ABSTRACT
This chapter centers the role of attention to social reactions in the policy process. This goal of this chapter is to examine value-acceptable social reactions and their relationship to real or perceived deviations, and norms. Public policy is designed to accept and harmonize certain deviations that underserve the underserved. Public policy is a system and like any system, it is subject to forces that incentivize discrimination within structures and institutions that return power to the powerful as an operating principle of the policy process. Tolerable Inequality uses the policy process to deny freedoms to individuals and groups by constraining the rights and liberties of those identities deemed unworthy of equality. Incumbent policy actors rely on the predictability of their constituency over time to ensure their continued success. However, the level of belief that a group holds to an expectation (including the expectations of policies, policy actors, and institutions) influences the perceived degree of deviation.
