Does Democracy Even Work?

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If you got an extra $2,500 after filing your taxes, who would you thank? The president? Congress? Your governor? How about H&R Block?

One of the biggest problems facing democracy is whether voters can discern and reward policy makers for good policy and, in reverse, punish them for bad policy. The research here has been mixed, and the Democratic Party’s performance in the 2024 presidential election has led some to doubt whether the feedback loops necessary for good policy—and a healthy democracy—even exist.

This episode of Good on Paper pushes back against the pessimists. Interpreting signals from voters is complicated, and so much is contingent on which issues are salient when they head to the ballot box. But the political scientist Hunter Rendleman’s research indicates that when states rolled out Earned Income Tax Credit programs—a benefit for working-class Americans—voters rewarded governors who implemented the policy with higher vote shares and approval ratings.

“I think I’m an optimist on sophistication,” Hunter told me. “I think a lot of times political scientists are a bit pessimistic on individuals’ capacities to actually know what’s going on to them because it is quite complicated. But we don’t often set up our analyses or studies in a way to give voters the benefit of the doubt.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: In 2021, Joe Biden gave the Teamsters union exactly what it was looking for: The American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package, included $36 billion to prevent cuts to union pensions. Tens of thousands of workers and retirees in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin received aid.

But when election season came around, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien gave a prime-time address at the RNC praising Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, infuriating White House aides who told The Washington Post that it was a “betrayal of the administration’s support” for union workers.

That betrayal rested on a concept known as “deliverism.” Deliverism refers to the idea that if you deliver good and important policy wins, then people will reward you for them at the polls. As The Prospect’s David Dayen wrote in 2021, Barack Obama’s reelection run contained a great example of this: the phrase, “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”

But this line of thinking has come under much scrutiny following Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump. As one article from Democracy Journal put it, “If spending trillions of dollars to improve people’s lives isn’t a fair test of ‘deliverism,’ then what is?”

[Music]

Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is Hunter Rendleman. She’s a political scientist soon to join the faculty at UC Berkeley and has published a paper at the American Political Science Review called, “Do Government Benefits Affect Officeholders’ Electoral Fortunes?”

Alongside her co-author, Hunter looks at one important federal tax credit for working-class Americans: the earned-income tax credit, or the EITC. Data in 2018 showed the EITC lifted about 5.6 million people out of poverty, most of them kids.

Hunter’s paper asks: Did voters reward governors who expanded this social benefit?

Hunter, welcome to the show.

Hunter Rendleman: Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: I’m excited to have you here. You’ve written a really interesting new paper, and it’s about something that I really want to be true, so I’m trying to temper my enthusiasm. But before we get into the details of your paper, I’m hoping you can just step back for us here and explain: What is a policy-feedback loop?

Rendleman: A policy-feedback loop is something where you implement a policy, and when that policy is implemented, it creates a new constituency of individuals that are invested in making sure that policy doesn’t go away. And that constituency of individuals can be motivated for what’s usually thought of for two reasons: either for resource reasons—so basically, you’ve given this group some amount of money, and they become mobilized and motivated around making sure that money doesn’t go away—or it does something to how these people perceive and interpret government.

So for example, in the case of the GI Bill, it allowed these veterans to go to get university education. This changed how they saw themselves vis-à-vis politics, vis- à-vis society. And this led to them changing how they mobilized and then how they participated in government moving forward.

Demsas: And so a lot has to go right for a policy-feedback loop to work, right? People have to understand why a policy happened and who’s responsible. And is it salient to voters come Election Day? And then, do politicians themselves understand that voters are rewarding or punishing them?

So let’s take something like Medicaid expansion. Are voters understanding who’s responsible for that? Is the media giving them that information? Do they know which politicians are actually to blame? Is it federal politicians? Maybe they’re the right people to attribute it to. Maybe it’s state politicians. If it’s state, is it your state legislature? Is it your governor? I mean, a lot of that has to go right. And before we get into your study, again, can you just lay the groundwork for us about the political-science literature in this space?

My read is that there’s a lot of pessimism about the possibility for specific policies to generate salient and durable electoral shifts. There’s this book by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels called Democracy for Realists, and it argues against the idea that policies are due to voter preferences or that voters are even engaged in issue voting, right? They point to those two problems I already mentioned about the difficulty in identifying who’s responsible for changes in your own welfare. But how dominant is this view in the academy?

Rendleman: It really depends who you are in the academy. So if you’re an economist, for example, you often believe in the notion of pocketbook voting, and I think that’s the most classical notion of how people respond to policies. If they’re doing better today than they were a year ago, they’re going to vote for the incumbent that made their pocketbooks, their bank accounts fatter, basically.

