Policy-Centered Learning in the Local Arena: Policy Feedback Effects from Community Policing

This paper is part of a larger project devoted to the application of policy-centered theory to the policies and programs of urban government. What is here called policycentered theory and sometimes called the policy feedback approach is a critically important line of empirical and theoretical work initiated in the early 1990’s by scholars interested in the impact of public policy on the functioning of democracy. Ingram and Schneider (1993; 1997), for example, elaborated on Lowi’s (1964) theoretical insight that the character of public policy shapes the nature of politics surrounding it. They theorized that public policies can have varied impacts on political participation depending upon key elements of policy design (such as the “social construction” of the target population, the nature of benefits or burdens provided, and the nature of program administration). Then a series of high profile studies provided empirical evidence consistent with their ideas. Soss (1999) showed that the AFDC program diminished the political involvement of welfare recipients, Mettler (2005) showed how the G.I. bill enhanced the political participation of recipients, and Campbell (2003) showed how the Social Security retirement program politically activated the elderly. At a minimum, these and other studies of social policies in the U.S. (Mettler and Stonecash, 2008; Soss and Keiser, 2006) and Europe (Kumlin and Rothstein, 2005) firmly establish that means-tested programs have a chilling effect on participation while universal (i.e., non-means tested) programs enhance the political engagement of recipients. What is more, the best of these studies control for the effects of individual-level background characteristics (such as education), thus strengthening confidence in the conclusion that the nature of an individuals’ experience with a public program can shape subsequent political involvement, even net the effect of the usual demographic predictors of participation.