How Policy Models Change: Insurgent Narratives of Policy Authority since the Great Recession

Abstract

Economic governance typically deploys policy frameworks linked to a model of the economy, but how a policy model is established and changes are questions that continue to puzzle analysts. The authority of the neoliberal model has been explained by the durability of the policy ecology of professional economists and policymakers, but this paper shows that a wider lens on agents and a longer time horizon reveals the emergence of an alternative policy model since the Great Recession that has influenced the new administration in Washington. This paper adapts arguments from the sociology of fields and movements and from pragmatist theories of action to show how the institutional redoubts of policymaking can be breached. Individuals and groups that institutions frame as passive takers of rules and fillers of roles in fact innovate in their daily lives. Social justice organizations have mobilized this dispersed mundane resource to expand the scope for action, but it required time for social learning and organizational innovation. Since 2009, social justice organizations and allies among unions, think tanks, and foundations have coalesced to win employment policy reforms by state and local governments. Their alternative narrative of an equitable economy has been increasingly adopted by Washington policy experts and the Biden Democratic Party. A key to whether the new configuration engineers a change in the national neoliberal model is the degree to which the new Democratic administration’s decisions are oriented by the equitable growth model.