The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics

by Bryan D. Jones, Sean M. Theriault, Michelle Whyman

Overview

Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing through the 1970s, the United States experienced a vast expansion in national policy making. During this period, the federal government extended its scope into policy arenas previously left to civil society or state and local governments.

With The Great Broadening, Bryan D. Jones, Sean M. Theriault, and Michelle Whyman examine in detail the causes, internal dynamics, and consequences of this extended burst of activity. They argue that the broadening of government responsibilities into new policy areas such as health care, civil rights, and gender issues and the increasing depth of existing government programs explain many of the changes in America politics since the 1970s. Increasing government attention to particular issues was motivated by activist groups. In turn, the beneficiaries of the government policies that resulted became supporters of the government’s activity, leading to the broad acceptance of its role. This broadening and deepening of government, however, produced a reaction as groups critical of its activities organized to resist and roll back its growth.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226626130
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/19/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Bryan D. Jones is the J. J. “Jake” Pickle Regent’s Chair in Congressional Studies in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and the coauthor, most recently, of The Politics of Information.Sean M. Theriault is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of three books. Michelle Whyman is a postdoctoral research associate with the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program at Duke University.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Great Broadening

Once in a great while, history's trajectory through time is deflected — direction, velocity, and acceleration can all be forever altered seemingly instantaneously. While these ruptures have received great attention in geology, paleontology, technology, and astrophysics, they also occur in human history. Not all ruptures occur instantaneously; rather, some involve an interconnected network of events, changes in variables, and reactions to earlier changes.

In this book we examine one of those great ruptures — a burst of political activity and policy enactment in the United States. We call it "the Great Broadening" because government got larger not by doing more of what it already was doing but by getting involved in new issues where it had only limited presence before. Beginning in the late 1950s, peaking in the late 1970s, and declining afterward, the United States experienced a vast expansion in the national policy-making agenda. Many have noted this great expansion; indeed it was hard to miss. In this brief period, government in the United States morphed from a targeted activist state centering on social insurance (the legacy of the New Deal) and foreign/military policy (a consequence of the permanent tensions of the Cold War) to a vastly broadened activist state in which few elements of civil society escaped intervention. Here we examine in detail the causes, internal dynamics, and consequences of this great, extended burst of activity.

We employ both qualitative and quantitative methods throughout our analyses. Qualitatively, we examine the available historical narratives used to explain the Great Broadening. Quantitatively, we use data series from the Policy Agendas Project and supplementary sources to establish the plausibility of causal orderings that are consistent with the historical narratives. We put aside attempts to develop sophisticated (or even unsophisticated) statistical models in favor of a more inductive but nevertheless disciplined approach to assess the nature of this great rupture in the development of American politics.

This period was so distinctively different that it must be approached holistically, as a separate and distinct phenomenon. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol (2007, 2) note that US politics were transformed between 1957 and 2007, "so much so that a Rip van Winkle who fell asleep in 1957 and awoke in 2007 would hardly feel it was the same polity." Pierson and Skocpol were correct, but we show in this book that the transformation was much more rapid and complete than they and their collaborators in their collection of essays on the transformation realized. For the most part, the transformation was over by the late 1970s.

This great rupture has not gone unnoticed, but observers have struggled with how to define it and assess its effects. Historian James Patterson (1996, vii) sees the period as one of "ever-greater expectations about the capacity of the United States to create an ever-better world abroad and a happier society at home." Samuel Huntington (1981) finds the answer in "creedal passions" that cause historical bursts of governmental activity. Pierson (2007) depicts a general rise in activist government. Skocpol (2007) views the transformation as a civic reorganization of group life and its influence on government. Campbell (2007) writes about the changing nature of party politics, while McCarty (2007) sees it as a period of partisan polarization with severe consequences for public policy. Scholars such as Zelizer (2007) and Teles (2007) define the period by the era of conservatism that followed it.

All of these astute observers are correct, but they miss the critical unifying component. All agree that the key general characteristic of the period is how the federal government changed. But no agreement integrates the diverse elements they discuss. Like Theodore Lowi (1967), we find the key in the shifting relationship between state and civil society. The federal government quite suddenly extended its scope into policy arenas previously left to civil society or the states and localities. Government did not grow much faster, at least according to standard measures relating expenditures to the size of the economy; however, it broadened, becoming much more intrusive across many more issues than in the past. As a consequence, we term this period "the Great Broadening."

