Executive Power, Issue Attention, Interest Groups, and Policy Change in the 21st Century: A Review Essay

Abstract In Means, Motives, and Opportunities: How Executives and Interest Groups Set Public Policy, Christian Breunig and Chris Koski offer a significant contribution to political science and the social sciences broadly. First, the book provides a new theoretical perspective regarding the determinants of budgetary outcomes for policy areas. In this perspective, executive power, the distribution of interest groups for the given policy issue, and public attention toward the issue all affect short- and long-term changes in budgetary spending. Then, the core of the book tests the perspective on original data for ten policy issues from all fifty states from 1984–2010. By examining these new data, the authors successfully leverage state-level, over-time variation in governors' powers and interest group density for the ten issues in ways that would not be feasible if the focus were only on national US politics. At the same time, the book arguably undersells itself in terms of relating the findings to ongoing debates regarding executive power, the role of issue salience, and the nationalization of U.S. politics, among other topics. This review article thus attempts not only to offer a thorough evaluation of the contribution but also to contextualize it within larger debates regarding U.S. policymaking today.