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This paper suggests that park and recreation provisions and programming can be an important generator of social capital, particularly bridging social capital. It is further suggested that the degree to which park and recreation activities create social capital can be strengthened by advocacy from Park and Recreation Boards and that these voluntary citizen advisory boards can influence park and recreation policies in directions favorable to social capital formation. This paper is partly prescriptive, suggesting park and recreation policies that are likely to contribute to the development of social capital in local communities. It also recommends a research agenda, urging further study of the relationship between social capital formation, park and recreation policies and the role of advisory boards in local government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Zedillo administration in Mexico, the federal government established a formula for distribution to states and municipalities of resources for social infrastructure. The question this paper seeks to answer is wheather the political bias previously observed in PRONASOL is eliminated with the new scheme. This paper uses municipal level data on a Mexican decentralized social program to test for political manipulation in its municipal distribution by the state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the causes of government change in Russia’s President-Parliamentary regime (1994-2003) and assesses three theoretical perspectives: 1) The view that the constitutional format of President-Parliamentary regimes causes government instability and conflict. 2) The proposition that Russia’s constitution creates such a powerful presidency that the incumbent can decide government changes unchecked. 3) The view that government change is the result of an institutionally structured bargaining process, in which the capability and willingness of actors to use their constitutional powers is shaped by election results, policy and public opinion shocks and government performance. The paper analyses opinion poll, economic and election data, the memoir literature, press reports and current event almanacs. This evidence suggests: 1) That the regime type perspective correctly identifies a tendency toward government instability in Russia’s president-parliamentary regime, but that it can neither account for the mechanisms of government change nor for variation in conflict and co-operation between president and assembly. 2) That the president was influential in many instances, but that major government changes had to be negotiated with the Duma, and that the president was not always able to secure his desired outcomes. 3) That government change in Russia appeared to be best understood as the outcome of an institutionally structured bargaining process, in which actors are influenced by election outcomes, public opinion and policy shocks and government performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When presidents talked in the nineteenth century, who listened? In prior research [Laracey, Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public (Texas A&M Press, 2002)], I have demonstrated that, contrary to what had previously been thought, many nineteenth century presidents did communicate with the American people about policy matters. Most of the presidents who went public from 1800 to 1860 used their own Washington-based newspapers as the main vehicles for their public communication efforts. However, while the use of presidential newspapers for policy communication purposes is now well-documented, the impact of those communications has been less well studied. One way of addressing this deficiency is to examine how opposition newspapers of the time reacted to the policy messages in presidential newspapers. This paper primarily analyzes the reaction of opposition newspapers to statements in the Washington Daily Union, the presidential newspaper of James Polk. Secondarily, the paper also examines statements made in the Daily Union about its presidential character. The findings further corroborate the conclusion that such presidentially-sponsored political newspapers were in fact understood as vehicles of popular presidential communication on national policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates over the dynamic processes of policy planning and budgeting have raged for decades. Proponents of the incremental approach have argued that policy changes tend to be small from year to year. Opponents of the incremental approach have contended that the incremental approach underestimates the importance of radical changes in policies. Recent models of policymaking have integrated the two approaches in to a punctuated equilibrium model in which policy processes experience long periods of stability followed by short periods of rapid, dramatic change. However, this research has been limited to demonstrations of the existence of the characteristic distribution of punctuated equilibrium processes. This paper seeks to advance the research on the dynamics of policymaking by introducing a multivariate approach to studying punctuated equilibrium policy processes. Using a large panel data set on budgetary decisions by educational organizations, this paper employs a multivariate punctuated equilibrium methodology to assess the impact of bureaucratization and district size on the relative frequency of large budgetary changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social welfare expenditures in Latin America tend to be more circumscribed than in other regions of the world, policies intended to govern the relationship