Patterson's grand expectations cannot have defined the period, because expectations have been raised and dashed many times in history. Nonetheless, the raising and sustaining of these expectations is the key to the self-sustaining nature of the broadening process. Pierson's "activist state" was trivially about more spending; it was more essentially a vast increase in scope. It is the particular nature of activism that mattered. The transformation of civic society that Skocpol so astutely examines was mostly a consequence of the Great Broadening. Political parties adjusted to this shift in scope; they were involved in causing it as well, but less so than many political scientists imagine. The more fundamental causes can be found in the social movements that proliferated during the period. Huntington recognizes the creedal passions that motivate social movements, but he downplays the roles of institutions, which are critical. Polarization and interest-group politics were largely a consequence of the broadening, not a characteristic of it. And conservatism as it developed after the Great Broadening would not have taken the same path without it — it too was a consequence. We offer evidence for each of these propositions and more.

The Arc of the Great Broadening

With the approaches we deploy in this book, we are able to measure the beginning of the period, its peak, and its end with considerable precision. The period may be described as a great arc, or horseshoe, of intense activity with a distinct beginning and end. We use a variety of different measures to assess this arc based in the intensity of the period and the changing scope of government.

We start with a simple demonstration that illustrates both the nature of the period and our visual approach to understanding it. Political news coverage increased during the period as the pace of politics intensified. Here we examine two news sources, the New York Times and the Congressional Quarterly Almanac (CQA). The Times reports generally on politics, public policy, business, and social affairs, whereas the CQA focuses on "inside the beltway" activity, reporting exclusively on policy-making and politics. Simple counts of articles published show similar arcs during approximately the same period of time (see fig. 1.1). Of course there may have been other reasons for the increases and decreases in news coverage, but the correspondence between the two series is striking. We'll see this arc or ones very similar many times in this book.

Politics, even in relatively quiescent periods, can involve senses of urgency and intensity. But during the Great Broadening, politics and policy-making each had a frenzy about them, and they moved in tandem, each influencing the other. Within the arc of the Great Broadening, causal processes differed from those prevalent either before or afterward. Moreover, the dynamics within the arc were generated endogenously — that is, they were not directly caused by an external event such as the Great Depression or World War II. Rather, changes within the polity itself caused the increase in intensity of policy-making activity. Part 1 of this book examines these internal dynamics, showing how the political processes within the arc were different in kind from those that came before and after.

Saying that the processes were different does not mean they were unique. Rather, the same factors used to explain politics in more normal times interacted more intensely, feeding on one another through emerging networks of activists and politicians. This pattern is not mystical. The processes inside the arc were generally similar to an arms race, a market bubble, or a trade war. Virtuous cycles also exist, of course. These sorts of self-sustaining processes are termed positive feedback systems. Outside the arms race, nations still arm. Outside a trade war, nations still pursue trade advantages. Supply and demand governs economic exchanges in or out of a bubble. The difference is how actors and groups key on each other's behaviors. In such self-sustaining feedback systems, external "shocks" are not required to explain change. Such systems are fundamentally unstable; they always end, but they sometimes end with a bang and sometimes with a whimper.

Part 2 of the book explores the causes of the Great Broadening — what set off the self-sustaining (for a time) dynamics that caused the rising phase of the arc. After pausing in chapter 7 to consolidate and reflect on what the empirical analyses have shown us, we embark on a study of the consequences of the broadening in part 3. Why did the arc decline, and what replaced it? The declining phase came about because actors who made gains during the period turned to consolidation, and those who lost mobilized against those policy changes.

In our analyses of consequences, we hope to establish the plausibility of a radical claim: much of American politics during the fourth quarter of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first was strongly influenced by the public policies addressed during the third quarter of the last century. That policies cause politics is an old idea (Lowi 1964; Pierson 1993), but an important one that too frequently is underappreciated. We take this idea much further by demonstrating that the magnitude of the disruption of the Great Broadening was transformative to our entire system of governance. Its "downstream" effects dramatically influenced the functioning of Congress, the courts, political parties, interest groups, and voters, and they generated backlash and social movements that continue to reverberate even today. Congress shifted its primary focus from lawmaking to oversight, the interest-group system grew exponentially, social movements on the right responded to the left's policy successes, political parties in government polarized, the corpus of law grew much larger, and the docket of the Supreme Court expanded as Congress intensified its lawmaking during this period. Prior policy-making processes are as important as factors that are normally seen as critical, such as elections, public opinion, political parties, and the media.

The Two Paths of the Great Broadening

While many scholars and casual observers have detected large, transformative events in history, few have offered broader theories to explain these events. Nevertheless, two distinct approaches can be used to study such events. In the first, they are viewed as arising from the same causes that explain less extreme changes, but the independent variables are themselves extreme (see Barabasi 2010, 11, for a more general statement). We term this approach the contemporaneous dynamics approach. For example, political scientists hypothesize that changes in political party control of government lead to different public policies. If such a change is large, one might expect proportionately larger policy changes.

