My research examines the interplay between political institutions and the political behavior of mass publics. I have examined the interrelationships between political attitudes and political participation and three kinds of institutions: public policies (especially social welfare and tax policy), federal systems, and political parties. Much of my research examines feedback effects – how public policies and institutional designs shape subsequent politics and policy outcomes. In particular, my work analyses feedback effects not just at the elite level, as earlier scholars have done, but also at the mass level. Often, I study these processes as they play out over time. Hence my work stands at the intersection of political science and public policy and combines the political behavior and historical institutionalist traditions, two normally quite separate approaches.
This approach has led to three major projects: How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton University Press, 2003); How Americans Think about Taxes: Public Opinion and the American Fiscal State (book manuscript under advance contract with Princeton University Press); and a third project on the development and consequences of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, the largest welfare state expansion in a generation that added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare and altered the program’s design in other fundamental ways. For these and other projects, please see the following:
Please see my first book, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State.
My second book, How Americans Think about Taxes: Public Opinion and the American Welfare State, examines public opinion toward taxes from the 1930s to the present. Read an excerpt from the current draft here.
A third major project examines the origins and consequences of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. With Kimberly Morgan of George Washington University, I am studying how this legislation, which provides a new prescription drug benefit for seniors through private insurers, not the traditional Medicare program, and which encourages more seniors to leave Medicare for private managed care plans, came about, and what the consequences are – how policy feedbacks at the mass, interest group, and state levels will shape the future of American entitlement policy. This research is funded by a Robert Wood Johnson Investigators Award and a grant from the NSF, the latter funding a panel survey of Medicare beneficiaries. See two initial papers from this project:
"The Medicare Modernization Act and the New Politics of Medicare"
"Policy Feedbacks and the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003: The Political Ramifications of Policy Change"
"Self-Interest, Social Security, and the Distinctive Participation Patterns of Senior Citizens"
American Political Science Review 96 (September 2002): 565-74.
Abstract
Decades of participation research show that political activity increases with income, but the participation of senior citizens specifically with regard to Social Security poses an exception to this pattern. Social Security-oriented participation decreases as income rises, in part because lower-income seniors are more dependent on the program. The negative income-participation gradient is especially pronounced for letter writing about the program, but even Social Security-related voting and contributing are less common among higher-income seniors. This is an instance in which self-interest is highly influential: Those who are more dependent are more active. It is also an example of lower-class mobilization with regard to an economic issue, something quite unusual in the United States.
"Participatory Reactions to Policy Threats: Senior Citizens and the Defense of Social Security and Medicare"
Political Behavior 25 (March 2003): 29-49.
Abstract
The sociodemographic factors emphasized in much participation research cannot explain abrupt changes in levels of activity. This study shows how threat of undesirable policy change acts as an impetus to participatory activity, helping to explain temporal variation in participation. Newly available individual-level time-series data are used to show surges in senior citizen letter writing in response to threats to Social Security and Medicare during the 1980s. Policy threat interacts with individual characteristics to produce variations in participatory reaction congruent with the magnitude of the threat to the individual.
"Financing the Welfare State: Elite Politics and the Decline of the Social Insurance Model in America" with Kimberly Morgan.
Studies in American Political Development 19 (October 2005): 173-95.
Abstract
Payroll taxes are central to the American social insurance model, financing two of the most significant government programs in American history: Social Security and Medicare. Yet, after the careful construction of a political consensus around payroll taxation, and the successful selling of this model to the public, a new consensus against payroll finance has emerged, encompassing both liberals and conservatives. The turn against contributory finance was not due to a sudden change in median public preferences, but instead reflected changes in the world of political elites and their interpretation of mass opinion. Institutional changes in the 1970s led to the collapse of the insulated policy-making community that had previously dominated social insurance policy, letting in a raft of critical voices at a time of fiscal and economic difficulties. This came as other political changes were encouraging lawmakers to adhere to the preferences of narrow interest groups and the affluent rather than median public opinion. As a result, policy-makers have rejected payroll taxes as a way to finance new social programs. Lacking funding, proposed expansions of the welfare state – including improvements in Medicare, long-term care coverage, and access to health insurance for the uninsured – have foundered. Nor have existing programs been stabilized for the long term. In tracing the rise and fall of contributory finance, this article highlights the role that taxation plays in shaping the politics of the welfare state.
"Policy Feedbacks and the Political Mobilization of Mass Publics"
In progress.
