Policies shape politics is the defining notion in current scholarship on policy feedback. The design characteristics of enacted policies have material, ideational, or cognitive effects on citizens and political actors, which structure political behavior and preferences towards the policy in question. With this understanding, theories of policy feedback resemble neo-institutionalist theories in the social sciences, just that the institutions in question are concrete public policies. Policy feedback has proven to be a powerful concept for understanding change and stability in public policies in areas such as social policy (the plurality of studies), same sex marriage (Kreitzer et al., 2014), criminal justice (Maltby, 2017), climate and environmental policies (Skjærseth, 2018; Tang et al., 2018), or education (Busemeyer & Thelen, 2020; Fleming, 2014). Popular exemplary research questions are whether citizens’ experience of accessing and using public social services, e.g., around healthcare (Jacobs et al., 2022; Lerman & McCabe, 2017), affects political participation and increases political support for continued public service provision. Policies thus constitute an important macro-level factor in the study of micro-level preferences and behavior, alongside other contextual conditions such as social inequality and the economy.

Different Uses of Policy Feedback Theory

Contemporary research examines feedback effects using a variety of different approaches. Some studies employ a cross-country comparative setting to examine the effects of spending levels (Busemeyer et al., 2021) or the public-private mix in policy provision (Zhu & Lipsmeyer, 2015) on citizens’ support for public spending. Some examine effects conditional on local or regional contexts. Dellmuth and Chalmers (2018) find that certain types of regional transfers are associated with increased support for the European Union. Maltby (2017) observes that racially unequal effects of the criminal justice system translate into unequal patterns of political participation and attitudes towards the government between black and white citizens. Others investigate the effects of a concrete policy in a single country or geographic area. Fleming (2014), for instance, identifies effects of the school voucher program in Milwaukee on parents’ reported political participation and attitudes.

There is a clear focus in current research on the USA (e.g., Maltby, 2017; Shanks-Booth & Mettler, 2019), but European countries (Busemeyer & Thelen, 2020; Skjærseth, 2018) and China (Tang et al., 2018) are also covered. The interest in the USA is partly due to US healthcare policy, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) more specifically. This focus on the ACA has even led Haeder (2020) to examine how the ACA has created feedback effects on the research activity of political scientists. However, the actors usually studied are the mass publics, mostly via quantitative research designs. Feedback effects are expected to be strongest for specific beneficiary groups directly affected by a policy (e.g., Jacobs et al., 2022; Fleming, 2014; Lerman & McCabe, 2017), but studies also observe effects among the general population only more indirectly affected by a public policy (e.g., Busemeyer et al., 2021; Kreitzer et al., 2014).

A smaller number of studies pursues qualitative approaches that shed light on feedback effects on political parties and interest groups (e.g., Béland et al., 2019; Busemeyer & Thelen, 2020). Haeder (2020) and Larsen (2019) provide literature reviews. The focus of some studies is theoretical and conceptual. For instance, Boswell and Corbett (2018) highlight the importance of bureaucracy and Goss et al. (2019) that of civil society organizations as intermediary, and previously neglected, actors for policy feedback effects on citizens. The study by Hacker and Pierson (2019), as further discussed below, attempts to advance the research field by identifying intervening conditional factors and strategic design characteristics that are conducive to feedback effects.

The studies reviewed here all understand policy feedback as the effects of policies on subsequent politics, which should have downstream consequences for policy change and stability. However, different understandings of policy feedback coexist that are associated with diverging expectations and interpretations regarding the nature and direction of feedback effects.

Different Understandings of Policy Feedback Theory

Most contributions relate to a historical institutionalist approach to policy feedback, building on earlier work by Paul Pierson (Pierson, 1993). By having material, cognitive, or ideational effects on organized political actors and mass publics, policies have the potential to become self-reinforcing over an extended period of time (sometimes labeled as “positive feedback effects”). Jacobs et al. (2022), for instance, show that access to health insurance and perceptions that the ACA has had beneficial effects are associated with increased political participation. According to Lerman and McCabe (2017), access to Medicare is associated with stronger support for this program that also extends to support for the ACA. By affecting preferences and political behavior of individuals and organized political actors, policy feedback has the potential to lock-in the policy status quo (see, e.g., Busemeyer & Thelen, 2020), even if at times it may produce highly suboptimal outcomes.

