%0 Journal Article
%T The Politics of Hidden Policy: Feedback Effects and the Charitable Contributions Deduction
%A Kelly L. Russell
%J Politics & Society
%@ 1552-7514
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0032329218754504
%X Policy feedback, or the process in which policies create constituencies vested in their maintenance, is a durable feature of the American welfare state. Scholars have shown that policy visibility conditions how feedback effects unfold: for public-private policies¡ªarrangements in which the state delegates service provision to private actors, often described as ¡°hidden¡± or ¡°submerged¡±¡ªpolicy feedback typically galvanizes not citizens but market actors that benefit indirectly from these subsidies. This article extends theories of public-private policy feedback from market actors to charitable organizations through a case study of the charitable contributions deduction. The deduction¡¯s incremental expansion is found to have mobilized charities as powerful stakeholders in the policy¡¯s endurance. Charities¡¯ efforts to protect the deduction, together with the efforts of lawmakers, have couched the policy in a politics of neoliberalism and disguised its effects, insulating it from reform even as elites have netted a greater share of its benefits over time
%K Policy feedback
%K charitable organizations
%K tax expenditures
%K social policy
%K public-private welfare state
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0032329218754504