Matters of Life and Death: The Durability of Discretionary Programs 1970–2004
Contrary to the prevailing view that federal programs are immortal, we show that program death is commonplace and seek to explain why. We develop a simple model of distributive politics, which we call "probabilistic universalism." Our theory suggests that differences in the ideological composition of coalitions between a current and an enacting Congress drive program elimination. To test the theory, we examine the durability of every federal discretionary program established between 1970 and 2004, using a new dataset that distinguishes program death from restructuring. Consistent with our predictions, we find that changes in the partisan composition of coalitions have a strong influence on program durability. We also demonstrate that these effects are asymmetric: programmatic life spans are shortened by coalition losses and lengthened by coalition gains. We thus debunk the conventional wisdom that federal programs are everlasting while providing a plausible coalition-based account for their varying life spans.
