Episode #40: Vicki Shabo
Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.
As we continue digging into paid leave, it’s a perfect encapsulation of a key question for child and family policy development; is policy design an overture to broker political compromise, or an instrument to memorialize one?
Much policy and political debate assumes the former.
If you look at the example of paid leave, there’s no shortage of punditry suggesting that the way to widen the tent of support is to channel your inner cattle auctioneer, offering various versions of your proposal that scale back who it covers or with how much until there’s support.
Those are the kinds of strategies that are ready at hand when you see policy design as an invitation to compromise.
Today’s guest instead presumes that political coalition formulation precedes policy design, treating it as a covenant that captures compromise.
Vicki Shabo is a Senior Fellow at New America’s Better Life Lab, where she leads work on gender equity and paid leave and care policy and strategy.
She has played a central role in shaping strategy related to paid leave at the national and state level, and the way media narratives portray caregiving.
We talked about why moving too quickly to policy design ends up smuggling genuine disagreements over vision and values into the minutia of benefit mechanics.
We also discussed how the durability of any policy often emerges from the way it changes people’s behavior over time.
Regardless of your policy priorities and preferences, this underscores the central role of offering clear and contestable visions to advance any sustainable child and family policy.
