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Backing into the Future: Reconceiving Policy Reform as Intertemporal Choice
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Abstract
This paper makes a case for reconfiguring the analytical lens through which we compare and explain governments’ public policy choices. Through an examination of the politics of welfare-state reform, it aims to demonstrate that a temporal lens of analysis can reshape both the policy puzzles inviting scholarly attention and the causal arguments best suited to unraveling them. The political analysis of recent welfare-state reforms has been largely structured along distributive lines, focused on explaining retrenchment. Yet, politicians seeking to control social spending have faced choices not only about who should pay the costs of adjustment, but also about when those costs should be imposed. Moreover, those governments who imposed the heaviest losses on program beneficiaries were often not those able to enact the most dramatic and costly investments in long-term fiscal sustainability. The paper contends that, in explaining reform choices as intertemporal tradeoffs, we need to employ a causal logic distinct from that used to explain retrenchment. To illustrate the argument, the paper reanalyzes a paired comparison of pension reforms from Paul Pierson’s Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. Viewed through a temporal lens, Pierson’s puzzle of policy reform is reversed. Britain -- the case of radical retrenchment -- largely delayed the costs of population aging, while the United States -- the case of incremental cutbacks -- adopted massive, costly investments in long-term sustainability. These outcomes were shaped by institutional context, but in ways contrary to the structural effects that scholars of distributive politics have usually identified. While concentrated policy authority led politicians to address long-term policy problems through distributive means, dispersed veto power generated distributive stalemate that led politicians to invest in long-range outcomes at short-run cost.
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Abstract
This paper makes a case for reconfiguring the analytical lens through which we compare and
explain governments’ public policy choices. Through an examination of the politics of welfare-
state reform, it aims to demonstrate that a temporal lens of analysis can reshape both the policy
puzzles inviting scholarly attention and the causal arguments best suited to unraveling them. The
political analysis of recent welfare-state reforms has been largely structured along distributive
lines, focused on explaining retrenchment. Yet, politicians seeking to control social spending
have faced choices not only about who should pay the costs of adjustment, but also about when
those costs should be imposed. Moreover, those governments who imposed the heaviest losses
on program beneficiaries were often not those able to enact the most dramatic and costly
investments in long-term fiscal sustainability. The paper contends that, in explaining reform
choices as intertemporal tradeoffs, we need to employ a causal logic distinct from that used to
explain retrenchment. To illustrate the argument, the paper reanalyzes a paired comparison of
pension reforms from Paul Pierson’s Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the
Politics of Retrenchment. Viewed through a temporal lens, Pierson’s puzzle of policy reform is
reversed. Britain -- the case of radical retrenchment -- largely delayed the costs of population
aging, while the United States -- the case of incremental cutbacks -- adopted massive, costly
investments in long-term sustainability. These outcomes were shaped by institutional context, but
in ways contrary to the structural effects that scholars of distributive politics have usually
identified. While concentrated policy authority led politicians to address long-term policy
problems through distributive means, dispersed veto power generated distributive stalemate that
led politicians to invest in long-range outcomes at short-run cost.
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