Darci Pauser

PSC 602 Reading Response

Week 12

Visible and Submerged Public Opinion and Policy

Paul Burstein. American Public Opinion, Advocacy, and Policy in Congress. Cambridge
University Press: New York, NY. 2015.

Burstein seeks to perform a comprehensive study of the effects of public opinion and advocacy on
the policy process. He finds the rather pessimistic conclusion that neither public opinion nor
advocacy seem to have much of an impact on policy. Because of this, he induces that we should
see a policy process that favors the status quo; and, in fact, that is what we see in the empirical
evidence on structural policy change. However, if public opinion and advocacy are not having
much of an effect, then what is? Mettler provides some insight as to the distribution of benefits of
government programs, and illustrates how they favor the upper echelons of society over the lower
echelons. Apparently, there is a lot of data that Burstein misses, or simply cannot quantify.
Burstein himself admits that the scope of his data is limited to what is visible.

So, given that public opinion and above-ground advocacy does not account for much policy
change, what is the residual? Perhaps we could borrow from the economics concept of the Solow
residual. In Solows model of economic growth (the analog for policy change), labor and capital are
combined to produce outputs. However, Solow recognized that there was something else affecting
outputa residual of productivity that was intangible. Although this is a very rudimentary
explanation, the Solow residual still holds as a measure of an economys productivity, and houses
things such as labor education, health, technology, et cetera. I ask: can we take the residual after
accounting for public opinion and advocacy and consider it submerged interests? This policy
residual would include back room deals, as well as Congress member personal opinion. Perhaps,
it would also be a measure of public disinterest, since those policies that the public do not affect
are often those they are simply not interested in engaging in and, hence, do not affect Congress
desire to implement them.

Burstein uses a random sample of 60 Congressional bills to test hypotheses regarding the policy
process. He argues that bills are a good measure of a policy proposal, a concept he
problematizes but does not adequately explain. Nonetheless, he explains that the basic building
block of the policy process is a bill. Members of Congress introduce a policy proposal, which is
manifest in one or more bills. The Congressional member then sticks with the proposal until it
passes or disappears from the legislative agenda (Burstein, 2014:896). Bursteins analysis of the
existing empirical literature and data is impressive, and he appears to create as comprehensive and
internally valid a study as possible. However, there are some other ways in which he could have
divided the data. For example, he does not differentiate between one-off advocacy and more
permanent interest groups. He seems to assume they are the same. Also, he could have looked at
the difference between elite and non-elite issues, since presumably these are affected by the two
groups in different ways. Finally, and similarly, Burstein did not address the difference between
organized advocacy as an indicator of public opinion and organized advocacy as an indicator of
special interest.
Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine
American Democracy (U. of Chicago Press, 2011).

In a fascinating description of government programs like social welfare and tax expenditures,
Mettler argues that some operations of government are visible, while others remain submerged,
or hidden from the general publics awareness. The submerged nature of programs like student
loans, health insurance subsidization, and Home Mortgage Interest Deductions (HMID) are
favored by conservative politicians, since they are able to target powerful campaign supporters and
maintain public legitimacy with their constituencies. While social welfare programs like TANIF are
conceptualized by the public as government spending with visible beneficiaries (who are very aware
they are getting handouts), submerged state programs are conceptualized as a favorable
contraction of government. These conceptions are problematic, since from an accounting
perspective, the submerged programs are in fact expenditures, and their beneficiaries are hidden
from public view, preventing an open and democratic process to form and reform their substance
and parameters.

My concern is that conservatives like Tea Partiers could use the idea of the submerged state as yet
another reason to contract government in other manners. The submerged state represents the
distrust that they have for the governments bureaucratic and policy process systems. Moreover,
Mettler spends just one paragraph explicitly describing why a tax expenditure (lost revenue) is the
same as a direct outlay (an obligation). Although I believe that the general public would agree with
equalizing the benefits of these programs more towards the middle class, I am skeptical as to
whether the public would be convinced of these programs as costs to the government, even given
the new information from Mettlers work.