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American public policy is and has always been profoundly racialized. Yet, the literature on policy feedback lacks cohesive theorization of how race matters for feedback processes. This article offers a conceptual road map for studying policy feedback in the context of racialized politics. Drawing together the substantial (but largely disconnected) work that already exists in the fields of public policy and racial politics, I develop the racialized feedback framework to provide theoretical guidance on (i) when race should be a core focus of policy feedback research and (ii) how race structures the relationship between policy and polity. I argue that both the scope of the questions that scholars ask and the nature of the answers they find are altered when race is afforded an appropriately central role in research on policy feedback.

AbstractThis paper focuses on the transferability of policy feedback and responsiveness theories. These theories have enjoyed a great deal of scholarly interest in the past years and are widely applied in different country contexts. However, this theory transfer tends to be more focused on the empirical challenges while neglecting the fact that it also involves normative implications about representative democracy. These implications, I argue, are strongly influenced by the real-world example of the United States, where the theories were originally developed. More specifically, I contend that bringing in theoretical approaches that are more influenced by European experiences such as neocorporatism and party difference theory affects the depiction of the role of interest groups and party government in policy feedback and responsiveness theories. I conclude by highlighting the contours of an empirical research agenda that might further elaborate on these issues.

A large body of research has explored how policies, once enacted, reshape public opinion, governing institutions, and political organizations—a process known as "policy feedback." Yet this productive research agenda has yet to be translated into practical recommendations of the sort regularly provided by other social science research. This volume of The ANNALS presents the findings of a major collective effort to do just this. The Policy Feedback Project (PFP) is an effort to develop research-backed arguments about how policy feedback might be harnessed to address collective problems in today's age of partisan polarization and economic inequality. This article orients readers to our collective approach and summarizes some of the contributing authors' findings. In particular, we show how the feedback effects of policies could be used to (1) tackle long-standing public problems that have resisted effective responses, (2) increase the long-term durability of policy initiatives designed to address these problems, and (3) build political momentum and power to facilitate the adaptation and expansion of these initiatives over time.

Although the idea that existing policies can have major effects on politics and policy development is hardly new, the last three decades witnessed a major expansion of policy feedback scholarship, which focuses on the mechanisms through which existing policies shape politics and policy development. Starting with a discussion of the origins of the concept of policy feedback, this element explores early and more recent contributions of the policy feedback literature to clarify the meaning of this concept and its contribution to both political science and policy studies. After exploring the rapidly expanding scholarship on policy feedback and mass politics, this element also puts forward new research agendas that stress several ways forward, including the need to explain both institutional and policy continuity and change. Finally, the element discusses the practical implications of policy feedback research through a discussion of its potential impact on policy design. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Objective: This study investigates whether the normalization of the use of the family-friendly workplace policy flexiplace in the organization affects men's adjustments in working hours following their transition to fatherhood. Background: Men's stable full-time employment after childbirth remains to be a barrier to the equal distribution of care and paid work. Recent research suggests that state family policies promoting dual-earner/dual-carer family models can involve new norm setting of active fatherhood, albeit so far with only modest consequences for fathers' working hours. Unclear is, however, whether family-friendly workplace policies, such as flexiplace, and involved organizational policy feedback are of complementary importance. Method: We estimated fixed-effects regression analyses on men's adjustments in actual and contracted hours after a transition to fatherhood. Analyses are based on linked employer-employee panel data (2012/13; 2014/15; 2018/19) from large German work organizations, considering a random sample of 1,687 men in 131 work organizations. Results: Findings revealed that the normalization of using flexiplace in the work organization was associated with a reduction in men's overall working hours as well as marginal adjustments in their contracted hours after transitioning to fatherhood. Conclusion: Although a normalization of flexiplace is more likely in demanding workplace contexts, men experience at least some leeway in adjusting extensive temporal investments to cater to private demands. - Appendix: https://ubp.uni-bamberg.de/jfr/index.php/jfr/article/view/946/748

AbstractScholars have charted a dramatic rise in the use of preemption both at the federal and state levels since the 1970s, with courts and politicians from both parties enacting preemptions across a range of contentious issues. Thus, preemption is a critical feature of American policymaking—one that almost certainly shapes the political choices of policymakers, organized interests, and voters across levels of government. Despite its significance to the politics of policymaking, scholars have yet to systematically consider the political consequences of preemption. We apply the logic of policy feedback theory to create a framework for analyzing the political consequences of preemption. Specifically, we detail how the use of both federal‐state and state‐local preemption might produce unique resource and interpretive effects that shape the subsequent political behaviors of policymakers, organized interests, and the public. We then consider two illustrative cases—federal preemption of state consumer financial protections and state preemption of local gender identity anti‐discrimination statutes—to demonstrate our framework's application. The article addresses a gap in the preemption literature and provides a critical extension of policy feedback theory, proposing a research agenda for future work to help better understand the politics of a widely used policy tool.

Theory suggests that policy benefits delivered directly by government are most likely to affect the voting behavior of beneficiaries. Nearly every empirical study, however, analyzes a policy or program that meets this criterion. To address this limitation, I compare the electoral impacts of two New Deal-era employment programs—the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Public Works Administration (PWA)—which differed primarily in their traceability to government. Though both programs provided employment, the WPA directly hired and paid employees. In contrast, the PWA subsidized private sector employment. Across two datasets, I find that the WPA increased support for the enacting Democratic Party. As expected, however, the PWA had no discernible causal effect on voting patterns. These results offer the strongest evidence to date that whether policy beneficiaries can easily see government as responsible for their benefits shapes the development of mass policy feedback effects.

AbstractInterest in policy feedback processes in energy transitions has grown rapidly in recent years. However, while it has provided interesting accounts of the mechanisms of stability or change, the policy feedback framework begs the question of why policy feedback dynamics vary so widely across cases. Existing accounts have tended to focus on the influence of ideas on policy design and on the role of interest groups. By contrast, the role of background institutional context in shaping policy feedback processes has been understudied. In this article, I develop a framework for identifying relevant types of institution that potentially shape policy feedback across different analytical stages of the feedback cycle. This approach is illustrated through the example of support policies for solar PV, where it is argued that a relatively small set of political, political economy and social institutions are likely to be important. The argument is then applied through a comparison of the evolution of solar PV policy in the UK and Germany, and the role of institutional context in explaining divergent policy pathways.