Dynamic Policymaking with Decay∗

It is often said that the only constant is change itself. As time passes, the population grows, new technologies are invented, and the skills, demographics, and norms of the populace evolve. These changes, whether in isolation or in aggregate, impact the effectiveness of policy. In particular, policies designed for today’s world are unlikely to provide a perfect fit tomorrow. In this paper we develop a notion of policy decay that captures this impact formally. We introduce policy decay into a simple, paradigmatic model of legislative policymaking and show that it leads to a starkly different perspective on legislative politics. Our results upend the classic notion of gridlock, and bear implications more broadly for the practice of politics. We show in turn how a changing world impacts the power of agenda control, how it drives the dynamic path of legislation, how it reveals a novel yet empirically relevant notion of expertise, and how it, ultimately, provides a foundational logic to the design of bureaucracy. ∗An early version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Executive Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, June 2014. We thank our discussant, Nolan McCarty, as well as Alan Wiseman, Terry Moe, Will Howell, and other members of the audience for helpful comments. We also benefitted from comments in seminars at Emory University, Stanford University, and the meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and Southern Political Science Association. †Stanford Graduate School of Business. [email protected]. ‡Emory University. [email protected].