States have long been treated as “laboratories of democracy,” where learning and competition spread policy innovations. Building on policy feedback scholarship, this article develops a new framework of policy interdependence showing that state policies do more than teach or compete—they reshape interest-group politics across state lines.
🔎 New Framework: Policy Interdependence and Feedback
Policy feedback mechanisms can (1) promote learning among policymakers and (2) intensify competition between states. This framework adds a third pathway: state policy can strengthen organized interests that benefit from a reform, and those strengthened interests can then export political power to influence policy adoption in other states.
📈 Evidence From Rooftop Solar Politics
- Case: rooftop solar, where state-level policy choices have been central to industry growth and to the emergence of installers as organized political actors.
- Data: a combination of administrative records, lobbying filings, and state policy data are brought together to trace resources and activity across states.
- Finding: solar installers accumulated resources in early-adopter states with favorable rooftop policy and then used those resources to shape policy debates and decisions in other states.
🧾 Key Findings
- State policies generate feedback that alters the capacity of interest groups, not only incentives for policymakers.
- Organized interests that benefit from reforms can convert policy-created advantages into cross-state advocacy and influence.
- The rooftop solar case demonstrates a tangible mechanism by which early subnational reforms produce political actors capable of propagating similar reforms elsewhere.
⚖️ Why It Matters
This perspective reframes how federalism and diffusion are understood: subnational policy is not only a testbed but also a tool for building politically potent coalitions that can scale reform geographically. For reformers, crafting policy at the state level can be a strategic step toward broader, multi-state policy change.
