The dominant implication of the carceral state literature is that path-breaking change is impossible through ordinary politics, reducing the options to either acquiescence or a level of mass mobilization not seen in decades. Over the last decade, however, activists have generated a surge of agitation for carceral reform, especially at the state level. In a twist the scholarly literature did not anticipate, much of that energy is coming from the Right. The theoretical flaw underlying the scholarly pessimism is a focus on the way policies entrench themselves through positive feedback, without commensurate attention to negative feedback. We argue the balance of feedback is shifting to the negative side in the case of mass incarceration. To seriously shrink the prison population, however, conservatives will have to accept the construction of alternative government structures; liberals will have to accept that these will remain more paternalistic than they might like.

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Over the last decade, in a major switch in position, conservatives have embraced the cause of reducing prison populations in the states and, increasingly, at the national level. The long-term crime decline and the increasing antistatism of the Republican Party contributed to this change, but it also has an important cognitive component: Policy makers have become more open to evidence of the damaging effects of mass incarceration. In contrast to previous studies, our case shows that such policy “feedback” only functions politically when a signal about a policy consequence is assigned valence and intensity by policy makers, whose calculations are heavily structured by the demands of party coalitions. On issues in which no core coalition member has a major stake, feedback can be tipped from reinforcing to undermining and vice versa, but this process depends on the efforts of entrepreneurs to change the way information is processed. In a highly polarized environment, opening policy makers to previously ignored evidence requires the cultivation of a reform cadre composed of ideological standard-bearers who can vouch for the orthodoxy of the new position.

Previous work in law and political development has emphasized the role that a “support structure” in civil society plays in translating electoral success into legal outcomes. In this paper, I claim that legal change can also work in the other direction—political appointees in government can use their power to assist their allies in civil society. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival materials, I show how—especially under Attorney General Meese—the Reagan Department of Justice invested in the ideas (through its support of originalism), organizations (especially the Federalist Society), and personnel of the conservative legal movement and reorganized itself to give these longer-term objectives more importance in the department. These investments add up to a case of “transformative bureaucracy”: the use of bureaucratic power to transform the conditions of future political conflict.

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This article discusses market and non-market failures. The first section explores the various implications of three ideas: recognition of the scope of departures from the optimal in private choice, deference to voluntary action as a ‘default option’, and acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of government failure. When these three ideas are combined, they provide a template for responsible policy analysis.

In this chapter, Landy and Teles take a strong normative stance in favour of decentralization. They echo a point made on economic grounds by Scharpf in Ch. 13, namely, that the role at the federal level should be to allow states to function better as a democracy; this they call ‘the principle of mutuality’. Accordingly, ‘It should be the obligation of each level of government as it participates in joint decision‐making to foster the legitimacy and capacity of the other. Local government contributes to central government by taking the brunt of the burden of citizen‐demands and of providing a coherent and properly constrained voice for citizen grievances. To do so adequately, it must be both responsive and capable. Central government has the responsibility to facilitate and encourage the ability of lower‐level governments to act as sites for deliberation and administration’. This leads Landy and Teles to stress the ways in which European Union powers need to be increased precisely and only to the extent to which this facilitative role is called for. In the end, they can see only classic indirect accountability as the way of enhancing the democratic legitimacy of the EU: ‘The EU needs democratic legitimacy, but that legitimacy should derive from its ability to protect the possibility for democratic government in its Member States, not from the largely fruitless mission of democratizing itself’.

Political scientists generally pay great attention to the creation of policies, but relatively little to the absence of policies. This article examines the reasons why Great Britain has not developed affirmative action policies, and in doing so, tries to shed some light on why the United States has. The author finds that both institutional and cultural factors explain the absence of preferential treatment in Great Britain, in particular the salience of the immigration issue, the absence of a leading oppressed group, the structure of the Labour Party and the electoral system, and the centralization of the British political system. The author argues that Great Britain seems to be moving along a different trajectory from that of the United States and that although their antidiscrimination policies are less developed than those in the United States, they may be more effective in the long term. As a result, the British experience may hold lessons for the United States.