ABSTRACT
This chapter has one primary goal: to locate political penalties in the policy process. This chapter addresses the way incumbent policy actors focus on political survival by maintaining power dynamics, which means that public policy is motivated by penalty avoidance, shunning attention, avoiding risks, and embracing affirmative inaction. Together, these methods limit the participation of certain actors in the policy process. The intent of this chapter is to assist the public, researchers, and students to examine current policy dynamics including the role of “loser” issues. The examples used in this book come from the LGBTQ+ experience, with one case from Australia. In all, political penalties inform Tolerable Inequality because they ensure the focus of policy reactions is on the satisfaction of high-value constituencies rather than the underlying inequality and communities they impact.
