Replication Data for: Business as Usual? Conventional Politics, Critical Junctures and Policy Feedback in the Paycheck Protection Program

Conventional politics approaches, emphasizing party ideology, electoral dynamics, committee member-ship, campaign donations and industry clout, exercise a powerful hold over assessments of public policies and their distributional effects. Emerging from pluralist and business power perspectives, such accounts see “who gets what and why” as the result of how politics and power shape policies, their implementation, and distributional outcomes. This pervades our understanding of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the US government’s effort to avert mass unemployment during the pandemic by lending $786 billion to small businesses to keep employees on payroll. Yet contrary to prior studies of the PPP, we find that such factors were strikingly uncorrelated with distributional outcomes, revealing limits to such approaches to this case. Instead, we find that an institutional politics or politics-in-time (IP-PIT) approach better explains the program and its trajectories. IP-PIT revises the causal sequence by empha-sizing how institutions and policies generate politics, distributional outcomes and feedback loops. We engage both approaches via a mixed-methods analysis of the PPP and two new datasets. We anchor our study in a qualitative process-tracing of temporal variation in policy architectures, politics, policy revi-sions, and shifting access to loans within and across the program’s three periods before presenting quan-titative analyses of loan flows across congressional districts and periods using data on the entire corpus of PPP loans. We use one of the largest economic interventions since the New Deal as a case to advance research and debate over the dynamics and outcomes of US policy making during crises and the Ameri-can political economy in general. Ours is the first study of the PPP to conduct a mixed-methods analysis of loans across congressional districts or to use conventional and institutional approaches to address its politics, policy and outcomes. We document varieties of critical junctures, contribute arguments about what might shape policy or institutional innovation in those moments, and use the PPP to identify conditions under which systems are “their own grave diggers,” fueling negative-transformative rather than positive-reproductive feedback.