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- Title
Traceable Tasks and Complex Policies: When Politics Matter for Policy Implementation.
- Authors
Manna, Paul; Moffitt, Susan L.
- Abstract
Implementation represents a key venue for the expression of political conflict. The challenge of illusory implementation, implementing the law's letter but not its spirit, has long vexed scholars and architects of public policy. We develop a political model of policy implementation to predict the kinds of politics—electoral, group, administrative—that different parts of complicated laws activate during implementation. Using original state‐level data on landmark education policy, we assess whether and how these politics render illusory implementation more or less likely for specific policy tasks embedded in complex laws. Consistent with our model, we find electoral politics render illusory implementation less likely for a narrow set of tasks. Group‐based politics and administrative politics bear on illusory implementation for a broader set of tasks in diverse ways. Overall, how policy activates politics during implementation depends on the features of the policy lever, where it is put into practice, and how traceable it is to the bureaucrats who do the implementing. Further, the results underscore how nuanced insights about implementation emerge when one considers individual components of complex laws, rather than treating the laws themselves whole cloth.
- Subjects
UNITED States; PUBLIC administration; U.S. states; EDUCATIONAL law &; legislation; NO Child Left Behind Act of 2001; GOVERNMENT policy
- Publication
Policy Studies Journal, 2021, Vol 49, Issue 1, p190
- ISSN
0190-292X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/psj.12348