between workers and the state are nonetheless central to national and local political dynamics. In the case of workers who might be considered "informal," such as street traders and microenterprise owners, government efforts to regulate small-scale commercial activities have generated persistent and intractable conflict in certain urban settings. This paper explores such efforts to govern street markets in Gamarra, Lima’s dynamic garment district. It examines two specific cases of policy failure in the district, and explores society-centered and state-centered sources of such failures. The paper argues that a lack of policy coherence at the national level contributes significantly to weak regulatory capacity at the local level. This weak regulatory capacity, in turn, feeds the types of conflict that are commonly understood to make the Peruvian capital "ungovernable." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of implementation have sometimes used principal-agent models to explain policy dynamics in the American federal system. Applications include studies of clean air enforcements (Wood, 1988, 1991, and 1992), education funding (Chubb, 1985), radioactive waste disposal (Hill and Weissert, 1995), and surface mining (Hedge, et al, 1991; Hedge and Scicchitano, 1994). In this paper I argue that principal-agent models offer a reasonable start for understanding certain aspects of policymaking and federalism, but they are necessarily limited for two general reasons. First, the measurement demands of these models tend to move scholars using principal-agent approaches to focus on policy outputs (the actions policymakers take) as opposed to policy outcomes (the substantive results of policy). All of the studies cited above specify dependent variables that are outputs, such as the size of government expenditures, the number of inspections, and counts of citations issued. Whether those activities resulted in cleaner air or more educated students, for example, is impossible to determine from the research. While that lack of information on outcomes is understandable given the studies’ designs, it is an important substantive gap, nevertheless, given that policymakers and citizens alike have become increasingly interested in measuring policy success based on outcomes. Scholars of public management have noted this trend as well (i.e., Kettl, 1997). Thus, it is important to develop more general ways of studying policy implementation and federalism that bring outcomes to the forefront. A second limitation is that the theoretical demands of principal-agent models (i.e., actors are well-defined, lines of authority are clear, and behaviors are clearly specified) can be difficult to meet in the American intergovernmental system where policymaking environments are quite complicated. This limitation is important given the increasing number of areas containing multiple principles and agents working to influence policy; the existence of networked, rather than purely hierarchical linkages between actors; and environments where actors can operate simultaneously as principals and agents. To overcome these two general limits, I integrate scholarship on federalism, public management, and organizations, in particular Wilson (1989), to develop a management-oriented approach to the study of intergovernmental policy implementation. I apply my approach to the early implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the main U.S. federal law addressing K-12 education, and contrast my approach with the principal-agent view. Key quantitative data come from the National Center for Education Statistics, and content coding of states’ progress in developing their educational accountability systems, which the states most recently reported to the U.S. Department of Education in June 2003. Qualitative evidence comes from several elite interviews conducted during 2001-02 with members of the education policy community in Washington, DC, and documentary sources reporting on federal, state, and local efforts to implement the No Child Left Behind Act. Overall, the paper is part of an ongoing research program that investigates the relationship between federalism, policy agenda setting and implementation, and K-12 education in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the functioning of the governing system of the United States by analyzing distributional outcomes from 1947-2000. The key question of this paper is whether public policy influences distributional outcomes. The macro politics model of the U.S. governing system (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002) and the power resources theory of welfare policy (Huber, Ragan, and Stephens 1993) suggest that left policies should equalize the distribution of income. I utilize single equation error correction models to assess the impact of policy on income inequality through two mechanisms ? the manipulation of economic opportunity and redistribution. Since nearly every government action influences economic opportunity, I examine policy in the aggregate rather than focusing only on policies explicitly designed to redistribute income. The analysis indicates that policy influences inequality through both mechanisms, with left policy producing more equality. The results are consistent with power resources theory and strongly support the macro politics model, by demonstrating that political choices are an important determinant of distributional outcomes. Furthermore, the manipulation of economic opportunity is as important as, and works in tandem with, explicit redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I would like to present a paper, entitled “Policy and Coalition Patterns