Policy Experiments and Poverty Politics

Policy making has increasingly turned to controlled analysis, in the form of demonstration projects and experiments, to test social policies before they are legislated nationwide. Reviewing the history of three hallmark welfare experiments, we examine how controlled analysis became a “shadow institution” — an alternative to more visible and highly contested legislative channels for policy conflict. Applying a political‐institutional lens, we explore what kind of channel this is and how it structures conflicts over poverty policy. We find that controlled analysis may be more apt to reiterate than to challenge conventional wisdom about poverty and the poor.