How Policy Shapes Politics

Judicialization juridification legalization-whatever terms they use scholars commentators and citizens are fascinated by what one book has called The Global Rise of Judicial Power and seek to understand its implications for politics and society. In <em>How Policy Shapes Politics</em> Jeb Barnes and Thomas F. Burke find that the turn to courts litigation and legal rights can have powerful political consequences. <p/>Barnes and Burke analyze the field of injury compensation in the United States in which judicialized policies operate side-by-side with bureaucratized social insurance programs. They conclude that litigation by dividing social interests into victims and villains winners and losers generates a fractious chaotic politics in which even seeming allies-business and professional groups on one side injured victims on the other-can become divided amongst themselves. By contrast social insurance programs that compensate for injury bring social interests together narrowing the scope of conflict and over time producing a more technocratic politics. <p/>Policy does in fact create politics. But only by comparing the political trajectories of different types of policies -- some more court-centered others less so -- can we understand the consequences of arguably one of the most significant developments in post-World War II government the increasingly prominent role of courts litigation and legal rights in politics.<br>