in the Scottish Parliament,” at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. For the first time since 1707, Scotland convened its own parliament, completing its first four-year session in early May 2003. This three-century hiatus was triggered by the 1707 Act of Union, which dissolved the Scottish Parliament and provided for Scottish representation in the House of Commons. Nevertheless, periodic expressions of nationalism kept the prospect of a Scottish Parliament alive, and once the Blair government embraced the concept of devolution, both Scotland and Wales opted to establish new parliaments. While Scots generally extended their support for a new parliament, many were skeptical. Some Scottish Nationals consider devolution to be a distraction from the real goal of independence, while others see it as a first step toward independence. In addition, Conservatives were almost always the strongest opponents of devolution, not to mention independence. Some even wonder whether or not a parliament is even necessary. After all, Scots are British, and political interests are certainly well represented at Westminster. However, politics in Scotland differs from that in England in at least two major ways. First, the Scots structured their electoral system for choosing MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) in a manner that deviates considerably from the Westminster model. A little more than half of the MSPs are elected in constituency districts, while the remainder is decided on the basis of a variation of proportional representation. As a result, four major parties have substantial representation in Parliament, and, for that matter, three parties elected one member each. Second, the presence of the Scottish National Party has no counterpart in the House of Commons. Its platform and vision for the future of Scotland makes the SNP unique in British politics, and the fact that it is the second largest party means it is a force to be reckoned with. At present there is a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition government, but the Scottish National Party stands ready to form a government if the present one falls, underscoring the fact that the Conservative Party is not much of a player in Scottish politics. What I propose to do in this analysis is (1) to identify major policy dimensions underpinning the multitude of roll call votes cast during the first session of the Scottish Parliament, and (2) to map the political parties in ideological/policy space. I plan to employ a combination of factor analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis to achieve these two goals. I have constructed a database consisting of the roll call votes cast by each member of the Parliament, and will use that data set for the proposed analysis. As far as I know, I’m the only one with a clean data set of 1999-2003 Scottish roll call votes. In addition to uncovering dimensions of conflict and parliamentary voting coalitions, I shall discuss the implications of these findings for Scottish politics and government. I hope you find this paper suitable for one of your panels. Thank you for your careful consideration of my proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of international relations have examined systemic influences on domestic politics and the need to bridge the gap between international relations and comparative politics (Coleman and Perl 1999; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Caporaso 1997; Putnam 1988; Gourevitch 1978; Keohane and Nye 1977). One of the systemic influences on states? behavior is the establishment of regimes (Haggard and Simmons 1987; Krasner, 1983; Young 1983; Haas 1980). In the early 1960s, two major reports ? the 1962 report of the Royal College of Physicians in the United Kingdom and the 1964 Surgeon General?s report in the United States ? about the hazard of cigarette smoking had dramatic impact on domestic politics of the US and countries of the Commonwealth. Tobacco control has gradually bubbled up as international concern and on May 21, 2003, a convention known as the FCTC was unanimously adopted among 192 countries, bringing into being an international tobacco control regime. Adopting a neo-liberal ? constructivist perspective, this paper seeks to examine the evolution of the FCTC between 1993 and 2003 using event history and document analyses. The paper aims to explore two main issues: (1) what accounted for the emergence of the tobacco control regime? (2) What role(s) did non-governmental actors play in the emergence of the regime? Similar to Meyer et al. (1997), the paper finds the spread of norms and activities of non-governmental actors as critical in the emergence of the regime. These answers help us to better understand the contemporary global system and the behavior of states within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas it is widely accepted that a decentralized system can enhance policy learning and the spread of best practices, a yet under researched question is where that learning process takes place. What diffusion channels are important? This paper focuses on institutionalized intergovernmental cooperation and the role they play in the process of policy diffusion in federal states. It argues that such institutions provide a place where policy makers exchange their experiences with policy implementation and make up their opinion which policies are considered to be efficient and effective. .x000d.Using data on the diffusion of health care policies in Switzerland, the paper shows how the analysis of institutionalized intergovernemental cooperation contributes to deepen our understanding of the process of policy diffusion