Governments exert a major influence on social relations through an unquantifiable but pervasive set of prohibitions and requirement. This extensive activity makes it very likely that ”new policies create a new politics.”This essay offers a summary of the dimensions of policy feedback mechanism (resource/incentive effects and interpretive effects) and among three sets of actors affected by these mechanisms (government elites, social groups, and mass publics). The framework suggests six separate pathways of influence running from policies to politics, although several pathways may involve multiple sources of influence.