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Studies of policy feedback have produced an increasingly nuanced understanding of when, why, and how public policies generate—or fail to generate—political effects that entrench the policies themselves and provide benefits to their proponents. Left open, however, is the question of whether policies can paradoxically generate political benefits for those who opposed them. This paper extends the study of policy feedback by exploring the mechanisms through and conditions under which organized groups can counterintuitively use policy losses to build power moving forward. It then demonstrates how post‐loss power building operates by exploring the National Rifle Association's historical use of gun policy losses to reinforce a shared identity among its supporters, which it later uses to spur collective action on behalf of gun rights. The analysis shows how policy outcomes can interact with the identity‐building efforts of organized groups in ways that enable those groups to use losses to their long‐term advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a large body of literature devoted to how "policies create politics" and how feedback effects from existing policy legacies shape potential reforms in a particular area. Although much of this literature focuses on self‐reinforcing feedback effects that increase support for existing policies over time, Kent Weaver and his colleagues have recently drawn our attention to self‐undermining effects that can gradually weaken support for such policies. The following contribution explores both self‐reinforcing and self‐undermining policy feedback in relationship to the Affordable Care Act, the most important health‐care reform enacted in the United States since the mid‐1960s. More specifically, the paper draws on the concept of policy feedback to reflect on the political fate of the ACA since its adoption in 2010. We argue that, due in part to its sheer complexity and fragmentation, the ACA generates both self‐reinforcing and self‐undermining feedback effects that, depending of the aspect of the legislation at hand, can either facilitate or impede conservative retrenchment and restructuring. Simultaneously, through a discussion of partisan effects that shape Republican behavior in Congress, we acknowledge the limits of policy feedback in the explanation of policy stability and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]