Volume 22, Issue 1

An important stylized fact about American government is that many societal problems persist despite expert recognition that better outcomes are technically feasible. What explains the weakness of the political demand for more effective public policies? This study investigates one factor that may contribute to the attenuated demand for policy improvements: namely, the belief among many affluent citizens that they are personally insulated from societal problems. Drawing on a national public opinion survey, we show that affluent Americans believe their resources and ability to activate powerful social networks affords them a measure of personal insulation from key problems in areas such as education, healthcare and neighborhood safety. We also find that the affluent express a more optimistic view than other respondents of the average citizen’s financial situation and capacity to manage problems in several domains. Taken together, our results have important implications for understanding how highly influential Americans think about public policy in an era of inequality.

Brown v. Board of Education marked the beginning of a long era in American politics in which courts, litigation and legal rights were associated with progressive causes. That association, however, is now eroding. The left’s discontent with the Supreme Court is well known, but less attention has been paid to liberal concerns about judicial policymaking – including some of the very mechanisms honed by liberals in the Brown era – that go well beyond the Court. The Brown era obscured a simple truth about lawsuits that the next few years are likely to clarify: They are much better at gumming things up than they are at making things work. Policymaking through litigation, though associated with liberals in the Brown era, in fact reflects a deep distrust of centralized governance. Given that it is conservatives, not liberals, who are more often interested in constraining government, this makes lawsuits ordinarily a more congenial policy tool for Republicans than Democrats. For many elements of the Democratic agenda of the next few years, litigation is likely to prove a clumsy tool, more effective in the hands of opponents than proponents.

Less than 1 year after President Biden announced a sweeping plan to reduce – and in many cases eliminate – the student loan burden for the 46 million Americans who hold educational debt, the Supreme Court ruled the proposal unconstitutional in Biden v. Nebraska. Media accounts immediately speculated about whether the Court’s actions would spell trouble for the President’s reelection efforts, presuming that voters would punish Biden for a perceived policy failure. Despite, or perhaps because of, these concerns, the administration has continued to pursue student debt forgiveness through other means, and highlighting these efforts has been a key component of the president’s re-election strategy. Prior research suggests that Democrats, and the president in particular, stand to benefit electorally from pursuing student debt relief. But did the Supreme Court’s decision to block the president’s plan change who voters hold accountable for the problem of student loan debt? And to what extent is the issue motivating voters from different constituencies in 2024? This study leverages insights from an original survey experiment fielded in August 2023 to explore the dynamics of blame attribution for federal student debt cancellation efforts. We find that, contrary to media speculation, voters place much greater blame on the Supreme Court and congressional Republicans for the problem of student debt, while President Biden receives relatively little blame. We consider the implications of these findings for the short-term electoral politics of student debt relief policy as well as the increasingly salient politics of debt relief more broadly.

Policing in the United States is highly decentralized, but recent events have propelled the issue of police reform onto the national agenda. I assess the extent to which the issue of local police reform has become nationalized, or correlated with national party divisions. I document such correlations in survey questions put to the mass public, in bills introduced in Congress, and in bills introduced and enacted in state legislatures. In the mass public, Democrats and Republicans disagree on many issues related to police reform, but majorities of both parties see a need for reform and support many of the same proposals. In contrast, Congress sees sharp partisan divisions on almost every police reform bill introduced, including bills that would enact reforms with bipartisan public support. While my state-level analysis is more suggestive, I find states with more Democratic voters are more likely to introduce and enact police-related bills. In addition to describing nationalization, the analysis reveals a disconnect: while partisans in the mass public are not polarized on specific reforms, elites at the national and state level are.

Few federal agencies have generated more controversy than the small Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education. From desegregation and bilingual education to intercollegiate athletics, sexual harassment, and transgender rights, it has turned short civil rights statutes into lengthy administrative rules. It thus offers a useful window into what has become known as “the administrative state.” But this window is far from transparent: OCR rarely uses standard Administrative Procedure Act rulemaking, opting instead for unilateral “Dear Colleague Letters” written with little external participation; the bulk of its resources are devoted to investigation of individual complaints, with little public explanation of the outcomes. Innovation and expansion of the agency’s mission has not come from the permanent bureaucracy, but from the courts and from agency leaders appointed by the president. From the 1960s through the 1990s, the result was slow but steady accretion of power and responsibility. More recently political polarization and shifting Supreme Court jurisprudence has led to more rapid alteration of agency policy and enforcement practices.

Why do Republicans sometimes decline to enact voter suppression measures, even when contextual conditions (unified control of state government, electoral threats from Democrats, and racial threats from African American and Latinx voters) suggest that they should? We argue that ideological diversity within state Republican parties plays an important role in moderating Republican efforts to adopt policies that substantially increase the cost of voting. When a state Republican Party is more ideologically diverse, members may differ significantly on the preferred severity of voting restrictions and the priority of ballot restrictions relative to other issues. Thus, more heterogeneous Republican Parties may be less willing and able to institute voter suppression measures. In contrast, more ideologically unified Republican Parties face fewer barriers to collective action in advancing ballot restrictions, facilitating their adoption of voter suppression measures. We illustrate our arguments with case studies from Georgia and Alabama.

The year 2014 is a notorious landmark for U.S. water policy. During that year, water crises in two Michigan cities – contamination in Flint and water service shutoffs in Detroit – brought renewed attention to the inadequacies of U.S. drinking water policy for ensuring access to safe and affordable water. The crises exposed the cities’ shared economic challenges rooted in histories of disinvestment and racial inequality. The events drew national and international responses, in part from the hard work and political successes of local resident-activists, ultimately leading to state and federal level policy change. Ten years later, we see three ways the water crises in Flint and Detroit transformed the politics of U.S. water policy: greater visibility of water politics and infrastructures, greater focus on water access and affordability in addition to historic focus on quality, and greater attention to the racial dimensions of water policy decisions. These shifts are evident in federal and state policy and administrative agendas, political coalitions’ priorities and strategies, and narratives of water policy in media coverage and public discourse. Despite historic progress and investment, the U.S. still lacks the necessary structures for comprehensive policy reform to ensure equitable access to safe drinking water, and public trust in water utilities is at an all-time low. Continuing to advance on water justice requires taking full advantage of the new landscape of water politics, including by engaging in scholarship and praxis that take intersectional approaches, and implementing policies that promote systemic reform rather than individual crisis response.

Climate change has been on the national agenda since the late 1970s, yet until recently, little progress had been made at the federal level because of the dominance of the fossil fuel industry within the policy subsystem. In this article, we use multiple streams approach with process tracing methods to examine why significant climate policy was able to pass in 2022, despite growing polarization, when previous attempts had all failed. We examine two key case studies, the failure of Waxman-Markey in 2010 and the success of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. In 2010 some climate organizations were hesitant about cap and trade as a policy mechanism to address climate change and failed to stimulate advocacy in their grassroots. Since then, climate groups rallied around an alternative policy approach, which involves investing in clean technology inspired by the Green New Deal. Activists built significant power within the Democratic Party, evident in climate policy remaining prominent on the policy agenda at the beginning of Biden’s presidency. Moreover, media outlets have improved their coverage of extreme weather events by tying them to climate change. In short, the political dynamics changed with growing grassroots climate advocacy, motivating citizens to elect Democratic leaders capable of passing climate legislation and keeping climate high on the policy agenda.