side with the more active interests is also buttressed by institutions. Those institutions, moreover, have been in place for decades, often having been established to address other public problems in the past. For housing, this includes zoning but also public meeting requirements and planning commissions. Einstein et al. (2019), for example, explain how requirements for public meetings for a wide range of proposed housing developments were established decades ago to curb the power of real estate developers. Yet public planning commission meetings are now a primary juncture at which residents use the public comment period to block or reduce the size of high-density housing (Sahn 2025).

Public-sector unions also benefit from institutions that bolster their influence on public pension policy. Through collective bargaining, which in most states is mandated by state laws passed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they can try to negotiate higher salaries – a key element of pension benefit formulas. Also, state and local legislation usually delegates pension funding and investment decisions to bureaucracies, which are typically led by boards of trustees on which government employees have a large share of the seats. The “California Rule” (followed by several states) also stipulates that public pension benefits established at the time of a person’s hire cannot be reduced for as long as the employee works for the government. These institutions date back decades. The California Rule, for example, originated with a 1955 California Supreme Court decision (Volokh 2014). Presumably, each was established to address some problem or grievance. Today, though, they stack the deck further in favor of concentrated interests.

3 The Activation of Problem-Solving Politics

While the politics of problem creation on these two issues have a lot in common, the drivers of the scope of conflict expansion are different. For housing, recent years have witnessed a growing YIMBY (Yes in My Back Yard) movement active in local and state politics, significantly increased engagement by state legislatures in places like California, and even the two major-party presidential nominees touting proposals to ameliorate the housing affordability crisis. Moreover, the spotlight is on how local government processes contribute to the problem.

Why has this happened? It would be hard to point to a single cause, but as I highlight in Table 3, one reason is that the problem has gotten much worse. In many economically vibrant metropolitan areas of the United States where people aspire to work and live, housing prices are astronomically high. On the one hand, it is widely recognized that people who already own their homes benefit from keeping supply down and blocking proposed developments in their neighborhoods. This helps to increase their home values. On the other hand, as time goes on, the losers from this arrangement grow as a share of the adult population. Millennials, for example, are now a large proportion of U.S. adults; they have reached ages traditionally associated with household formation and greater political engagement; and they have lower homeownership rates than Boomers or Gen Xers did at a similar life stage (e.g., Choi et al. 2018). Moreover, shelter is a basic human need, and most people spend a large fraction of their incomes on housing. When housing prices increase by a lot, those who absorb the adverse consequences (notably, non-homeowners) are likely to notice. This helps to explain why the problem has slowly risen in prominence on governments’ agendas.

Public pensions are different. After many years of problem creation, problem-solving politics was activated suddenly with the Great Recession. State and local pension funds had trillions of dollars invested in public equities, and so pension asset values plummeted with the stock market, causing funding ratios to tank. The economic crisis therefore thrust the pension problem more into public view. For a few years, state and local governments actively wrestled with how to rein in benefits, address underfunding, and manage pensions more responsibly. Many governments enacted reforms (Anzia and Moe 2017), especially in states that were relatively less constrained by longstanding institutions (e.g., Walsh 2015). But the furor eventually died down, and the issue mostly went back under the radar – even though the underlying problems were still there.

One reason for this is that the costs to the public of generous, underfunded pensions are less direct and less perceptible than those of housing price increases. They may well be large, but in this case, they take the form of gradually higher taxes and gradually reduced services. Unlike housing, this does not show up in the form of a large and growing monthly bill. Even if they were perceived by the public, moreover, these costs are harder to trace to decisions about pensions. This also is not entirely an accident. Policymakers do what they can to continue to push these undesirable consequences to the future by issuing pension obligation bonds, maintaining rosy actuarial assumptions that keep governments’ contributions down, and chasing riskier investments that might yield higher returns. They do this to further the illusion that pension benefit levels and underfunding are not a problem – to avoid problem solving. And they do that, in large part, to please the dominant interest group, which in some cases holds positions of direct policymaking authority through their positions on state and local pension boards of trustees (Anzia and Moe 2019).

4 Problem-Solving Politics

For both housing and pensions, even when problem-solving politics is activated, there is still a strong political pull in favor of the status quo. One reason is that reformers hoping to make change must be successful at all the different veto points, whereas those who prefer the status quo only have to block change at one of them (e.g., Tsebelis 1995; Moe 2011). Two other reasons have to do with the resilience of the interest structures and institutions discussed earlier.

