From the reactionary crusade against civil rights laws in the 1960s to the decade-long fight to overturn the 2010 Affordable Care Act, policy reforms can spark sustained counterattacks from those who dislike efforts to change the status quo. Eric Patashnik’s excellent new book, Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age, charts the growing frequency of such episodes and explains the conditions that precipitate what he refers to as backlash—when notable resistance emerges to oppose policy changes that threaten the political equilibrium.
Backlash can manifest against real or perceived threats to the status quo and take shape when a group believes they have something significant to lose. They can be carried out by voters and mass publics, interest groups, or even policymakers themselves. But threats to the status quo are not sufficient on their own to spark a policy backlash. Instead, Patashnik argues that three main factors must align to sustain the organized countermobilization necessary for backlash: motives, means, and opportunities.
Motives stem most directly from policy design. Patashnik explains that when people perceive that a new policy changes the balance of existing costs or benefits in substantial ways, those on the perceived losing end are prone to engaging in countermobilization to thwart that change. Of course, not all groups will have the means to engage in robust and organized contestation; thus, Patashnik posits that the capacity and resources of groups must be sufficiently robust to sustain a backlash. Finally, groups must have opportunities to engage in meaningful countermobilization. For example, the US political system is favorable to countermobilization because it contains multiple avenues for political contestation that allow groups to successfully “shop” for persuadable policymakers.
For scholars of social movements, these criteria will sound familiar—they mirror in many ways the conditions that Sidney Tarrow proposed in his 1994 book, Power in Movement (Cambridge), as necessary for contentious collective action. To my mind, one of the best contributions of Countermobilization is that it connects policy feedback theory more directly with the contentious politics canon—a task that has yet to be fully tackled within the growing feedback literature. Patashnik articulates a clear link between policy design and the emergence of the motivation for backlash—or what the contentious politics literature might refer to as collective grievance. By shaping the concentration of costs and benefits and reflecting public preferences about who deserves what from government, specific policy attributes can directly influence whether a group perceives that they are experiencing a shared grievance—which might motivate them to engage in backlash.
After laying out his theory of backlash and countermobilization, Patashnik continues by assembling a novel data set from The New York Times articles that catalog episodes of policy backlash in the United States from 1960 to 2019. He charts shifts in the type of issue that sparks backlash, the political orientation of the backlash episodes (which are primarily, though not exclusively, conservative), and the general uptick in backlash episodes since the 1970s. The latter he attributes in part to growing partisan polarization. The remainder of the book delves into several detailed case studies of policy changes that sparked countermobilization—health care, trade, immigration, educational segregation, gun control, and transgender anti-discrimination—as well as some that did not, including air traffic control deregulation, the savings and loan bailout, and the extension of welfare benefits to people with felony drug convictions. These case studies, which are engaging in their own right, offer compelling evidence for Countermobilization’s core thesis.
This book has many laudable elements. First, it recognizes that politics is fundamentally messy. Rather than trying to artificially prune critical components of the story for the sake of methodological parsimony, Countermobilization does the opposite: it extends its ambit to engage multiple threads of US politics scholarship, from the literature on policy feedback to public opinion to contentious politics. The result is a more holistic, and realistic, framework for policy backlash. To fully understand the multidimensional nature of policy backlash, Patashnik masterfully weaves together historically grounded, detail-rich qualitative case studies—a hallmark of his scholarship. Second, Countermobilization makes critical contributions to the policy feedback literature by bringing it into conversation with the contentious politics scholarship. It is also one of a relatively small number of policy feedback studies to incorporate the full cycle of feedback effects, from initial policy enactment to future efforts at reform.
Of course, any good book invites readers to engage with its arguments, and in this spirit, readers might question the scope of what constitutes a backlash in Countermobilization. Patashnik provides a robust intellectual history of the concept in the introduction to the book, ultimately settling on a more expansive definition of backlash for his framework. But does such a broad definition capture cases that are simply run-of-the-mill politics? There exist, for example, several theories of politics that expect individuals and groups who bear concentrated costs or received concentrated benefits from a policy to more heavily engage in politics around those issues. It is less clear what novelty we gain by treating, for example, patients who mobilize politically around their frustration with the costs of managed-care health insurance plans as a backlash. Likewise, I wonder whether backlash really should be used to describe interest groups that mobilize to avoid resource loss from a proposed policy.
One possibility would be to confine cases of backlash to countermobilizations that unfold in response to real or perceived threats of status loss, rather than extending it to include other types of thermostatic or interest-group politics that might emerge from cost–benefit calculi. Indeed, status loss is already present in many of the cases in Countermobilization. One of the clearest examples is in Patashnik’s retelling of the conservative backlash against anti-discrimination legislation to protect transgender people in North Carolina. In this case, those engaging in backlash were not, in fact, directly experiencing any type of concentrated costs or loss of benefits from the extension of civil rights protections to another group. But they did experience a perceived loss of status, and their resulting countermobilization was largely based on that change to the status quo. There are, of course, instances where policies can change the status quo in ways that generate perceived status loss alongside concentrated costs or loss of benefits—for example, in the case of the IRS denying tax-exempt status to private religious schools. But the most compelling and distinctive cases of backlash that remain distinct from everyday democratic politics in Countermobilization incorporate themes of status loss.
Very few sequels live up to the standard set by the original. However, Countermobilization is an exception. It offers a compelling intellectual continuation of Patashnik’s powerful 2008 book, Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes are Enacted (Princeton), in which he observed that “the passage of a reform law is only the beginning of a political struggle…” (p. 3). While Reforms at Risk explains when significant policy changes succeed in the long term, Countermobilization illuminates the other side of the coin—when policy changes spark reactionary backlash that threatens those reforms. It is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the fractious politics and uncertain prospects for policy reform today in the United States.