in federal states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands on the theory and research that focuses on innovation in government. In particular, it develops a theory based on models of Borins, Altshuler, Littman, Light and Rogers. The theory suggests that municipal governments need to develop specific managerial and policy structures if they are to create optimum conditions for innovaton. This construct is called Innovation Management Capacity (IMC). To test the theory, survey data has been collected from senior municipal administrators and city council members. We have data on frequency of innovations and their perceived effectinvees, and types of innovatons, ie., technical, managerial, economic, political and so forth. The data is already collected and is currently being analyzed. This paper is also based on a growing literature base. We feel the findings are very interesting and useful to students of local government, public administration, and public policy. Since not much empirical research has been done on governmental innovation, this research is breaking some new ground. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks how researchers can better measure and operationalize social norms as variables in theories of the policy process. As standards of appropriate behavior for a given identity, norms are a distinctive and powerful type of idea relevant to many public policy contexts, but have received relatively little attention among policy theorists. This omission may be partly due to methodological difficulties. Measuring the presence of norms in a given political setting through surveys or interviews can be challenging given the "taken for granted" nature of many norm-based beliefs (Elster 2007). Documenting the causal relationship between a norm and a particular policy choice can be even more challenging (Campbell 2004; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Yee 1996). This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of different methods for studying the political influence of norms, including interviews, surveys, experiments, content analysis, and QCA. The paper pays close attention to the challenge of distinguishing norm-driven behavior from behavior driven by self-interest, as well as the relationship between normative ideas and normative rhetoric (Finlayson 2004; Raymond and Olive 2009). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the impact on Congress of many types of collective action-demonstrations, lobbying, speeches, etc.-for 60 policy proposals on the congressional agenda 1989-90. For well over 30 years, researchers have systematically collected data on political activities from newspaper articles and estimated their impact on policy change. Most often the data have been on protest and its impact has been gauged for a single issue. This paper advances this research tradition in four ways. It (1) analyzes congressional action on a stratified random sample of 60 policy proposals; (2) uses data on all forms of political activity aimed at influencing congressional action on those proposals, as described in the press; (3) searches many publications in order to find data on as much political activity as possible; and (4) tests hypotheses about how much collective action there is likely to be, and about which types are especially likely to have an impact. There proves to be very little collective action; most of it is associated with a small number of proposals, while most proposals evoke little or none; the lack of collective action limits its impact. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State officials, concerned about women and children’s welfare, surround a community of Mormon polygamists intent on protecting families and the sensibilities of the community. The system, faced by an overwhelming number of women and children and by unfamiliar and confusing family ties, stumbles forward with prosecutions drawing national media attention. This is a familiar story to anyone who watched the raid unfold at the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas in 2008 but has actually repeated itself 3 times over the past 150 years. This paper looks at religiously motivated plural marriages within its midst as an ideal type to understand how the presence of religious polygamy has impacted or failed to impact policy in America. It provides an overview of the history of Mormon polygamy as a religious doctrine and proceeds to examine how America has responded to polygamy based on three fundamental issues: 1) the role of dissenting religions impact public policy, 2) the level of government addressing the policy issue, and 3) the role of government in protecting children, families, and free religious practice? The paper concludes with policy recommendations for responding to American polygamy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, increasing numbers of state governments have invested in programs focused on recruiting accomplished research scientists to a state’s major universities. This paper reports on an event-history analysis of the socioeconomic, political, and diffusion factors influencing state adoption of eminent scholars programs over the 1983-2006 period. The results suggest that among the factors prompting the initiation of such programs are low levels of private R&D employment and patenting activity, gross state product, the institutional powers of governors, the use of certain structural arrangements for governing higher education, and an absence of comparable programs in neighboring states. Interestingly, the results suggest that a state’s economic conditions interact with the state’s political arrangements to prompt innovation