Swing Issues and Policy Regimes: Federal Education Policy and the Politics of Policy Change

Political scientists have long debated the nature of the American political system, particularly the degree to which the federal government is amenable to major policy initiation and reform. There are two basic schools of thought on this question. One school—which I will call the stasis school—argues that the system is highly resistant to major change. The other school of policymaking—which I will call the dynamic school—emphasizes the openness and responsiveness of America's political system and the relative ease of generating reform at the national level. While the stasis and dynamic schools are helpful in explaining systemic tendencies and the influence of particular forces on the policy process, they are less useful in illuminating the evolution of governmental policymaking in a single issue area over time.

Dynamic approaches correctly identify the potential for policy change in the American political system, but history validates the stasis school's claim that extensive reform within a particular issue area is, in reality, quite infrequent. It does nonetheless take place, and this article will draw from both schools in articulating a policy regimes framework that specifies the mechanisms by which major policy change occurs within a specific policy arena. By "major change" I do not mean the perpetual fine-tuning and incremental ebb and flow of policymaking but the more fundamental reshaping of policy ends and means, such as one finds in the 2002 No Child Left Behind education law. NCLB replaced a narrow federal role that had historically been focused on providing resources and procedural protections for disadvantaged students with a greatly expanded national effort to improve the performance of all students through mandates on teacher quality, academic standards, testing, and accountability.

A policy regime is the set of ideas, interests, and institutions that structures governmental activity in a particular issue area (such as health care, transportation, etc.) and that tends to be quite durable over time. A policy regimes framework draws on the insights of the stasis school to understand the factors that allow policies to withstand pressures for major change for many years, but it relies more heavily on the dynamic school to comprehend how inertial forces are eventually overcome and a new regime constructed. It offers an alternative to the "punctuated equilibrium" model developed by Baumgartner and Jones in which major policy change is seen as resulting from short bursts of rapid reform after a long period of hegemony by a policy monopoly. The policy regimes framework draws from the American political development literature's study of political regimes to argue that individual policy regimes are less stable—and change, when it occurs, less rapid—than the "policy monopoly" model would suggest.

The Stasis School and the Politics of the Status Quo

Political scientists have frequently observed that the American political system contains numerous inertial forces that reinforce the status quo and limit major policy change. The stasis school does not say that major change never occurs, but it emphasizes the forces that make policymaking configurations and policies highly durable and stable over time. It has several variants. One places the emphasis on American political culture and strong public support for free enterprise, limited government, and local control which make efforts to create national programs and regulations difficult (Hartz 1985; Lipset 1997). Another stresses the character of the American constitutional system and, in particular, the fragmentation of its policymaking institutions. Federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances create a system of multiple veto points that opponents can use to protect existing policy arrangements and thwart reform proposals (Mettler 1998; Quadango 1994). Other variants of the stasis school add to the systemic explanation something more general about the character of policymaking itself. Incremental and bureaucratic models, for example, emphasize the limitations on decision-making and implementation processes that incline complex systems toward only minor change (Downs 1967; Wilson 1989; Moe 1989).

A large and powerful class of interest-group actors can use these veto points and their influence over the bureaucracy to block initiatives that threaten their interests.¹ Together with politicians and...