Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy. By Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020. 304p. $28.99 cloth, $17.99 paper.

Abstract

standing of American political development, education policy, and the politics of policy design. Those interested in the politics of the United States’ hidden welfare state will find the book’s conceptual innovations especially valuable. Hackett usefully disaggregates the hidden (or submerged) state into two dimensions of hiddenness: the role of the state may be hidden by obscure and complex policy designs or by the use of rhetoric that attempts to make the state’s role more hidden. In highlighting these two dimensions, as well as the ways policymakers may creatively combine them, the book makes a strong case for revisiting the origins story of purportedly hidden welfare programs other than school vouchers to see if (and when) policymakers may adopt attenuation as a deliberate strategy. In addition, in both conceptualizing how attenuated governance operates and insulates and revealing how policymakers over time have considered the risks and rewards of specific types of voucher strategies, Hackett offers an alternative account for the sustainability of modern voucher programs beyond those centered exclusively on asymmetric information arising from a context of low citizen visibility and powerful private stakeholders. It is not just citizens’ lack of recognition of the role of the government (and the openings this creates for private stakeholders) that sustains and expands submerged programs. Instead, Hackett’s account clearly reveals that programs relying on attenuated governance also emerge through the deliberate actions of policymakers aiming to craft policies that will be legally defensible, especially when the goals may be controversial. Finally, in addition to delving into the specific policy area of school vouchers, which has been understudied within the hidden welfare state literature, Hackett brings the study of hidden welfare state politics into venues that have received less attention, namely state legislatures and courts. The states are ideal arenas for the types of experimentation, learning, and diffusion described in the book, and educational provisions and positive rights in state constitutions generate particular legal opportunities and constraints. That school vouchers seem so particularly ripe for this type of policymaking and state-level experimentation, yet are subject to specific state legal and constitutional constraints, raises questions about how well the framework generalizes to other types of voucher programs and to other hidden welfare state programs, including those that are more likely to be implemented at the federal level. Although Hackett anticipates these concerns by including other examples of attenuated policy design, rhetoric, and resulting political struggles throughout the book (for example. in the areas of mortgage credit and abortion access) the question of how attenuated strategies operate outside of school voucher politics remains. That Hackett does not apply the same degree of detailed analysis to every other potential policy area is hardly a critique of the book; instead it suggests important areas for future work. Fortunately, Hackett’s book provides a roadmap for how to structure and carry out this type of work and encourages those of us who study the hidden welfare state to think more deeply about what it means that the state is hidden and why.