Abstract
This article compares the long-run adjustment of transport finance instruments in the US and Australia. Change and continuity in these policy instruments highlights how the institutional context can influence an instrument constituency’s influence within a policy subsystem. In the US, a mature instrument constituency created and entrenched motor fuel taxes as an exclusive resource for implementing transport policy. In Australia, fuel taxes remained exposed to the politics of inter-governmental competition and fiscal rivalry across subsystems, leaving less opportunity for instrument constituency leverage. We explore the circumstances under which instrument constituencies can either constrain or facilitate adjusting transportation policy through fiscal mechanisms, especially when the efficacy of established instruments appears to decline. The policy paradigm of American transportation rests upon the entrenched segregation of fuel tax revenues for infrastructure spending. When fuel tax revenues grew from the 1980s until 2008, transportation policy yielded an expanding stream of programme outputs – building the interstate highway network and upgrading part of the nation’s urban transit infrastructure. The instrument constituency that shaped the Highway Trust Fund found a privileged position within the transportation subsystem. In Australia, similar instruments have not been entrenched and have thus been open to political influences beyond the subsystem. The effects of institutional configuration on instrument constituency participation in policy change become most apparent during times of austerity, or when fiscal instruments fail to deliver expected revenues. Electrification of vehicle fleets is now creating such disruption in the transportation subsystem.
Highlights
With a growing awareness of the role that instrument constituencies can play in advancing particular solutions across policy subsystems, the dynamics of such influence on the policy process over time deserves to be considered
Once instruments are successfully promoted as viable solutions, what difference does the context in which they are adopted make to their long-term impacts on both policy and politics? Our contribution to this special issue on instrument constituencies seeks to explore the longitudinal variation in influence that instrument constituency initiatives have exhibited by comparing the application of motor fuel taxation instruments in Australia and the United States, two nations with parallel growth trajectories of motorized mobility
This article compares instrument adoption and adjustment efforts in Australia and the United States over a century to highlight the effect that entrenching fiscal instruments can exert on policy and politics
Summary
In the United States, an instrument constituency succeeded in legitimating the exclusive connection between government’s mobility expenditures and its revenues. Fuel taxes, at national and state level, are mostly segregated into transportation ‘trust funds’, a policy instrument that embeds a legal, and often a constitutional, obligation to spend the accumulated revenue exclusively within the policy subsystem. HTF expenditures could only go towards transportation, and required state governments to collect matching funds through segregated fuel taxes (Rose, 1990) Such multi-layered fiscal restrictions to benefit the transport subsystem reveal a successful alignment of the three policy subsystem pillars that Béland and Howlett (2016) identified as necessary to attach instrument-based solutions to new problems. New instrumentation, such as highway tolls or distance-based road pricing raised the question of whether new revenue should retain the special status that had exempted fuel taxes from budgetary politics These deliberations over replacing motor fuel taxes reveal the effects of an instrument’s institutionalization on an instrument constituency. As will be shown while subsystem demands for instrument change have grown, the institutional constraints that were previously embedded by the instrument constituency subsequently require adjustment decisions to be taken well beyond the policy subsystem
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