In this paper, I apply Mettler's concept of the “submerged state” to aid for children at private schools in the United States, including education vouchers, in‐kind aid, and property tax exemptions. All aid policies are “submerged” in that they help private organizations take on state functions but some are more submerged than others. Theoretically, this paper distinguishes between subcategories of submergence. Using policy data from 50 states and an original database of court challenges between 1912 and 2015, I employ probit regression with sample selection to evaluate the effect of submergence on successful court challenge. I find that more submerged policies are less likely to be successfully challenged than less submerged policies. Submerged policy design enables supporters to avoid legal as well as political challenge.

Indirect or delegated governance engages private organizations, tax expenditures, or service users to deliver programs that would otherwise be provided by the government directly. This paper explains the rise of indirect governance in terms of policymakers’ strategic use of “attenuation” to avoid political and legal challenge. Attenuation is the process by which a government obscures its role in promoting a particular policy goal, through communication strategies (attenuating rhetoric), or by utilizing private third parties and the tax system to deliver a benefit (attenuated design). Deploying policy‐maker interviews and an original historical database of private school choice programs and their legal and political defense, 1953–2017, I argue that pursuing both attenuated design and attenuating rhetoric at once helps policies pass and spread by publicly dissociating the government from legally contentious policy outputs.

In the current polarized political climate there is heightened attention paid to the American state constitutional provisions known as "Blaine

The application of Boolean logic using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is becoming more frequent in political science but is still in its relative infancy. Boolean 'AND' and 'OR' are used to express and simplify combinations of necessary and sufficient conditions. This paper draws out a distinction overlooked by the QCA literature: the difference between inclusive-and exclusive-or (OR and XOR). It demonstrates that many scholars who have used the Boolean OR in fact mean XOR, discusses the implications of this confusion and explains the applications of XOR to QCA. Although XOR can be expressed in terms of OR and AND, explicit use of XOR has several advantages: it mirrors natural language closely, extends our understanding of equifinality and deals with mutually exclusive clusters of sufficiency conditions. XOR deserves explicit treatment within QCA because it emphasizes precisely the values that make QCA attractive to political scientists: contextualization, confounding variables, and multiple and conjunctural causation.The primary function of the phrase 'either…or' is 'to emphasize the indifference of the two (or more) things…but a secondary function is to emphasize the mutual exclusiveness', that is, either of the two, but not both (Simpson 2004). The word 'or' has two meanings: Inclusive 'or' describes the relation 'A or B or both', and can also be written 'A and/or B'.Exclusive 'or' describes the relation 'A or B, but not both'. 1 Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) currently deploys only Boolean 'AND' and the inclusive disjunction 'OR' to express and simplify combinations of necessary and sufficient conditions. But in this paper I argue that QCA should also use the exclusive disjunction 'XOR', because the XOR mirrors natural language closely, deals with mutually exclusive clusters of sufficiency conditions, and extends our understanding of equifinality -the notion that different causal paths can lead to the same outcome. The exclusive disjunction deserves explicit treatment because it emphasizes precisely the values that make QCA attractive to political scientists: contextualization and complexity, confounding variables, and multiple, conjunctural causation (Schneider and Wagemann 2006).The exclusive, not the inclusive, disjunction should be used wherever there is logical or practical incompatibility between two or more competing paths to an outcomethey cannot both be taken at the same time. Regrettably, the distinction between inclusive and exclusive 'or' has been treated with casual disregard across the discipline of political science, not just those parts of it that use the QCA method. 'A or B' is often implicitly taken to mean: 'A or B (but not both)' rather than 'A or B (or both)', with resultant confusion. The exclusive disjunction is already widely discussed by linguists, philosophers and logicians, and used extensively in the electrical engineering literature (Hurford 1974;Akers 1959;Jennings 1994;Fleisher, Tavel, and Yeager 1983). It is also commonly, 1 In H.P. Grice's terms, the word '...

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