The Political Development of Public Policy: Institutions, Intercurrence, and the Community Reinvestment Act

Although Congress continues to pass urban redevelopment programs and local actors attempt to use these policies to address urban problems, many policies do not live up to initial expectations. Urban policy scholars tend to focus on local political or economic arrangements to explain this phenomenon, while public policy scholars emphasize the role of special interest or bureaucratic influence on policy success or failure. Neither approach studies the institutional arrangements motivating urban policy, nor do they do they study these arrangements over time, as the policies evolve. In this paper, I suggest a new framework for exploring urban policy: intercurrence. I operationalize this theoretical framework, drawn from American Political Development (APD) scholarship, to examine the institutional ordering mechanisms in Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). I argue that challenges to successful policy implementation can best be appreciated by understanding how institutional arrangements inherent to American politics, including the relationship between the public and private sectors, federalism, and separation of powers, circumscribe policy creation and then implementation at the local level.