Since that happened—and that’s, you know, [Anthony] Downs and how he viewed the world. Since that work was published, there was a lot of pushback on the part of the academy, saying, like, Okay. But wait—we know that people vote on the basis of vibes, for lack of a better word. We know they vote on the basis of identity. And so even if they are not necessarily doing as well as they were yesterday, they still might vote for the incumbent. And then, even further, if the incumbent does do something for them, it depends on who that incumbent is to generate this sort of feedback loop that we’re talking about. And so I’ll say that the academy is extremely mixed with regards to how they view this proper attribution process going.

Demsas: What about you before you started doing your study? What did you think?

Rendleman: When I started the study—the only reason why I wrote the study is because I had this firsthand experience about the policy that I was studying, the EITC.

Demsas: Can you say what that is?

Rendleman: Yeah. The earned-income tax credit—it is a tax credit remitted to lower-income individuals based off of how much they earned in the past tax year. And basically what it is, is this potentially sizable sum of money given to individuals that will defray part of their tax burden, and it’s refundable. At the federal level, it’s refundable. So you offset part of your tax burden, and whatever you get in remainder, you get to take home and as a check.

So this is an incredibly popular policy. It has had bipartisan support since it was first created and implemented. But there is a lot of political-science work that says this actually shouldn’t have an effect, and it doesn’t have an effect. And the reason why people argue this—and specifically, it’s folks like Suzanne Mettler in her book called The Submerged State, but also folks like [R. Douglas] Arnold, who studies something called “policy traceability”—is that no one really knows where the EITC comes from when they get it.

So you get your check on tax day or after tax day, and you’re like, Okay. Cool. I got $500. I did my taxes. It could be for a whole host of different things, like, Taxes are complicated. Maybe I just paid too much, and so I’m getting money back. Or it could be some special policy, or it could be: I hired a fancy accountant, or I went to H&R Block for the first time, and I got this money.

And, in fact, there is a great book called It’s Not Like I’m Poor, which basically says the design of the tax-preparation industry submerges these policies. It makes it really difficult for normal people to know whether or not they’re getting a given tax policy from the government.

But to get back to the topic of my paper—when I was in college, I did volunteer work for the IRS because I was a nerd. And I was helping people out with claiming their EITCs. And people were like, Wow. This is a lot of money. I’m like, Yeah. It’s from the government. And they’re like, Wow. I always knew this guy was really good for us, and they would talk about whatever politician was in office at the time.

Demsas: And who are they talking about? Are they talking about, like, presidential level? Or are they talking about, like, governor? Who are they talking about?

Rendleman: Presidential level. Like, you know, this broad attribution to the president.

Demsas: Thanks, Obama.

Rendleman: Thanks, Obama, basically. But in the positive way, like, Actually, thanks, Obama. And when I got to graduate school, and I read this literature about traceability and policy feedbacks and, specifically, this work on the EITC, I said, That doesn’t make any sense. People sort of know—or, oftentimes, people can know—about this policy, but maybe we’re just not measuring it in the right way.

Demsas: But when you heard people say, Thanks, Obama, do you think that Obama is the reason why the EITC—or he should be credited for the EITC checks people are getting?

Rendleman: No. So government, as you know, is complicated. So it’s an interesting question because there was an EITC expansion under the Obama administration, but was he responsible for it? No. It was the legislators that worked hard to bargain with other legislators in order to get a new policy through.

And the topic of my paper, which are state-level EITCs, it’s the same thing: Is it the governor that is doing this, or is it state legislators, or is it someone else entirely, like nonprofits that went and lobbied to push for certain policies?

I guess going back to your initial question—this idea of attribution is super difficult, and it’s not really clear, from a normative standpoint, if you necessarily need that perfect one-to-one attribution or if it’s okay that we have a diffuse attribution. So in general, Are we rewarding the party that did this for me, or are we rewarding the individual?

There’s a paper by Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and Chris Warshaw, which basically studies this question: When people do better in their wages—I believe that’s the study—is it the individual politician responsible, like what politician is responsible for wages, or is it just this diffuse party effect? And they find that salient politicians really benefit. Like, governors and presidents and House legislators—they really benefit when people do better. But in general, the party in office tends to do better when people are doing better off economically.

Demsas: Well, so in an ideal world, though, the way that we would want to see policy-feedback loops work is: If a policy durably benefits you, then you are going to be able to understand who is responsible for that. That’s, obviously, a difficult question, but you could identify the arm of government that was most responsible, or at least the arms of government that were involved in this, and then you would reward them at the ballot box however you could.

But you’re saying, if you feel like this diffuse version, this one where parties get benefited, is also an optimal way for feedback loops to work.

Rendleman: I guess I have difficulty with this idea of the optimality of the feedback loop, because it’s really sort of voter psychology. Do I want voters to respond to the policy landscape that they are facing? Yes. I think that is the sign of a healthy and thriving democratic system.

