Reforms at Risk

Eric M. Patashnik is associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. His books include "Putting Trust in the US Budget: Federal Trust Funds and the Politics of Commitment".

• List of Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgments xi Chapter 1: Introduction: General-Interest Policymaking and the Politics of Reform Sustainability 1 Chapter 2: Policy Reform as a Political Project 16 Chapter 3: Expert Ideas Meet Politics: Reforming the Tax Code 35 Chapter 4: Reforming the Agricultural Welfare State: The Mixed Case of the Freedom to Farm Act 55 Chapter 5: Reforming the American Welfare State: ERISA and the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act 72 Chapter 6: Uncle Sam Goes Shopping: Reinventing Government Procurement 91 Chapter 7: Unshackling an Unstable Industry: Airline Deregulation 110 Chapter 8: Making Pollution Control Pay: Emissions Trading for Acid Rain 136 Chapter 9: Conclusions: The Patterns and Paradoxes of Policy Reform 155 Notes 181 Index 229

Winner of the 2009 Louis Brownlow Book Award, National Academy of Public Administration "Tremendous effort is invested by political scientists in an attempt to understanding the conditions that produce significant policy change. In this important book, Patashnik considers the fate of major policy changes."--S.Q. Kelly, Choice "Eric M. Patashnik's excellent book ... is an important book, for obvious reasons--as the Obama Administration settles in to a long, hard slog of reform across the broad swath of government activity, it will need to understand not only how to get reforms passed, but how to make sure they're carried out."--Elaine Kamarck, Democracy "[Patashnik] produces not only a helpful primer for policy entrepreneurs on how to design reforms with self-reinforcing features, but also a fine-grained scholarly analysis of the limits of previous work on policymaking. It is an instant classic that will be widely read by practitioners and scholars alike... Eric Patashnik has written a fascinating and enormously important book that tells us how policy designs help shape the long-term sustainability of general-interest reforms... It is a brilliant book that confirms Patashnik's place among the top scholars examining the interaction between political science and public policy."--Andrea Louise Campbell, Journal of Policy History "This is a very fine book--an example of American political science at its best, which is to say, very good indeed... Fine scholarship informs and leaves the reader arguing with it throughout; by these two measures this is fine scholarship."--Michael Moran, Governance "As the Obama administration and Congressional leaders address these and other challenges, they would do well to read Eric Patashnik's new book, Reforms at Risk. It is a book that adds to our base of knowledge and also provides insights that can be used to improve public policy."--John Hoornbeek, Journal of Politics "[I]n contrast to portions of the political science literature that try to portray post-reform politics as a matter of cycles, or coalitions, or institutional design, Patashnik provides a more complex and, to me, more realistic account of the political dynamics, including the importance of timing, historical circumstance, and learning from experience."--J. Samuel Fitch, Policy Sciences