Font size:
Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman was invited to speak at a recent luncheon for the Midland Area Chamber of Commerce. He spoke to a capacity crowd at the Holiday Inn in Midland about the Overton Window.
The Overton Window is a model for policy change, helping to explain how ideas can go from absurd to accepted. The window encompasses a range of policy positions and shows the limits placed on politicians.
If you ask most people how laws and policies change, they will usually tell you it’s because of politicians. But that is only the end result.
A law first started out as an idea. For every policy area, there is a range of possibilities. Politicians can generally only support policy options from those within a range of political possibilities – at least if they want to be re-elected.
In the presentation, Lehman used education policy as an example. For this policy area, there are many options ranging from big government to small. On one end of the spectrum is compulsory attendance in only government schools while at the other end is no government schools at all. In the middle are things like options for charter schools, homeschooling, private schools, tax credit scholarships
and vouchers.
Previously, Michigan operated mostly at the least free end of the spectrum – virtually every student was forced to go only to their local government school or paid extra for a private school. But slowly, the window has shifted. Homeschooling became legal and then less regulated. Public school choice through the state “schools of choice” program came to be. Charter schools were then introduced.
Of course, many policy areas go in a different direction (think health care becoming more and more centralized).
The purpose of think tanks is to move the policy window – making some things which were formerly off the table an option. For the Mackinac Center, that involves educating and empowering individuals in order to influence the policy options in Michigan.