First, the groups and individuals that helped to give rise to the problem are usually still there. They still have their interests and will continue to pursue them. This almost always means they will resist and try to limit change. Moreover, they usually retain the upper hand even in this altered political context: They are familiar with the rules of play. They are well-versed in the technicalities of the policy. And politicians know they will be there through thick and thin. Much of this cannot be said for newly activated groups and individuals.

Second, the decades-old institutions that support vested interests are extremely difficult to dislodge, both because of legal obstacles and because of the politics surrounding them. It is more than just that the dominant interests benefit from the institutions and want to keep them. The institutions themselves are also imbued with values like participation, voice, and rights, and those values resonate with the public. This makes it difficult to appeal to the public for changes and easy for the dominant interests to exploit the public’s commitments to those values.

For instance, few people actively engaged in politics are willing to acknowledge that more opportunities for democratic participation could sometimes produce worse outcomes. Fiorina (1999) does in “Extreme Voices: The Dark Side of Civic Engagement,” as do Einstein et al. (2019). But for the most part, requirements for public hearings on housing developments have come to be viewed as avenues of participatory democracy that lift up the voices of affected communities and limit the power of business interests. Trying to position oneself against that is a political minefield. It is no wonder few politicians actively try to dismantle these institutions.

Those who attempt to change institutions surrounding public pensions are similarly vulnerable to accusations that they are trying to take away workers’ rights. The language of rights has long been visible in the areas of collective bargaining and agency fees, where it is wielded both by proponents (e.g., right to collective bargaining) and opponents (e.g., right-to-work laws). But it has also been used to protect institutions like the California Rule. In a campaign to change the rule with a state ballot measure, for example, former San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed admitted defeat after then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris released the ballot measure language. It read: “Eliminates constitutional protections for vested pension and retiree healthcare benefits for current public employees, including teachers, nurses, and police officers, for future work performed.” Reed withdrew the measure, presumably because not many voters would support eliminating working people’s constitutional protections (Lin 2017).

That begs the question: In the face of these obstacles, who would even try to solve these problems? Often the answer is no one. But as the Chuck Reed-California Rule example illustrates, usually the problem-solvers emerge from political offices with relatively broader constituencies. It is probably not a coincidence, for example, that many of the leading reformers on pensions have been governors, mayors, and other elected executives (Anzia and Moe 2019). That aligns with the political science literature proposing that presidents are more likely than members of Congress to prioritize the welfare of the entire nation and to consider their legacies (Howell and Moe 2016). The same general idea may help to explain why the California state government has been willing to take action on the housing affordability crisis where most municipal governments have not. Both for pensions and housing, better aligning the political constituency with the scope of the problem can help to incentivize problem-solving leadership.

The similarities between housing and pensions probably end there, however. As I have said, high housing prices are experienced directly by a large group of people, whereas the costs of generous underfunded pensions are mostly felt indirectly and are not easily traceable to policymakers’ decisions (see DiSalvo 2024). Just as important is the extent of organization and coordination on the side of the status quo, which is different for housing and pensions.

Consider housing: Why have California state legislators been willing to propose and pass legislation forcing local governments to allow more housing development? Why haven’t those state legislators succumbed to the same political pressure from neighborhood defenders as local governments? At first glance, it might seem that they would. State legislators are elected from districts, and the local interests that dominate the local governments in their districts can presumably also call their state legislators to voice their opposition.

The reason, I suspect, has to do with the lack of coordination and organization among the neighborhood defenders across the state. Proposals for high-density housing developments do have concentrated costs, but the bearers of those concentrated costs are not the same people from one city to the next – and are not even necessarily the same people from one proposed project to the next within a single city. Arnold (1990, 137) is again helpful as a guide. He writes, “The strongest coalitions are those in support of programs that deliver large and regular funds to the same citizens year after year…Coalitions are considerably weaker when programs deliver benefits to an ever-changing cast of recipients.” The people blocking housing in one city are probably not the same people blocking housing hundreds of miles to the north. It is “an ever-changing cast” of residents. They might not even be formally organized groups in many single municipalities, let alone a powerhouse active in Sacramento coordinating with local groups in nearly five hundred municipalities. Because of this, shifting the venue to the state significantly weakens the influence of the dominant interests.^[3]

Circumstances are different for pensions. For starters, policymaking authority on pensions is already shared between state and local governments. More importantly, public-sector unions are organized and politically active at the local and state levels, and as groups with a federated structure, they are well coordinated across the different levels and localities (Finger and Hartney 2019; Hartney 2022).^[4] Any political reformer hoping to break through by venue-shifting from local governments to the state legislature would find the same public-sector unions in the state capital. From the perspective of state legislators in places like California and Illinois, moreover, there would be huge political downsides to initiating pension reform and little to no political upside.

