Coercive mandates let institutions pursue changes too politically difficult on their own

Evidence

Broader political research would also be useful. Why did affirmative action surface as an especially “hot” political issue in 1995, given that white men (and to a lesser degree, white women) have always disliked strong versions of it (Bennett et al., 1995: tables 2, 3)? Conversely, why haven’t corporations, universities, most political candidates, and city governments jumped on the antiaffirmative action bandwagon? Do they see benefits in affirmative action policies that they would not be able to attain absent an apparently coercive governmental mandate? (An analogy here might be school superintendents who welcomed judicial decisions mandating desegregation because the mandate allowed them to make changes in the school system that were otherwise politically too difficult.) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1957

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors Milgrom’s point about institutions substituting for information and the author’s broader theme of institutions as cover for individually prudent actions; also echoes Coleman’s social capital work on how collective structures enable otherwise impossible actions. — connects to: Launching a new market contract requires coercive mobilization of its own members. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 774; An agency cannot achieve through regulation what Congress declined to legislate — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2444
• DEEPTHINKING: The superintendent analogy generalizes into a theory of why powerful actors silently welcome externally imposed mandates: coercion redistributes political blame.