The 1997 Canada Child Tax Benefit: A Test of Beland, Rocco and Waddan's Theory on the Implementation of Public Policy in Federations (revised 29 August 2017)

Abstract

In the 2016 book Obamacare Wars: Federalism State Politics and the Affordable Care Act, Béland, Rocco and Waddan study the implementation of so called “Obamacare” at the state level. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act introduced not one but several reforms to health policies, most importantly, the creation of state-based market-places for individuals to perchance health insurance with federal subsidies, a federally subsidized expansion of state Medicaid programs for low income families, and regulatory changes to require insurers to spend a minimum share of premiums on providing health care to members or face penalties. All of these required state-level action to implement making the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) not just a complex policy but one with shared authority between Washington and the fifty states. Béland, Rocco and Waddan argue that the degree to which any one of these three policies was implemented in a given state can best be explained not by the ideology or partisanship of the state executive or legislatures but by the creation of intergovernmental networks and delegations of authority by policy legacies, institutional fragmentation and public sentiment, impacting each of the policies in each state. This paper asks whether this theoretical framework can provide a more general approach to the study of policy implementation of complex shared authority programs within federations. The test case is the introduction of the Canada Child Tax Benefit and associated reforms to provincial social assistance and programs to help low income families. All of the factors but one (delegation) identified by Béland, Rocco and Waddan were found to play a role in the present case. This could be due to the difference in policy sectors or to the difference in political institutions between the two nations.