The pressures may not be all that different for many governors, especially those hoping to run for higher office and retain the needed support of public-sector unions. But when politicians do take on the challenge, it is usually someone from the executive branch. In California, for example, at the height of reform momentum, Governor Jerry Brown came out with a bold array of reform proposals, including the introduction of a hybrid defined-benefit and defined-contribution plan for new employees. State legislators, however, whose political futures were more dependent on unions, eliminated or watered down the boldest provisions (Anzia and Moe 2019). Commonly, then, lead problem-solvers are executives. Legislators – thinking about their districts and electoral futures – often try to limit problem solving in response to interest groups.

A key lesson for the politics of problem solving is that the dominant interest groups often constrain what kinds of solutions are possible. Moreover, even when a reform is enacted, those interest groups rarely cease their efforts. As Patashnik (2008) explains, unless a general-interest reform dismantles or scrambles the preexisting interest group environment, the reform is vulnerable to being eroded or repealed in the future. Brown’s signature pension legislation in California is an example. Even after being watered down, it was indeed a significant political accomplishment. But since then, reform momentum has subsided, the issue is back under the radar, and the interest group environment remains intact. Key features of the reform (and others like it) have been challenged on the grounds that they violate public-sector employees’ rights. Meanwhile, governments in states ranging from Illinois to Oklahoma have come under pressure to improve the benefit levels of the new pension “tiers” created during the reform period.

The constraints interest groups impose on problem solving are also easy to overlook because often they are not readily observable. One of the best ways to fight off a threatening policy is to prevent the problem from ever being discussed by policymakers, and to ensure that only policies acceptable to the group are on the menu when the issue does get discussed. When an interest group is successful in this regard, there is nothing for the researcher to see. Instead, the interest group’s influence comes in the form of a problem not being discussed, and certain solutions not being considered. Rarely do we get to observe the full extent of what would be possible if the interest group were not a factor. But the differences between housing and pensions in California shed some light: state legislators have taken up the housing issue in recent years, but they rarely, if ever, mention how public pension costs are transforming public service provision. Another example is discussed at length by Moe (2019), who examines how education policy proceeded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina demolished the existing education system and significantly weakened its teachers’ union. With a clean slate, policymakers designed a system very different from the one that had existed before, because for the first time in decades, they could. Thus, by considering how problem solving proceeds in contexts without a dominant group, we begin to appreciate how interest group dominance constrains problem solving in so many others.

5 Caveats and Takeaways: The Politics of Problem Solving

Political observers often lament that certain problems could be solved if only there were the “political will” to do so. But who, exactly, lacks “political will,” and why do they lack it? This is an area in which political science research can and should weigh in. In addition to research that focuses on estimating the effect of an independent variable (an X) on various outcomes, political scientists should pursue research endeavors that start with some outcome of interest (a Y) and seek to identify the major contributors to that outcome. As Cochrane (2025) writes of his own field of economics,

“Causality is great, but it isn’t everything. We often do want to know, ‘what are the major causes of growth vs stagnation, wealth vs. poverty, recession vs. boom, and why do stock prices wander around so much?’ Causal identification can chip away at this question, but obviously there is a long way to go.”

The same is true in political science. We do (or should) want to know what the major political contributors are to the staggering costs of housing in many parts of the country, to the rise of economic inequality, to declining student achievement, and to the pension underfunding that has put state and local governments like Kentucky, Illinois, and Chicago in precarious fiscal positions. Increasing attention to such questions would not threaten nor undermine the pursuit of X-oriented causal inference research – it would complement it. By unearthing new and understudied potential contributors to outcomes of interest, it would point political scientists toward new Xs that are worthy of careful causal research.

