https://bsky.app/profile/sam-workman.bsky.social/post/3lyygppp4pc2t

Portions of this are reprinted from a blog post I wrote for the MPSA some time ago. The issues it raises are even more important moving forward. That post can be found here.

The article above, from Good Authority, is an insightful read. It makes several points that I largely agree with. Democrats have been lax in both party building and establishing the "in-between" institutions that support the party—such as podcasts, alternative media, and grassroots organizations—for some time. This showed during the Biden administration, where the focus was squarely on policy, but lacked attention to the organizations and systems that help explain policy to key populations.

The result is that policy didn't matter so much in the election, and frankly, hasn't for quite some time. One of the key disconnects over the last quarter century concerns the breakdown in the administering of policy—implementation. Discussing policy implementation in political science is like descending into the abyss—a realm of old men, the aroma of cigars, and leather. A land where there are a million ways to fail and a story for each of these.

Fiscal federalism is premised on states and localities targeting funds at the problems identified in federal initiatives but using local skill and context to drive impact. In an era where funds can be easily redirected and goals sabotaged, it makes a poor lens for any citizen hoping to understand who is responsible for what they experience. After all, policy implementation is a pressure valve, a continuation of politics at earlier stages in the process of collective decision-making.

For reasons I will note below, policy implementation is key to understanding policy change and outcomes broadly, and not just in the crevices left by public administration or public management. Policy implementation is fundamental to understanding enduring issues in American politics, such as representation, party governance, and democratic governance.

The assumption for left-leaning strategists and commentators, sometimes heroic, is that voters sense when the party in power has moved too far left or right for their tastes, and in response, turn out the party in power. How do we understand this linkage in the context of administrative incompetence, or even more importantly, opposition party obstruction? If opposition parties are able to impede, or outright degrade, the quality of policy implementation, then citizens no longer judge policies or their left-right location, but their implementation. This leads to a quite different interpretation of representation and mass movements in party support.

In the United States, it is apparent that opposition parties are able to manufacture this dynamic. The Affordable Care Act, for instance, has suffered from day one due to decisions about implementation forced on the administration by the opposition. Similarly, as late as fall 2015, 20% of the regulations implementing the Dodd-Frank regulatory reforms of the financial sector were still unimplemented, confronting stiff opposition from the House Banking and Finance Committee. This phenomenon works both ways, though in the modern era, Republicans are far more skillful in deploying the strategy. The asymmetric value for government in part favors this. If you value a small government that doesn't do much, making government ineffective partially achieves your goals, whatever their substance.

For political scientists, this also opens up an avenue for studying party governance in a new way. Opposition influence does not end with the bargain struck in the legislative branch or with presidential directives. President Trump learned that lesson in his first term, and has corrected course in the second. Our recent past has shown, if nothing else, that debilitating the governing party’s attempts at implementation is a viable strategy for influence, and governing from the back. As for democratic governance, it emerges as a viable strategy for representation, even when out of power. In other words, credit-claiming and position-taking has both an affirmative, and preventative dimension relating to government action.

If I have convinced you that policy implementation might be important, why do we need a theory of policy implementation? After all, we have the prosperous fields of administration and management that bear heavily on many of the things bureaucracies do. It is difficult for research traditions built around the inner-workings of bureaucracies and administrative units to deal effectively with a problem that is inherently inter-institutional. The same could be said of bureaucratic politics with its focus on influence, the accumulation of power through reputation, and how bureaucracies navigate their political environment. Are these things important for understanding policy implementation? Of course they are, but they will never be theories of policy implementation. And furthermore, a theory of proactive government and a party platform presaging proactive government, had better be imbued with an attendant theory of implementation that is something besides "give states and localities money."

The federal form of government was envisioned as a solution to impotence of states in the face of external threats and internal fragility. If that level of government can no longer demand, and is left to pray or beg instead, then policy will cease to matter altogether democratically. That not only changes the form of government, but changes what we mean by "democracy." We should never forget that democracy, authoritarianism, and everything in between are value propositions, nothing more. Democracy has no inherent value beyond the problems it solves for people. To the degree this isn't visible, or is obscured, we should expect exactly what we've seen over the past quarter century or more.

Two characteristics of governance in American politics severely limit that ability of current research to speak to policy implementation. The first of these is the nature of the issues faced by government in the modern era. Issues like climate change, terrorism, and global economic interdependence are boundary-spanning in nature—they cross many traditional substantive issues. As such, diverse interests and bureaucracies work within the same substantive area.

In addition, federalism overlays the nature of these problems and the bureaucracies competing within them, adding an extra layer of consequences for policy implementation. In many ways, the federalism components of the ACA’s implementation shaped resultant policy outcomes in the program for better and worse. Moreover, there is ample evidence that legislators and parties were thinking about policy implementation when considering these choices.

If we understand policy implementation as important, and accept that a theory of policy implementation must move beyond our current approaches in management or bureaucratic politics, why now? The straightforward answer is that the problems and political dynamics we now face demand it if we are to understand policy change, outcomes, and how citizens intersect with governing structures. Beyond that, it is worth considering the history of policy implementation.

Policy implementation was born, grew, and expired long before the necessary conceptual and theoretical components necessary for understanding it where intellectually ripe. In other words, it was an important problem before its time. Many of our theories of politics today bear directly on policy implementation, including theories of delegation, the ecology of games, how governing systems process information, and how they accumulate expertise. None of this intellectual infrastructure existed when the concern for policy implementation was deep and abiding.

Party building, alongside nurturing supportive organizations that buttress larger strategy, is a necessary condition of imposing policies, and we shouldn't forget that's the whole point. No politician should be stumping about policy implementation, but they'd better have a theory of implementation the day they step into office.