William_T._Bianco,_David_T._Canon]_American_Polit

590 Chapter 16Chapter 16 || Social PolicySocial Policy

Despite these limitations, extensive efforts to evaluate policy do provide decision

makers with some basis for deciding whether to modify, expand, or terminate a policy.

Programs are notoriously difficult to cut or eliminate. Examples abound, such as wool

and mohair subsidies implemented after World War II and the Korean War. More than

half of the wool needed to make uniforms during these wars was imported, so the

Pentagon wanted to increase domestic production of wool. The National Wool Act in

1954 provided direct subsidies to farmers. By 1994 the program was spending nearly

$240 million a year, despite the fact that the Pentagon removed wool from its “strategic

materials” list in 1960! The subsidies were finally killed in 1994, but the 2002 Farm

Act added wool and mohair to the list of commodities eligible for marketing assistance

loans and the subsidy persists today.^35 Some policies are like the zombies in The Walking

Dead—unless you kill them in just the right way, they keep coming back.

Alternative perspectives on the

policy-making process

The “stages model” of policy making described earlier is a pretty basic description

of the process. Several elaborations and extensions provide a more nuanced

understanding of the process.^36 For example, the first two steps, problem recognition

and agenda setting, were conceptualized by John Kingdon as multiple streams of

problems, politics, and policies. These three streams are independent and may or may

not intersect. Objective conditions may or may not turn into problems. For example,

the abuse of opioid painkillers has been evident for many years. But the death of the

musician Prince called attention to this condition and turned it into a problem that

policy makers felt more pressure to address. This changed the politics of the problem

as people were more likely to see the problem as something that required government

action. Congress responded in July 2016 by passing the Comprehensive Addiction and

Recovery Act (CAR A), which changed the government’s policy related to the opioid

problem. With 175 Americans dying every day from opioid overdoses, many politicians

recognized it as a crisis that needed further government action.^37

There typically are various policy options available to address any given problem,

but whether or not policy makers act on them depends on either the presence of a policy

entrepreneur who pushes for change or, more broadly, the occurrence of a political

change that creates a “policy window”—an opportunity to implement the policy.

Political change may occur thanks to a change in the national mood, interest group

pressure, or an administrative or legislative change in control.^38 All this is to say that

agenda setting and eventually passing a law are not as linear and static as implied by

the basic stages model.

Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones provide additional insight into how policy

change happens with their “punctuated equilibrium” model. They argue that the

policy process features long periods of incremental change punctuated by brief periods

of major policy change. Change comes about when an alternative “policy image” can

expand an issue beyond the control of the policy specialists who resist change. For

example, the ACA overcame decades of resistance to major change in health insurance

by emphasizing a policy image that focused on the millions of Americans who did not

have insurance.^39

One final question about the policy-making process concerns policy diffusion: Why

do some policies quickly spread across the country while others are adopted in only

a few states? The idea that states are “laboratories of democracy” is an invitation to

explore that variation. One comprehensive study took up the challenge and examined

Full_17_APT_64431_ch16_572-613.indd 590 16/11/18 11:28 AM