Abstract
A growing body of research demonstrates that policy feedback effects influence not only state and elite actors but also mass publics. Case studies from the United States and Sweden show how the designs of public policies affect the level and distribution of political participation among target populations as well as government trust and state interventionist attitudes, ideology, and partisanship. This paper lays a theoretical foundation for the further study of these effects, both cataloguing these consequences and distilling the relationships between specific opinion and participation outcomes and particular aspects of program design (which include scope [universal vs. selective], funding, administration, benefit duration, and interest group mobilization). The paper argues both for the substantive importance of studying how the designs of policies affect the outputs of democratic governance and for the methodological innovation necessary to pursue such analyses: the combination of behavioral and institutional approaches.
"Universalism, Targeting, and Participation"
For inclusion in a volume edited by Suzanne Mettler, Joe Soss, and Jacob Hacker on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.
"The Political Consequences of Program Design: The Case of Medicare"
In progress – comments welcome.
Abstract
Political participation typically increases with income, but the participation of senior citizens regarding Medicare is an exception to this pattern: low-income seniors are more likely to participate concerning Medicare than their high-income counterparts. This is due in part to their greater dependence on Medicare; lower income seniors are less healthy, use more Medicare benefits, and are less likely to have supplemental insurance. This case provides another example where self-interest is particularly influential and provides a second example of a negative income-participation gradient within a universal government program, to accompany earlier findings on Social Security. These findings help explain the policy trajectory of Medicare and the likely political consequences of the program design changes contained in the 2003 program overhaul.
"Federalism and the Politics of Old-Age Care in Germany and the United States" with Kimberly Morgan.
Comparative Political Studies 38 (October 2005): 887-914.
Abstract
Until the mid-1990s, Germany and the United States had very similar systems of long-term care. At that time, Germany created a new social insurance program while American reform efforts stalled. Given the risk profile of long-term care, conventional explanations of social policies -- rooted in objective conditions, policy legacies, interest group mobilization, and party politics -- fail to account for the diverging trajectories. Instead, we show how differing federal structures shaped reform efforts. German federalism gives states a powerful role at the federal level and encourages collective responses to fiscal problems, enabling comprehensive restructuring of long-term care financing. In the U.S., states had no political mechanism to compel federal policy-makers to tackle this complicated subject, and reform efforts died. Our analysis suggests that reform around "new" social welfare issues with weakly mobilized publics is unlikely without proxy actors that have the institutional or political means to forcibly gain the attention of policy-makers. A second implication is that scholars should pay more attention to the “varieties of federalism” in their analysis of the welfare state.
"'Racial Threat,' Partisan Climate, and Direct Democracy: Contextual Effects in Three California Initiatives" with Cara Wong and Jack Citrin.
Forthcoming, Political Behavior (March 2006).
Abstract
Does context – racial, economic, fiscal, and political – affect whites’ votes on racially-related ballot propositions? We examine non-Hispanic whites’ voting behavior on three California ballot initiatives: Propositions 187, 209, and 227. Unlike previous analyses that lacked individual-level data and were therefore limited to ecological inference, we combine individual-level data from exit polls with county-level contextual variables in a hierarchical linear model. Racial/ethnic context affected whites’ votes only on Proposition 187, economic context had no influence on vote choice, and the effect of fiscal context was limited to Proposition 227. However, across the propositions, whites’ decisions were shaped by local political context. Thus, we do not find support for the “racial threat” hypothesis across all racially-charged issues. Furthermore, the strength of political context supports the “friends and neighbors” effect suggested by social network theory.
"Parties, Electoral Participation, and Shifting Voting Blocs"
In The Transformation of the American Polity, ed. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol. Forthcoming, Princeton University Press.
Abstract
A series of technological, institutional, legal and cultural changes have reshaped the role of political parties in the American electoral system. Parties were once broad-based mobilizers of the public, providing the manpower to run labor-intensive political campaigns and appealing to voters with emotional and social ties. Then advances in communications and reform of the nomination system led to the rise of candidate-centered elections. To help the modern candidate, the parties reconfigured themselves as providers of services. At this they have excelled. However, they have lost their grassroots ties to voters and increasingly target high-turnout and affluent citizens, exacerbating political inequality. And the parties have fared differently: the Republican party more quickly and adroitly built its organizational and fundraising capacities. Moreover, the Democrats became associated with a variety of “new politics” groups and ceded both populist and prosperity arguments to the Republicans, who are now seen as the defenders of the middle class. As a result, Democrats have lost ground among many important electoral groups including white men, Southerners, Catholics, and evangelical Protestants. In perhaps the most vivid expression of the ascendance of an energized conservative movement in American politics, the Republican party now controls the presidency, both chambers of Congress, and a majority of governorships and state legislatures, a complete reversal of the circumstances of 1964.