Policy feedback scholarship has focused on how laws and their implementation affect either organizations (e.g., their resources, priorities, political opportunities, or incentive structures) or individuals (e.g., their civic skills and resources or their psychological orientations toward the state). However, in practice the distinction between organizations and individuals is not clear‐cut: Organizations interpret policy for individuals, and individuals experience policy through organizations. Thus, scholars have argued for a multi‐level model of feedback effects illuminating how policies operating at the organizational level reverberate at the individual level. In this theory‐building article, we push this insight by examining how public policy influences nonprofit organizations’ role in the civic life of beneficiaries. We identify five roles that nonprofit organizations play. For each role, we draw on existing research to identify policy mechanisms that either enlarge or diminish nonprofits’ capacity to facilitate individual incorporation and engagement. From these examples, we derive cross‐cutting hypotheses concerning how different categories of citizens may need policy to operate differently to enhance their civic influence; whether policy that is “delivered” through nonprofits may dampen citizens’ relationship with the state; and how the civic boost provided by policy may be influenced by the degree of latitude conferred on recipient organizations.

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How do we explain the steep increase in women's higher educational attainment that began in the mid-twentieth century and has continued, unchecked, in subsequent decades? Although many point to the emergence of feminism and the creation of Title IX in the 1970s as the origins of this trend, I argue that two federal student aid programs—the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Higher Education Act of 1965—helped set the stage for women to surpass men as the recipients of bachelor's degrees. Using historical analysis of primary and secondary resources, I present two related case studies that demonstrate the central role that unique political contexts and nondiscriminatory program administration have played in lawmakers' capacity to promote equal opportunity through public policy. This study suggests that women's increasing college degree attainment has important, but frequently overlooked, public policy roots.

In 1890, Congress passed the Second Morrill Land-Grant Act, which provided federal resources to support the creation of nineteen Black land-grant colleges. At a historical and political moment when Black Americans faced a violently repressive backlash against what progress they had achieved during Reconstruction, the successful passage and implementation of this legislation was unlikely. How did congressional lawmakers successfully pass the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1890, and was the expansion of educational opportunity for African Americans a clearly expressed objective? Using historical analysis of primary sources, this analysis suggests that the 1890 legislation’s investment in Black colleges reflected a politically expedient compromise between northern Radical Republicans who supported greater educational access for Black citizens and Southern Democrats who wished to expand higher educational opportunity in their region while also maintaining the segregated racial order of southern educational institutions.