Enacted policies reshape interests, constituencies, expectations and capacities, and thereby determine the politics that follows.
Schattschneider's formulation that new policies create a new politics was developed by Pierson in 1993 into an account of why programmes become hard to reverse: a policy creates beneficiaries who organise, administrative capacity that has uses, and expectations that make withdrawal a visible loss. The causal arrow usually drawn from politics to policy runs the other way as well, and often more strongly.
In practice
- A subsidy introduced for three years has a trade association lobbying for it by year four.
- A firm that offers a benefit once finds that removing it is a bigger event than introducing it was.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works