We want people to have the information to understand what’s happening to them, and for them to translate that information into decision making at the ballot box. If it’s to a particular individual they can actually trace—I know politician X did Y—that’s great. I think an alternative, perhaps more realistic view is: Can I detect if I did better, and the party that is in office is probably associated with that policy? That’s also good.

Demsas: I’m going to get into your study now. You and your co-author conduct a study looking at states’ adoption of EITC programs from 1992 to 2018. Can you just walk us through what you actually did, what you were trying to measure, and how?

Rendleman: Yeah. We went at it from, as I was saying, this very pocketbook-voting type of perspective, where we investigate whether the introduction of a given state level in earned-income tax credit leads to the incumbent governors—and generally, the incumbent party—being rewarded on Election Day.

So what we do is: It’s called a staggered difference-in-differences design, where you see policy getting introduced in year T, and then we look at the nearest election to year T and see if there is an increase in voting for the incumbents at that time. And so we did this at the county level for vote shares for governor, and then we also did an additional study at the back end of the paper looking at individuals’ approval levels for governor using survey data.

And just to explain the results a little bit: We find quite small effects at the ballot box, which is expected. The EITC doesn’t actually benefit a lot of people on a percentage basis in a given county. We do see in places where more people tend to claim the federal EITC, you get a bit larger increases at the ballot box. So effectively: Places that are poorer, you see bigger swings in favor of the incumbent governor.

But what was also interesting is: When we used the survey data, and we’re able to actually see, Okay, given the demographics that a given person ticked off in the survey—you know, their marital status, their income, how many children they have—we can back out who is a likely eligible person for the EITC. You, in particular, see big boosts in approval amongst those people. So not only do we see this rather small increase on Election Day, but you also see that it has perhaps this more durable psychological effect, or at least attitudinal effect, on the people that the policy is helping.

Demsas: Can we start with why you chose governors? I would imagine the state legislatures are likely to be more responsible for this. Why didn’t you measure what was happening there?

Rendleman: Part of it was data. Vote shares for governors are far easier to come by, and they are still involved in the policy process. They have to sign off for the budget. Like, Okay, this is a good budget. And at the time, it was more difficult for us to detect state legislative election votes. If we were to redo the study, probably we wouldn’t try to investigate that, as well.

You do see on the attitudinal side, we look at different types of politicians. So we look at the governor, we look at the president, we look at senators, and we look at House representatives. And we don’t see the same sort of effect that we do for governors. And so we took that as a good sign that people are properly attributing to at least the state level when they are receiving their EITCs.

Demsas: So when states adopt the EITC, what do we see happening to governors’ vote share?

Rendleman: Yeah. What we see is: In counties where a state EITC has just been implemented, you see a two-percentage-point increase in favor of the incumbent governor, the governor that passed the policy.

Demsas: That’s a pretty big number. Is that surprising to you?

Rendleman: We took that as a pretty small number, given the wide-ranging estimates in the economic-voting and policy-feedback literature.

Demsas: Well, EITC is one of, like, thousands of policies that are implemented. The idea that you would detect something that’s going to a minority of individuals—a very small minority of individuals in the state—and that that would increase the governor’s vote share by two percentage points, I mean, that can be the margin of victory, right?

Rendleman: It could be. Yeah. So when you really parse the effects further, you find that these effects are concentrated in only the first year after the EITC is implemented. And it is way concentrated in places where there are more claimants, so as I was saying before. But also, it’s concentrated amongst Republican governors.

So Republicans tend to get a bigger boost from passing these sorts of policies than Democrats. And I think that’s also a pretty significant part of the story, because if these people who tend to be lower income—and so oftentimes we associate them with voting with the left, or at least voting for Democrats—we’re seeing them potentially switching their votes. Of course, the study itself can’t tell us about whether a given person switched their vote from one thing to another, but we do see, within these counties that would plausibly vote more blue, this increase in support for Republicans and stuff.

Demsas: Can you talk us through the story of what’s going on here? A governor decides to implement a more generous EITC expansion in their state. And then what’s actually happening on the ground? I can imagine there are a bunch of different stories you could tell. There’s a story where the people who are getting the EITC become more likely to vote and more likely to do political participation because they have more money. And we see that happening, in general, with higher-income folks accessing the ballot box more.

Or you could imagine that people are really excited about the EITC. You could also imagine that the EITC is covarying with a bunch of other welfare policies or anti-poverty policies. What’s actually the most plausible story to you about what’s happening here?

Rendleman: These are popular policies when they are passed. And they’re policies that governors would plausibly want to run their elections on, or their campaigns on, rather. And so it’s—I don’t know—October, and you’re trying to get a new sector of the vote, and you say, Okay. What do I tell them that I did?

Well, you tell them that you passed something like the EITC, and they’re like, Okay. Well, that’s wonderful.