A second approach comes from historical institutionalism. It is also reflected independently in the study of American political institutions. In this approach, political institutions hold the trajectory of the political process within bounds; the process is path-dependent. It is not that change is precluded; rather, the costs of reversal are very high (Levi 1997, 28). Rarely, in what is termed a critical juncture, this path-dependency is disrupted. In this juncture, causation is different, because the bounds imposed by institutions have broken. As Capoccia and Kelemen (2007, 343) claim, "The freedom of political actors and impact of their decisions is heightened" during the critical juncture. This freedom of action leads to the creation of new forms of political rules and institutional arrangements. These new arrangements structure politics and are path-dependent and highly resistant to change unless they are disrupted by another critical juncture. Pierson (1996) has detailed some of these dynamics in the specific case of attempts to dismantle the welfare state; Hacker and Pierson (2014) expanded these ideas. Similarly, students of American political institutions have analyzed the resistance to change built into our constitutional design (Krehbiel 1998; Jones and Baumgartner 2005).

Our study shows that both contemporaneous dynamics and path-dependency face limits in explaining the Great Broadening. The contemporaneous dynamics approach fails most fundamentally because the standard political variables, even at high levels, cannot account for the Great Broadening. A quarter of a century ago, David Mayhew (1991) found that the passage of landmark legislation (including acts passed during the Great Broadening) could not be explained by the standard hypothesis of unified government, suggesting that a rethinking of the standard approach was in order. Put in context, though, the standard factors remain important.

As the historical institutionalism school would lead us to expect, we find distinct evidence that the Great Broadening altered American institutions of governing in important ways. It was indeed a great rift, permanently transforming the trajectory of politics and public policy in the United States. Second, we find evidence that the causation is different during the critical juncture than either before or after the rupture. But many intuitionalists assert that once the new trajectory is established, institutions reestablish constraints on actors within the new set of rules. We demur from this claim, at least partially, and we back up our dissent from the prevailing wisdom with data.

What actually happened is much more dynamic than the neo-institutionalists suggest. The Great Broadening did reset institutions, but it also set off counter-reactions and downstream consequences that continued to disrupt the historical path for decades after the peak of the Great Broadening. Most obviously, the actors who saw themselves as losers were unlikely to submit quietly to the new rules; rather, they were more likely to mount a counterattack on the system to keep it from becoming solidified.

We document two basic paths of the Great Broadening and its aftermath rather than the single path of the historical institutionalists. The first is indeed path-dependency — some parts of the system were shifted permanently in ways that we can assess and measure. For example, once Congress began to address the new issues that emerged during the Great Broadening, it continued to address them. The second is counter-mobilization, as opponents of the new policy direction tried and succeeded to halt the Great Broadening and have even reversed some of its effects. The intensity of lawmaking rose during the intense dynamics of the broadening period, subsequently falling as conservatives pushed back. We note that the first halves of both paths are the same, and it is that rise that we refer to as the Great Broadening. Once the agenda had broadened though, it could either persist, yielding the former path, or experience a downturn, yielding the latter.

Measuring the Great Broadening

Could it be that critical junctures in political systems are so rare that they must be studied by constructing narratives — guided by theory, but narratives nevertheless — as comparative neo-institutionalists recommend (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007; Bates et al. 1998)? Or, despite their rarity, can more quantitative methods be employed? We show here that quantitative study is both possible and productive, at least under some circumstances.

Our quantitative analyses are made possible by the availability of the Policy Agendas datasets that measure the occurrence of policy activity using a consistent and temporally compatible set of content codes from 1945 to the present (http://www.comparativeagendas.net/). The system is analogous to the National Income Accounts that economists use to track different sectors of the economy over time. The key to the system is backward compatibility and high reliability in coding, and the use of the same coding system on various policy-making activities (Jones 2016a).

The quantitative analysis based on the Policy Agendas Project is essential to understanding the Great Broadening, because the general conception of what the changes of the period were about is at least highly misleading. The whole process is often summarized as a growth of government, and most scholars of policy change examine government growth using expenditure data. If government spends more money relative to the growth of the economy, then one may conclude that government has grown.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
  Chapter 1: The Great Broadening

Part 1: The Internal Dynamics of the Great Broadening

Chapter 2: Crossing the Legitimacy Barrier
Chapter 3: Arcs and Plateaus
Chapter 4: Dynamics of the Great Broadening

Part 2: Causes of the Great Broadening

Chapter 5: Causes of the Great Broadening: Conventional Explanations
Chapter 6: Causes of the Great Broadening: The Role of Social Movements
Chapter 7: Feedback Politics

Part 3: Consequences of the Great Broadening

Chapter 8: Transformation of US Law: Broadening and Then Thickening
Chapter 9: The Administrative State and Its Legislative Oversight
Chapter 10: Polarization in Congress: A Macro-Level Analysis
  Appendix: Granger Causality
Chapter 11: Microstory of Polarization in Congress
Chapter 12: The Interest-Group System
  Appendix
Chapter 13: Politics of Conservative Reaction
Chapter 14: Extreme Events, Feedback Policy-Making, and American Politics
  Notes
List of References