Reforms at Risk

Description

Reforms at Risk is the first book to closely examine what happens to sweeping and seemingly successful policy reforms after they are passed. Most books focus on the politics of reform adoption, yet as Eric Patashnik shows here, the political struggle does not end when major reforms become enacted. Why do certain highly praised policy reforms endure while others are quietly reversed or eroded away? Patashnik peers into some of the most critical arenas of domestic-policy reform – including taxes, agricultural subsidies, airline deregulation, emissions trading, welfare state reform, and reform of government procurement – to identify the factors that enable reform measures to survive. He argues that the reforms that stick destroy an existing policy subsystem and reconfigure the political dynamic.Patashnik demonstrates that sustainable reforms create positive policy feedbacks, transform institutions, and often unleash the creative destructiveness of market forces.