So that’s probably going on—that because these policies are popular, and people would probably want to reward you for passing something like this, you talk about it. I think Gavin Newsom—California passed an EITC in our sample—he ran pretty strongly on the fact that he rolled out this EITC. And he also campaigned pretty strongly on increasing the EITC, as well, or making a very generous one. So that’s going on.

You also have the entry of these sorts of nonprofit and lobbying types of organizations that say, Okay, this is sort of a workfarey type of policy that we like to see. It’s something that incentivizes people to work. There’s a whole bunch of economic studies that talk about the downstream economic benefits of implementing EITCs. Maybe they come in, and they say, Yeah. We want you to keep the EITC, and so we’ll help you out. We’ll throw you a bit of extra cash to campaign more in these districts. So that could be going on.

I don’t know, and I doubt it’s a resource story, in the sense of: The amount of money given to an individual because of the EITC is enough to dramatically change the amount of leisure time that they have, which can allow them to participate more in government, or in politics, rather.

So I think that’s a story that’s often told for Social Security: Older folks that are impoverished—they get this potentially transformative amount of money. It allows them to not have to think about maybe getting a part-time job after they retire. Instead, they can have more time to themselves and potentially campaign. I don’t think that’s what’s going on for the EITC. I don’t know.

It’s a great windfall. It’s, like, $200-$300, which is great. There have been economic studies that talk about people spending that money often on more durable goods. So you get your EITC. You buy yourself a new washing machine, potentially, which improves your quality of life significantly. But it’s not something that’s going to durably transform how you approach life.

Demsas: But it’s bigger for people with children, right? So you could have—for childless adults—you could have maybe $500, something like that. But you can get up to $6,000, or even higher than that for families with three or more kids. So that could be pretty big. And one thing I think that was interesting in your study is that you don’t actually see families with children having stronger effects. What do you think is going on there?

Rendleman: Basically, what we’re doing in that analysis is: We’re seeing if there is a difference in the effect size between, generally, people that are eligible to receive the state EITC versus people that are eligible and have children. We don’t see a difference between those two groups. We, overall, see an increase in people’s approval for the governor. We just don’t see a distinct increase on top of that for people with kids.

Demsas: But that’s surprising, right? You would expect, you know, one person’s getting $500, and another person’s getting $6,000. It’s a very, very different outcome.

Rendleman: It’s a very different outcome. It’s also the case that when you also have kids, you’re eligible for more things, on average. And so maybe it’s harder for you to do the attribution, or you already know that you’re receiving more money, on average, and so maybe this extra cash is not going to be so revolutionary to you.

Demsas: But I guess my question is: When you’re going from $0 to $500 or $700, you’re detecting a change in the governor’s vote share in that county where you see more exposure. And so if you see that difference from $0 to $500, but you don’t see that from $500 to $6,000, what would that indicate?

Rendleman: It could be that it is hard for individuals to detect changes, I think. And we also have analyses in the paper that say when states increase or decrease their EITCs, you don’t see a change in either vote shares or approval levels. So when you give someone like a lower-income single person more cash, that’s great because they generally don’t have a lot of things available to them in, you know, the laundry list that is welfare policies. They can’t really claim a whole lot of things, whereas people that might be or are already getting things from government could be less sensitive to these changes.

Sometimes people think of voters as myopic, and so they detect the first thing, and then they don’t detect other things after the fact. There’s a lot of studies to show this. Also within the EITC paper, this also seems to be the case because we only really detect an effect in the first year of implementation.

So yeah. Different populations, if you want to see this attribution going on, like targeting to populations that are going to be able to actually detect it and would change their behavior meaningfully for it—that’s part of how politicians would want to think about targeting these types of things.

Demsas: After the break, why democracy relies on voter sophistication.

[Break]

Demsas: I guess what I take from what you’re saying, and what started me thinking about, too, is just the sort of sense that people are taking a signal from this, right? They’re taking a signal about the political goals or the policy goals, the orientation of the governor and party that is in power when this happens—less so that they’re reacting, specifically, to the material circumstances that are changing for them. And part of what leads me that way—something you mentioned earlier that we didn’t get into, which is that—Republican governors are particularly rewarded for these expansions.

And that is such a signal to me because what it’s saying is that Republicans are less friendly to these sorts of programs. They’re more concerned about welfare expansion leading to problems with people not working a lot. Obviously, that’s why EITC, which is something that—it’s the earned-income tax credit and requires you to work—is more amenable to Republicans. But it is something that’s almost—it changes your perception of the Republican Party for a Republican governor or legislature to okay an EITC expansion or a particularly generous one.

And so is that how you think about it, too? That voters are getting a signal about what the priorities of these elected officials are, and that’s changing their vote share—less so that they’re reacting to the material shifts in their lives?

