Summary
Policy feedback is the idea that policies reshape the politics that follows: who has resources, who organises, what people expect of government. Political scientists developed it from the late 1980s; the most cited statement is Paul Pierson’s 1993 article ‘When Effect Becomes Cause’. Policies, he wrote, hand political actors resources and incentives, and give them “information and cues that encourage particular interpretations of the political world”. Later research finds feedback can undermine a policy as well as entrench it.
Guardian columnist George Monbiot has popularised a stronger, psychological version, his ‘values ratchet’: a health service open to all “helps instil the belief that it is normal to care for strangers”.
Rationale
Our examples of contexts that form dispositions are mostly small and chosen: gardens, repair cafes, assemblies. Policy feedback studies that loop in pensions and tax, where nobody opts in, and finds it runs both ways.