Policy-focused political science does some of this already, emphasizing how the features of a policy help to shape the interest group environment. In this essay, I have examined the dynamics of an important class of issues: those in which public problems grow slowly and gradually because of systems in which one side has advantages of organization and preference intensity. For both housing unaffordability and public pension underfunding, problems were created and allowed to grow because of imbalanced interest structures and inattentive publics, largely due to the distribution of the policies’ costs and benefits, and buttressed by institutions. Sometimes problem-solving politics can be activated if the problem gets bad enough and is felt directly by a large number of people, but often it takes a sudden crisis, and interest groups can work to limit public awareness of a problem if reform momentum would threaten their interests. They can also constrain the set of solutions that are acceptable when problem solving is activated. Furthermore, even devoted reformers – who often come from parts of government with broader constituencies, such as the executive branch – may find that many solutions that would effectively address the problem are infeasible within existing political institutions and the prevailing interest group structure.

Are there forces that might reduce these tendencies, such as political parties? It is certainly possible, but there are outstanding questions about the conditions under which that would occur. Most U.S. local governments, for example, are formally nonpartisan, and they mostly deal with issues that are different from those that divide the major parties at the national level. Also, in some situations, an interest group could be so important to a political party that it does not have to compromise on its positions to stay in the party coalition. And how would stronger political parties help with issues that do not clearly divide the two major parties, as with the two issues discussed here? A full exploration of these issues is beyond the scope of this essay, but in short: it is not entirely obvious that stronger political parties would limit the influence of a dominant interest group under a wide range of conditions.

Might groups sometimes have interests aligned with those of the general public? As I said earlier, yes. It is also possible that some interest groups under some conditions have broader goals in mind. Furthermore, sometimes interest groups face tradeoffs between their own goals, such as between their longer- and shorter-term interests, and it is possible that they could be nudged to support the direction more in the public interest. The point is not that this cannot occur but rather that as a general matter, we cannot expect interest groups to willingly embrace policy solutions that would uniformly harm their interests.

Not all policy issues have the features I highlight in this essay, of course; to the contrary, a major theme of policy-focused political science is Schattschneider’s insight that policies make their own politics (Schattschneider 1935). Even so, it is often possible to find some of these same basic patterns of problem-creation and problem-solving politics in policy arenas that seem quite different. Consider criminal justice, the topic of Steven Teles’ essay in this issue of The Forum (Teles 2025). In some ways, the political dynamics of that case are different: problem creation – the dramatic increase in incarceration – happened in the context of the salience of crime and public jockeying among politicians. Solving the problem of over-incarceration, Teles explains, could only proceed when that salience declined and policymakers were free to act out of the spotlight. But one might also distinguish between the salience of crime and the salience of over-incarceration, which are probably inversely correlated. A slightly different interpretation of the case is that the increase in incarceration (the creation of the problem in Teles’ essay) occurred at a time when the salience of crime was high and the salience of incarceration was low. Problem solving on over-incarceration could therefore only proceed when the salience of crime had decreased – and the salience of over-incarceration was allowed to rise. Still, this difference of interpretation notwithstanding, the quiet, technocratic form of problem-solving in the criminal justice case clearly emerges as a difference from the cases of housing and pensions I examine here. As Arnold (1990) emphasizes, sometimes policymakers need to be shielded from the gaze of attentive publics, or easily activated inattentive publics, to engage in problem solving.

The case of criminal justice also serves to underscore a final point, which is that all of this is context-specific. At different times, and on different issues, society and the broader public have almost certainly benefited from the groups I have discussed in the examples of housing and pensions here. The residents referred to today as neighborhood defenders were once deemed worthy of greater power because of what was then perceived as excessive influence of real estate developers and other business interests (Einstein et al. 2019). Public-sector employee organizations may have contributed to the advancement, development, and professionalization of government in the early 20th century (see, e.g., Anzia and Trounstine 2025). Policies and institutions created decades ago solved problems and probably did some good relative to the status quo at the time. The challenge, though, is that after half a century of this – of these groups pushing in one direction, helped by institutions – society has lost its balance. It has led to bad outcomes that now need to be corrected, and new problems that need to be solved – a phenomenon Aaron Wildavsky (1987) referred to as “problem succession.” The challenge, though, is that today’s policymakers are not starting with a blank slate. They must confront the interest groups and institutions that are in place, and those can make for some formidable political obstacles to problem solving.