Rendleman: Yeah, totally. I think a lot of the story that we’re telling here is one of sort of symbolic politics in a way. So if you see an individual politician behaving against their type, or, like, your perceived type of them, then you’re going to be like, Oh, maybe this guy is not so bad, or, This woman is not so bad, so I’ll throw a vote his way, or, I’ll say he’s not as bad as he was when I get the next survey. I think that’s a big part of it and also contributes to this idea of traceability of policies.

Demsas: Yeah. I think that that’s one other part of your paper that is so relevant for this, is that you look not just at people who were eligible for the EITC but also people who were not eligible, and you find effects there. Can you talk through the effects you find from people who were not getting this benefit at all?

Rendleman: Yeah. We do see a bump in approval levels amongst people that are not eligible for the EITC. We went into this finding with sort of two thoughts: Either it’s that people that are not eligible for the policy are seeing the good effects of the policy on the ground, or they’re just into the idea of them being in a state government that is being productive. And so we try and parse these ideas by looking into this—we call them higher- versus low-exposure counties, so places, again, that claim more federal EITCs versus less federal EITCs.

We don’t see the same sort of strong effect for ineligible people when you compare high- versus low-exposure counties. So it’s sort of like this uniform effect amongst ineligible individuals across like the context of the county.

Demsas: So basically, if you’re ineligible and you’re in a county that doesn’t have a lot of people claiming that EITC, or you’re in one that does have a lot of people claiming, your effect is the same. It doesn’t really matter.

Rendleman: Exactly.

Demsas: Okay. So it’s not really about you observing, Oh, people around me seem better off. It’s that you’re just realizing this has happened in your state.

Rendleman: Yes.

Demsas: I think the first thing that’s going to come to a lot of people’s minds is: How do you control for all the things that are going to covary with this, right? Because if you’re a governor that’s willing to do EITC implementation and expansion, it probably means that there are a lot of other things about you that are going to be shifting in that direction. It’s probably not just this random heterodox thing that you did that you can fully isolate.

And on top of that, a lot of other stuff might be going on. Maybe the state’s more willing to do EITC expansion when the economy’s good. Maybe you’re more willing to do it when the state coffers are higher for whatever reason, like your investments paid off, or something happened, or you stopped paying off some municipal bond. You know what I mean?

So there are a bunch of things that could be happening that could covary with this decision to do this. So how confident are you that what you’re measuring is really the effect of EITC implementation?

Rendleman: Yeah. We can’t be completely certain. It’s social science. We just do massive amounts of checks to try and rule out alternative explanations.

Demsas: It’s the funniest part of reading a paper, where you’re like, Okay. Five pages of this are the study, and 30 pages of a study is just like, Are we sure that’s what we’re finding? (Laughs.)

Rendleman: We do try and look at what’s going on in the states where EITCs are implemented. We don’t see any sort of change in, sort of, the budget surplus of the states. So it’s not like an EITC is implemented in a time where, you know, you see a huge budget surplus, and then the state’s like, Oh, okay. So let’s do a bunch of different sorts of spending now.

You also see a sort of a commiserate drawdown on revenues. So the state is not taking in as many revenues anymore. So they’re giving it back. And we also don’t see strong effects in favor of a pure economic story going on. So we don’t see changes in pay in the areas where the EITCs are implemented or in unemployment rates. This is broadly consistent with the sort of mixed findings of EITCs. Some economists find very strong findings. Some of them find quite muted findings.

We also did follow up analyses trying to detect whether people in the survey that we are using detect whether the economy around them is doing much better or much worse. We don’t see very strong effects that suggest that’s going on, at least for ineligible people. In general, actually, we see people that live in high-poverty areas tend to say that the economy is doing pretty poorly, which is consistent with what you might expect.

So we can’t completely rule out the idea that maybe some of these places pass, like, these omnibus welfare policies, where not only did they introduce an EITC, but they introduced something akin to a CTC—

Demsas: Child tax credit.

Rendleman: Yeah. Child tax credit. Thank you. It doesn’t seem like that’s the case when we look at the budget data or in our checks of the places that are passing EITCs. But we can’t really account for everything that is going on in the political moment where these policies were passed.

Demsas: I want to take a step back here because you’ve kind of referenced this a couple of times now, but your research kind of pushes back against other research that has not found an effect of the EITC.

First, can you just give us a sense of what those studies say and why you think yours found something different?

Rendleman: Yeah. The past research on the EITC has been mostly concentrated around the idea that this is a policy that, perhaps purposefully, was deployed in a way that makes it difficult for people to attribute it to government. Suzanne Mettler, in her book The Submerged State, makes the case that many policies that you might expect would have a policy-feedback effect are deployed through the tax code in a way to obfuscate the role of government. You just get your check, as I was saying.