A rather distinct understanding of policy feedback and use of terminology can be found in studies relating to systems theory, theories of punctuated equilibria, or “thermostatic” policy feedback (Patashnik, 2019, p. 49; Tang et al., 2018). In these approaches, too, we find a predominating expectation of policies to be self-stabilizing, but this is referred to as “negative feedback” in this context. Different from the more long-term oriented perspective in historical institutionalism, these studies adopt a perspective of relative policy change: If policy deviates too far from an (exogenous) ideal point and/or the policy status quo, voters should object to this change, which should bring policy back into equilibrium. Patashnik (2019) discusses “policy backlash” as an extreme form of such adverse reactions to policy change in the context of the ACA among parts of the electorate and political elites.

Several studies criticize the research field for focusing too much on attempting to identify self-reinforcing feedback effects with the consequences that policy stability may have been overestimated and our ability to understand policy change been hindered (e.g., Béland et al., 2019; Busemeyer et al., 2021). These studies highlight the need to understand when and how policies can also be self-undermining, thereby increasing the chances of policy change. Several assessments of the ACA conclude that the reform had some elements that produced self-undermining feedback effects; at the same time, some elements also had the potential to set in a self-reinforcing dynamic, even though this may not have been strong enough to protect the ACA against attempts by political opponents to dismantle it (Béland et al., 2019; Hacker & Pierson, 2019; Michener, 2019).

To avoid “conceptual confusion” (Busemeyer et al., 2021, p. 143) resulting from the different uses of the terms positive and negative feedback in the different theoretical traditions, Busemeyer et al. (2021) propose conceptually distinguishing self-reinforcing and self-undermining feedback. Similar to Hacker and Pierson (2019, p. 19), they argue that self-reinforcing feedback can be further differentiated by whether a policy either introduces an expansionary (“accelerating”) dynamic or a strict orientation towards the status quo.

Different Future Directions

To sharpen the conceptual clarity and the ability to deliver “practical recommendations” (Hacker & Pierson, 2019, p. 9), several authors highlight the need to refocus attention on the long-standing question of when and how policies affect politics (Pierson, 1993, p. 597). This would call for empirical assessments guided by clear theoretical priors to shed light on the detailed mechanisms and conditioning factors that matter for the nature and intensity of feedback effects (Busemeyer et al., 2021; Larsen, 2019). In this spirit, for instance, Jacobs et al. (2022) identify internal and external political efficacy as mediating variables for the effects of access to health insurance on political participation.

Hacker and Pierson (2019, p. 15) highlight the conditioning role of political polarization (“polarization changes everything”), implying that partisan logics in a polarized political context may outweigh policy feedback effects (similarly: Béland et al., 2019). These contributions remind us that we should refrain from a deterministic understanding of feedback effects. While policies may in fact have self-reinforcing material or normative effects on citizens and organized actors, these actors may lack the necessary political clout. The existence of self-reinforcing feedback effects does not imply that the policy will not be dismantled eventually. In this context, the relatively strong weight of research on mass publics appears to be at odds with the at times more residual political weight of voters in determining whether a policy will be dismantled or prove resilient (Hacker & Pierson, 2019, p. 20). This insight calls for additional research on feedback effects on organized economic and political actors.

Other conditioning factors mentioned by some of the studies are trust (Hacker & Pierson, 2019, p. 20) or performance (dis)satisfaction (Busemeyer et al., 2021, p. 143). While feedback effects may be more pronounced for salient policies (Busemeyer et al., 2021, p. 159), sometimes a deliberatively chosen submerged policy design leads to a situation in which citizens fail to recognize even beneficial material effects of government policy (Shanks-Booth & Mettler, 2019). Such questions about strategic policy design have been at the heart of the debate on the ACA (e.g., Hacker & Pierson, 2019), and on the desired and feasible role of the state versus markets in service provision more generally (Busemeyer & Thelen, 2020; Fleming, 2014; Zhu & Lipsmeyer, 2015). While many open questions remain, policy feedback theories appear well equipped to provide answers to these questions.