This paper leverages the wealth of high quality information about the U.S. minimum wage to explore the role that time brings to policy change in form of policy and preference drift. Additionally, the paper investigates the role under which staged implementation plays in the U.S. minimum wage development. In so doing, the study provides insights into the role that staged implementation plays (gradual implementation or wage target maintenance) and thus the time horizons of key decision-makers.
Furthermore, this analysis allows the authors to test whether the pace of policy change in this one issue with a substantial temporal history corresponds best with the veto-player theory of institutionalized policy change or the punctuated equilibrium theory which argues that policy changes tend to ''overreact'' after period of negligence and cross-time drift. We find relatively convincing evidence that in the case of this policy area, a modified dynamic veto player model explains the pace and dynamics of policy change better than that of the PE theory.