And for policies that might have particularly helped Democrats, let’s say, like an EITC, potentially, it’s sort of a way to level the playing field for politicians. Like, Okay. Well, you want to get this done, but we’re going to remit it in such a way that it’s going to be submerged through the tax code. And because of that, there have been other studies after that, that say, Who does get the benefit from EITCs? And it’s people like tax preparers or community-service organizations that are helping people navigate the complex landscape of the tax code. So it’s not the politicians, but it’s this delegated welfare state, to borrow a term from Andrea [Louise] Campbell. And this happens with a lot of social policy in the United States.

Demsas: So you just mean someone going to their local tax preparer thinks that they’re the ones who helped them, not the state.

Rendleman: Exactly

Demsas: Okay. Gotcha.

Rendleman: Like, I just hit it out of the park by finding this guy from H&R Block.

Demsas: (Laughs.) The Intuit lobby is alive and well.

Rendleman: Exactly. That was sort of the focus of the studies on the EITC. And they spoke to other work that focused on social policies and how they’re remitted and why people don’t respond to those policies. Sometimes people are just more interested in keeping their body and soul together, and they’re not going to necessarily be able to do this attribution process. And the ways that policies are implemented influences this.

The way that our study is different is that we try to exploit periods where—we try and find the best-case period for detecting an effect of an EITC. That’s going to be, like, the first year it was implemented, and it’s going to be in places where, potentially, it’s more generous or the state is doing things to allow for that attribution process to be a bit easier than it might otherwise be.

By focusing on the state EITCs, we’re able to basically examine the same policy across a bunch of different policy landscapes with a bunch of different policy-design strategies, and we’re able to test these different levers that might lead to better or worse attribution to the party that passed the policy. The other studies that study the EITC—they’re just looking at a given snapshot in time, either through interviews or through surveys. And what we do is really exploit this “over time” phenomenon, and say, Can we actually compare it to when we know we wouldn’t detect an effect to when we probably would?

Demsas: And one of the parts of the study that you haven’t talked about yet is what you just mentioned, which is: The way in which the government is almost trying to make the policy-feedback loop happen. So can you talk about the notification laws and what those are and how they work and why those are important?

Rendleman: Yeah. So in some states—and I think the city of Philadelphia—they have what are called EITC-notification laws. So if you are likely eligible to claim the EITC, your employer has to tell you. And so basically you get this note saying, Hey. If you haven’t already, when you file your taxes, you should make sure you claim this benefit. This is, at least to my mind, a tremendous idea. Telling them that you have done something or telling them to do the thing seems like a smart strategy. And in fact, that’s what we see in our study, that places where you have these notification laws, you see slightly higher approval levels for the incumbent governors.

Demsas: So I find it really funny because something very similar to this happened to me this week. I was at the optometrist, and I am always ready to fight when I go to the eye doctor because they are so annoying about giving you your prescription. But this year, the FTC—well, the reason that they’re annoying about it is because they want you to buy glasses from them, rather than going to, you know, 1-800-CONTACTs or going to whatever and Costco and finding something cheaper.

And I have literally been in a situation constantly where I’ll go to the optometrist, and then I will say, I want my prescription printed out, please. And they will try to make it impossible for me to get this prescription. And I’m, like, blood pressure high, ready to go in, fight with my eye doctor. And I get there, and for the first time, they just hand me the printed copy of my prescriptions. And I was like, What’s happening here?

And then I get another document called a Prescription Acknowledgement Form. And it says—I’m reading it right now: “In accordance with Federal Trade Commission regulations, optometrists are required to obtain a signed confirmation from a patient confirming that they received their glasses and/or their contact lens prescription.” And I was like, This is amazing. Not only did I get it; I got a piece of paper explaining to me that the FTC is the reason.

But the funniest part of this whole story is that after this happens, I was like, Oh, why am I getting this? I was just trying to figure out if everyone understood what was happening here. And the woman who was assisting me was like, Oh, yeah. It’s just a local D.C. regulation. It’s like, the piece of paper says that it’s the FTC, and it’s the federal government doing this. The person who handed me this piece of paper, who’s responsible for implementing this policy, is telling me it is a local D.C. regulation, but oh, also, it applies in Virginia.

And this is not to make fun of this woman at all. I don’t think that’s the point. I think that part of what’s happening here is just, like, even with all this notification, this feedback loop is extremely difficult to create. And I don’t know. It both made me optimistic and pessimistic about democracy in the same interaction.

So I don’t know how you feel about the efficacy of these kinds of programs when it’s so, so difficult to actually make clear what is happening and why, even when they do this. I mean, I think another clear example of this is when Donald Trump was signing the stimulus checks, and people were just like, Oh, it’s awful. He’s doing this. But it’s like, I don’t know—shouldn’t we know what government is doing?

