The role of crop insurance in US farm policy: a post-exceptionalist analysis

The shift in US agricultural policies towards crop insurance and away from direct payments to farmers would at first appear to reflect the dominance of a competitive-market paradigm and a post-exceptional or even non-exceptional view of agriculture. This paper explores an alternative interpretation: that crop insurance – both in terms of policy motivation and as a policy instrument has evolved into farm income support through other means. This possibility raises conceptual and empirical questions regarding the nature of agriculture policy reform. At a conceptual level, the shift toward crop insurance illustrates that ideas are less of a constraint on policymakers as the concept of policy paradigms suggests. Instead, ideas serve as resources that policymakers employ selectively and strategically. At an empirical level, the shift toward crop insurance illustrates how constellations of interests entrench and institutionalize new policy instruments in the existing policy regime. Using text analysis of congressional hearings and quantitative analysis of lobbying reports, we explore the role of ideas and interests in the adoption of crop insurance in the United States. Our findings have implications for understanding agricultural policy reform. The case of crop insurance suggests that post-exceptionalism can be understood as a process whereby policy makers creatively rearticulate existing policy goals to meet new political circumstances and seek to entrench these reimagined policies in durable coalitions of powerful interests.