Join us for the second talk in CIPR’s 2026 Fall Series: Governance in Times of Crisis in Latin America.
Jessica Rich, former CIPR post-doc and currently at Marquette University, will give a talk at 12:30 on October 16th in the Greenleaf Conference Room.

Theories of policy feedback hold that reforms endure when they generate constituencies with the power to defend them. Such coalitions, however, are thought to arise only from structural conditions outside advocates’ control. We argue instead that public servants can build coalitions deliberately, even under adverse conditions, through what we call empowered institutions: executive agencies granted the authority, resources, and expert staff to sustain policy advocacy. Rich and her co-authors further highlight two mechanisms through which bureaucrats can construct reform coalitions: interpretive, reframing how officials understand a policy problem, and material, restructuring the incentives facing the organizations on which policy survival depends. This may help explain how social policy commitments survive when threats come from the actors a policy depends on to deliver rather than from opponents at the ballot box.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and an original news archive, they show how bureaucrats in empowered institutions sustained Brazil’s promise of universal access to medicines despite powerful opposition by multinational pharmaceutical firms with monopoly pricing power.