Rendleman: Yeah. I think this story sort of sums up how everyone sort of interacts with the welfare state or just public policy, in general. Like, you hear about public policy from your neighbor or from the news or something like that, and you get 10 percent of the story, and you’re just going to take that 10 percent and go with it.

Demsas: It’s actually really funny, too, because I tweeted about it, and someone responded, Oh, in my office, they thought it was because of corporate, and that’s why it was happening.

So we talked a little bit about this earlier, but I want to delve into it a bit more. There’s this idea that I think that most people popularly have, which is that engagement with government programs will increase both approval, if you’re getting something beneficial from the government, but also that it will make you more likely to participate in the political process. I mean, I know you mentioned that, like, this is probably too small of a benefit to change the amount of leisure time you have in the way that Social Security did.

One of the books that I’ve read on the subject that has been really formative to me is this book by Jamila Michener called Fragmented Democracy. And so she looks at Medicaid enrollment and finds that enrollment yields a decline in the likelihood of participating in politics and voting. Her story, I think, has a lot to do with the ways in which the Medicaid implementation can be really degrading for people—the way they’re treated in these offices, the messages they’re receiving about their worthiness as members of the political body.

And is your idea that you think the EITC is just like a better-designed program than Medicaid, or how does your finding kind of interact with Michener’s?

Rendleman: I love the idea that you could think that my study is in conversation with Michener’s.

So it’s a dramatically different policy. A lot of policies that came out of the ’90s will say, We’re very much interested in the idea of dignity, or how we can maintain the dignity of individuals when they claim these policies. And going to a benefits office, where you have to talk to a tired bureaucrat who is upset to be at their job because it’s a difficult job, or you have to travel far away to the office to try and claim the policy—so just making it more difficult for you. All that comes together to make it sort of a lame thing to try and seek out, even if you need it.

The EITC is just a check. It’s easy. So even though, sure, you have to do your taxes, we always have to do our taxes every year, and maybe it’s more or less complicated for some individuals, depending on how complex their taxes are, but it’s nothing like having to go into an office, have to ask answer questions, and have to face the notion that things are not going your way, and you’re having a tough time.

Demsas: I feel like a lot of this work is, in part, answering the question: Do we think that voters are politically sophisticated? There’s a famous 1964 chapter by a political scientist, Philip Converse, called “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” And I have not gone to political-science grad school, but the people I know who have say this is one of the first things everyone gets assigned and has, like, 13,000 citations.

He makes the argument he’s making, and this is a very early attempt to sort of really go out into the field and learn from people through survey data, rather than just kind of sitting in an ivory tower and doing theorizing. And he basically looks at the ideologies of voters. And his argument is that people’s policy views are inconsistent and not ideological. When you ask someone, one day, What do you think about X? It’s not going to be the same question if you ask them at another time. And then it won’t covary with things that should covary together if you were to be a consistent person.

Your argument kind of supports the idea that voters actually are somewhat sophisticated, at least they’re able to see something that is valuable and approve the right people for it. But then there’s also parts of your study which push in the other direction, right? Like, the fact that it’s not super durable indicates that, perhaps, you know, you ask them in year one: Oh, they’re really happy about it. Year two: They don’t even care whether or not it happened. And the size of the benefit not really varying with how much support people are giving to the politicians that they view as responsible also indicates that perhaps they’re not politically sophisticated.

So do you think that voters are politically sophisticated? How has this research changed your views about that, if at all?

Rendleman: No. I think I’m an optimist on sophistication. I think a lot of times political scientists are a bit pessimistic on individuals’ capacities to actually know what’s going on to them, because it is quite complicated. But we don’t often set up our analyses or studies in a way to give voters the benefit of the doubt.

I think the effects that we detect are indeed consistent with this sophistication story. And I think, maybe, I’ll push against this idea that after that first post period—after the implementation of the EITC—that’s where you see the bump. I think I would push against the idea that reversion back to the mean is indicative of voters not being so sophisticated.

It just means that other things happened that interceded in people’s capacities to reward the governor in that same direction. Not all politicians have these hot streaks that will allow for constant bumps to their vote share at the polls or in how people approve of them on approval polls. Scandals get in the way; other policies get in the way, etcetera.

And the finding on the amount of money—it’s not really clear how people would respond to that amount of money, because it’s not like people have that counterfactual, necessarily, or, like, can really detect, I got 15 percent of the federal EITC this year and then 18 percent of the federal EITC the next year. How would we expect that to manifest in approval levels? Like, how much more would we expect people’s attitudes to change? It’s not really clear.

So I like the study because it really points in favor of the idea that voters are reasonably sophisticated. We shouldn’t just expect them not to react to policy. They will react to policy. And it depends on the environments that these individuals are in, in order for us to see an effect. So we should just be far more conscientious about how we deploy policies and where we deploy policies and what sorts of messaging goes along with the policy.

