<> agency time discretion, deadlines, time pressure, pharmaceuticals <>Public agencies have discretion on the time domain, and politicians deploy numerous policy instruments to constrain it. Yet little is known about how administrative procedures that affect timing also affect the quality of agency decisions. We examine whether administrative deadlines shape decision timing and the observed quality of decisions. Using a unique and rich dataset of FDA drug approvals that allows us to examine decision timing and quality, we find that this administrative tool induces a piling of decisions before deadlines, and these "justbefore-deadline" approvals are linked with higher rates of postmarket safety problems (market withdrawals, severe safety warnings, safety alerts). Examination of data from FDA advisory committees suggests that the deadlines may impede quality by impairing late-stage deliberation and agency risk communication. Our results both support and challenge reigning theories about administrative procedures, suggesting they embody expected control-expertise trade-offs, but may also create unanticipated constituency losses. <>

This article defines a concept of relative trust—the gap between trust in different levels of government in a federalist system—and examines whether it influences public attitudes about which level of government holds authority in specific policy domains. While scholars have explored how trust in government affects political systems from a national perspective, little is known about how trust influences multitiered government systems in which public trust levels differ for national versus subnational governments. This article finds that greater relative trust in the state versus national level of government is associated with support for devolution in several policy areas where governing authority is shared: unemployment, health care, environmental policy, and food safety regulation. The implication is that relative trust shapes public preferences about policy centralization or decentralization and provides an individual‐level mechanism through which windows of opportunity open for changes in the allocation of policy authority.

Public opinion features prominently in policy research because it sets bounds on the definition of policy problems and acceptable policy solutions. We contend that public opinion is also important for setting bounds on the level of government at which policy hazards are regulated by shaping preferences for uniformity of regulation and, relatedly, preferences for centralization. We offer a theoretical argument for why risk creates pressures for uniform standards and examine the extent to which preferences for uniformity and centralization are the product of fairly stable individual-level predispositions (e.g. partisanship and ideology) versus more fluid attitudes like perceptions of risk, which vary in response to crises, new information, and issue framing. We test our argument using survey data in the policy domain of food safety and find that individuals who anticipate greater risk from food-borne illness prefer more uniform food safety regulation, which translates into preferences for federal-level policymaking. Our results imply that contextual circumstances and strategic communications that influence risk perceptions can create not only generalized public demand for more regulatory policy but specific demand for uniform, centralized regulation.

Has the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) 2010 dependent coverage provision (DCP) created a positive policy‐opinion feedback loop among its stated beneficiaries—adults under age 26? Such feedbacks are well documented around programs like Social Security that make explicit government transfers, but may be more limited around policies that—like the DCP—channel private‐sector resources to their target populations. It is also unknown whether single provisions within multipronged policies can elicit feedbacks around the parent policy as a whole. This article tests whether 19–25‐year‐olds differ from adults aged 26–34 in support for the ACA, civic predisposition, political efficacy, and political participation in 2012. Analyses also compare 2012 to 2008. The article then studies insured 19–25‐year‐olds in 2014, testing whether those using parental insurance differed from those using other insurance in ACA support, responses to threats to the ACA, and beliefs that the ACA is personally helpful. Young adults show virtually no signs of DCP‐inspired political feedbacks. These results do not appear strictly attributable to the youth of this target population. Rather, feeble feedbacks may owe to ACA attitudes resting on factors other than the DCP, to Democrats failing to mobilize young adults, and to the DCP's limited ability to reach low‐income earners.

Social Security and Medicare enjoy strong political coalitions within the mass public because middle-class Americans believe they derive benefits from these programs and stand alongside lower-income beneficiaries in defending them from erosion. By pooling data from nine nationally representative surveys, this article examines whether the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is cultivating a similar cross-class constituency. The results show that middle-income Americans are less likely than low-income Americans to say the ACA has helped them personally so far. On the other hand, partisanship conditions the relationship between income and beliefs about benefits likely to be derived from the ACA in the long run. In total, the results suggest that cross-class Democratic optimism about long-run benefits may enable the ACA to reap positive beneficiary feedbacks, but a large and bipartisan cross-class constituency appears unlikely. Drawing on these results, this article also makes theoretical contributions to the policy feedback literature by underscoring the need for research on prospections' power in policy feedbacks and proposing a strategy for researchers, policy makers, and public managers to identify where partisanship intervenes in the standard policy feedback logic model, and thereby to better assess how it fragments and conditions positive feedback effects in target populations.