Tag: education policy

Advocacy Groups, Policy Subsidies, and Policy Change: The Case of Teacher Evaluations

by Leslie K. Finger

In many policy areas, powerful interest groups—such as labor unions or industry associations—shape and protect the status quo. When these vested interests have significant financial and political clout, how do policymakers manage to enact major reforms against their preferences? My paper examines this question through the lens of teacher evaluation policy in the U.S., revealing that advocacy groups play a crucial role in facilitating policy change by providing what I call policy subsidies: information, resources, and capacity that enable reform-minded policymakers to push past entrenched opposition.

My primary research question is: How are powerful interest groups with a stake in the status quo overcome? In the case of teacher evaluations, many states moved to incorporate student growth measures—often derived from standardized testing—as a sizable portion of their teacher evaluation systems despite fierce resistance from teachers’ unions. I investigate why some states were more successful than others in adopting and sustaining these reforms, focusing on the role of advocacy groups in supporting policy change.

Teachers’ unions have long been among the most influential state-level interest groups, using their financial resources and political leverage to shape education policy. Given their strength, it would be expected that states would avoid implementing teacher evaluations that include student achievement as a key factor. Yet, from 2009 to 2015, a growing number of states adopted such provisions. Why?

I argue that advocacy groups—such as education reform organizations—provided information (i.e., policy ideas, analysis, data) and capacity (i.e., time-consuming actions). I call these assets policy subsidies. By reducing the costs associated with enacting and implementing controversial reforms, policy subsidies can make it easier for policymakers to challenge vested interests and push through significant policy changes.

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To test this theory, I conducted a 50-state quantitative analysis of teacher evaluation policymaking between 2010 and 2011 and case studies of Minnesota and Wisconsin, two states that took different policy paths. The study tested two primary hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: States where advocacy groups provide policy subsidies are more likely to implement policy change opposed by vested interests than those without such groups.

Hypothesis 2: States where those in power are open to change are more likely to implement significant policy change opposed by vested interests than those without such politicians in power.

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My quantitative analysis showed that states where advocacy groups were active were significantly more likely to pass teacher evaluation reforms (see Figure 1). The effect of advocacy groups was strongest in states where Republicans controlled the legislature. In these states, advocacy groups helped craft policies that successfully incorporated student achievement as a “significant” factor in teacher evaluations (see Table 5). My case studies of Minnesota and Wisconsin illustrate this dynamic in action. In Minnesota, advocacy groups worked closely with Republican lawmakers to provide both technical policy assistance and political support, leading to the adoption of evaluation reforms. In contrast, Wisconsin—despite similar political conditions where Republicans were in control—lacked strong advocacy group engagement, and teacher evaluation reform was delegated to the bureaucracy, where, in the absence of advocacy group involvement, the student achievement provision was compromised during implementation..

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This study demonstrates that interest group influence is not absolute; advocacy groups can play a decisive role in shifting policy outcomes by lowering the costs of reform, even where vested interests are strong. Additionally, having policymakers favorable to a particular policy is not enough to overcome vested interests— policymakers need interest group allies to help them craft and implement those policies that might otherwise be stopped in their tracks by powerful interest groups. The concept of policy subsidies extends beyond education, offering insights into how policy entrepreneurs in other domains—such as climate change, healthcare, or labor policy—can challenge entrenched interests.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Finger, Leslie K. 2024. “ Advocacy Groups, Policy Subsidies, and Policy Change: The Case of Teacher Evaluations.” Policy Studies Journal 52 (4): 777–808. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12538.

About the Author

Leslie K. Finger is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on interest groups, policymaking, and state and local politics with a focus on education policy. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Governance, Policy Studies Journal, Interest Groups & Advocacy, American Politics Research, and State Politics & Policy.

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Race, Representation, and Policy Attitudes in U.S. Public Schools

by Lael A. Keiser & Donald P. Haider-Markel

Tragic events around the country highlight the disproportionate ill-treatment of African Americans within the criminal justice system, the high levels of distrust African Americans have for the police and political institutions in general, and the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in public institutions. In response, some have sought to increase the passive or descriptive representation of minorities within law enforcement, higher education, and public schools, with the hope that doing so will improve the treatment of under-represented groups and enhance positive attitudes toward institutions and the policies they implement. 

However, different schools of thought exist about whether increasing representation of minorities is a zero-sum game (where increasing representation of one group reduces it for others) and whether it worsens attitudes of historical majorities. Further, while scholars have discussed two major perspectives – the mirror image and the institutional democracy hypotheses – few have measured passive representation in ways that fit these two perspectives or examined their implications for both minority and majority groups. 

According to the theory of symbolic representation, greater passive representation can evoke feelings of inclusiveness and of being represented which, in turn, impacts public attitudes toward policy and public institutions. Two distinct and competing mechanisms connect this passive representation with citizen attitudes. One argument, described as the “mirror image” hypothesis, is that a person’s support for government institutions depends, in part, on whether people within those institutions “look like” that person. The institutional symbol of democracy perspective, on the other hand, posits that support for public institutions depends on whether the institution reflects the population as a whole. 

In our paper, we test both of these hypotheses by examining passive representation in public schools and attitudes about school discipline using different measures of passive representation that better map onto existing theory. Using individual-level survey data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), we analyze a sample of 5,750 white, Black, and Hispanic 10th-grade students across 453 high schools who were asked their perspectives on the fairness of school rules and whether they felt the rules were implemented in a uniform manner across all students. We utilize three distinct measures of passive representation, as illustrated below.

Our results were more consistent with the institutional symbol hypothesis, where more diverse school personnel corresponded with more positive attitudes about how institutions implement policy among white students. White students in schools with a higher proportion of minority teachers (and therefore fewer white teachers) were more likely to think punishment is fair than were white students in schools with less passive representation for minorities. This finding provides evidence that increasing the number of minority teachers may not always be considered a zero-sum context.  However, we do find evidence in support of the mirror image hypothesis for Black students who were more likely to think punishment was fairer when their percentage representation was greater but we find no evidence that attitudes were affected by representation measured by diversity or proportional representation.  We find inconsistent results for Hispanic students. 

However, our results suggest some important caveats. Though our analysis indicated that white students’ attitudes toward fairness were greater in schools with higher percentage representation of minorities, this was largely only the case in schools with smaller minority student populations. We found no evidence that white students’ attitudes varied with differences in proportional representation. This suggests that the positive link between minority representation and whites’ attitudes was strongest when in schools with relatively small minority student shares.

And perhaps more importantly, our results highlight how the use of different measures of representation, as well as of distinct statistical models, can lead to dissimilar results. This calls attention to the assumptions researchers implicitly make about theory when they choose measures of representation and calls us to both specify the theoretical mechanisms at play and to match them to theory so that we can improve our understanding of how passive representation truly affects policy attitudes. 

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Keiser, Lael R., Donald P. Haider-Markel, and Rajeev Darolia. 2022. “Race, Representation, and Policy Attitudes in U.S. Public Schools.” Policy Studies Journal, 50(4): 823–848. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12443

About the Authors

Lael R. Keiser is professor and director of the Harry S. Truman School of Government and Public Affairs. Her research and teaching focuses on the policy implementation and the administration of public programs. She serves on the editorial boards of Public Administration Review and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

Donald P. Haider-Markel is Professor of political science at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching are focused on the representation of group interests in politics and policy, and the dynamics between public opinion, political behavior, and public policy.

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