Demsas: One thing that I think really plays into this is sort of the ideological nature of politicians themselves. I mean, I think we have this sense that what we would want is: good-guy politician who does what he believes no matter what, and pushes back against, you know, anything that they find is negative, and is a leader.

But democratic theory, and what we’ve been talking about this whole episode, is that, actually, you kind of want a politician that all they’re going to do is try and make sure that they’re making people happy. They’re going to respond to positive feedback loops. They’re going to search for them. They’re going to try to make sure people know what they’re doing, and they’re going to try to iterate to be more popular because that is how you get better governance, according to basic democratic theory.

And it seems we’re in a highly ideological environment, where politicians are often not willing to do things that are very popular or are willing to do things that are very unpopular.

I think one example of this is the child tax credit, which we mentioned briefly before. I think it’s a great policy. And when it expanded in 2021, it lifted more than 2 million kids out of poverty—when that was expanded by the Biden administration. But it doesn’t get renewed. And there isn’t a massive backlash. And survey data from NPR/Marist showed that just 15 percent of respondents who got payments said that it had helped their families a lot.

And yet, both parties run on it during the presidential election, right? Both the Harris campaign and the Trump-Vance campaign—they run on this, and they talk about the child tax credit. It’s like a point of unity. You can see a lot of Republicans pushing for it and Democrats.

You know, we tend to think about the blame of policy-feedback loops resting with voters for not being sophisticated. But is part of this also just that the ideological nature of politicians makes them often unwilling to engage in those feedback loops appropriately?

Rendleman: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So it’s interesting because you would, indeed, just expect politicians to do the thing that would maximize votes, but politicians don’t always have full information on what would maximize votes, and they also don’t have full information about how people react to policy, necessarily. So it’s funny—you bring up the presidential campaigns, and it seems like presidents will just run on boosting the economy in whatever way possible.

And if you have this sort of universalistic policy, like the child tax credit or everyone-has-kids, everyone-could-benefit type of policy, then that just seems like good political capital. It’s just something to run on. But then the campaign is done, and you actually have to get policy done. It’s hard to bargain with other people towards actually implementing things and, also, implementing things in a satisfactory manner.

One reason why we don’t have a very thick safety net in the United States is, in part, because of the entry of not just outside influence into politics—so let’s say, like, money in politics, like lobbying and things like that—but also because, yeah, these politicians are people, too, and—

Demsas: Politicians are people, too. (Laughs.)

Rendleman: Yeah, exactly. And when they have to work with each other, it’s hard to actually overcome not only their own conceptions of what it means to have good policy but also, you know, what they actually have to do in office. Like, you know, Maybe instead of passing the CTC, I want to do something else.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, that’s a great place for our final question, which is: What is something that you once thought was good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Rendleman: It’s funny because it’s going to be about this idea that politicians are people too. So my other arm of my research agenda is focused on basically the workplace of politics, so focusing on how politicians interact with each other but also how bureaucrats interact with each other.

And when I was doing part of my dissertation work, I wanted to study the idea of, like, Okay, when people of color are with each other in deliberative spaces in government, maybe they work better together. And so I did all this work in my third or fourth year of grad school, and I was fully expecting to see, Yeah, if we add more, let’s say, Black people to a congressional committee, you’ll see that they are more effective at their jobs. And I didn’t see that, and I was really bummed about it. And, you know, I talked to people, and people were like, Ah, maybe it’s just, like, a null effect, so throw it away, and move on with your life.

But I was quite stubborn, so I went to D.C., and I started talking to people. And I asked them, you know, Why am I seeing this effect? I’m seeing no effect, effectively. And it never dawned on me that when people come into Congress, they are not just the silos. They’re not just by themselves, working. They are bargaining with other people. They’re working with other people, and they’re deciding, like, What is the best way to position myself or ourselves as a group?

And ultimately, I found that in the case of African Americans, you don’t see a general empowerment effect; you see this very specific delegated effect. So people that are closer to the policies—groups like the Black Caucus are in support of—those are the people that are speaking more in these settings, whereas people that are farther from those policies speak less.

So this empowerment effect—thought it was good on paper. Maybe it was, but it led to just this far more robust finding that I think squares more with how we think about how elites think about the political process, in general.

Demsas: Side note: I feel like I’m very on the bandwagon of everyone should be publishing their null effects, and it shouldn’t be a negative thing. I guess that’s probably the fault of, like, you know, journals and stuff and not really you, in particular, Hunter.

Rendleman: Well, yeah. Like, my incentives at this stage in my career are such that I have to publish, and sometimes reviewers just like seeing positive effects as opposed to null effects.

Demsas: Blame reviewer two, always.

Rendleman: Yeah, of course.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Hunter, for coming on the show.

Rendleman: Thanks so much for having me. I had a lot of fun.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.