toward these policies. The paper builds on theory and research in the areas of American federalism, policy diffusion, and policy entrepreneurship in explaining these findings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1995 the EPA recognized that Superfund legislation was over-regulating small, lightly polluted urban sites. The liability provisions of Superfund and the requirement that the reclaimed property be cleaned up to the level of residential use discouraged potential developers and lenders. Over the next decade national, state, and local governments developed policies to correct this situation. This paper uses a multi-method approach to examine policymakers' goals and to evaluate the success of the inter-governmental approach to brownfield policies. The research site is Charlotte, NC, one of a small number of cities chosen by EPA for brownfield pilot projects. The paper tests whether brownfield policies fit the fiscal federalism framework of Peterson, and it studies the effects of brownfields and their cleanup of urban neighborhoods using a longitudinal database that includes measures of social, environmental, and economic variables at the neighborhood level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of the specific claim that the events of September 11th have transformed and/or is largely driving politics and policy within the major immigration-receiving countries this paper poses two related questions. First, has European public opinion objectively become more illiberal on immigration-related questions since September 11, 2001? Specifically, is it significantly less receptive to new immigration and/or less accommodating towards settled immigrants than previously? Second and more subjectively, are Europe's political elites under unusual pressure to align public policy with the preferences of an increasingly illiberal electorate? Are the parameters of immigration policy making in Europe in the post-September 11th era more circumscribed by public opinion than previously? In addressing these questions this paper pushes as far back as possible in the respective national public opinion records, with special attention paid to the pattern of British, French, and Spanish public attitudes before and after September 11. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research identifies sources of interpersonal trust in Latin America by exploring why the most developed countries in the Americas, namely Canada and the United States, show higher levels of interpersonal trust than their neighboring countries. The findings of this paper suggest that Latin America's high economic inequality poses a challenge to democracy because it triggers interpersonal mistrust. This paper also finds that in Latin America interpersonal trust, rather than civic participation, ideology or trust in government, promotes citizens' support for the implementation of public policies aimed to close the gap between rich and poor. Taken together, the results suggest a vicious circle between Latin America's historically high economic inequality, low interpersonal trust, and low support for redistributive policies within certain segments of the population, especially the well-off. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research at hand examines the impact of political trust on policy preferences among Latinos. More specifically the paper seeks to look at the role of political trust on support for health care reform. Findings suggest that political trust impacts Latino policy preferences, however not in the expected direction. Instead this research finds that political trust has a negative impact on support for health care reform. Results do suggests that political trust impact whites and Latinos differently, with trust having a positive impact among whites. Lastly, this paper finds that Hetherington's "sacrifice based" theory does not extend to Latinos, nor does the ideological sacrifice theory of Rudolph and Evans. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between government policy and public preferences is a core concern of democratic theorists. One particularly powerful method of relating policy to opinion is the 'dynamic representation' approach. Scholars in this tradition test to what extent current policy changes are a function of past public preferences. This paper derives hypotheses from the dynamic representation approach and tests them for the United Kingdom in a left-right context from 1976-2006. First, it is shown that government policy on the left-right scale changes as a consequence of changing public preferences (the direct mechanism of 'rational anticipation'). Second, a right-wing public results in the election of the Conservative Party, which consequently pursues right-wing policies in office (the indirect mechanism of 'electoral turnover'). Third, government responsiveness is found to be conditional on electoral vulnerability. Popular incumbents are less likely than unpopular incumbents to adjust their policy position to the public. While the Westminster system has received much criticism for its failure to reliably link rulers to the ruled, this paper finds that dynamic representation on the left-right scale in the United Kingdom functions quite admirably. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the journey of political parties in Nigeria so far through the murky and turbulent waters of politics. In doing this,the paper seeks to examine the impact of the party system,as practised in Nigeria, on the current political engineering taking place in the country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that governments matter. That a new government, particularly one of a different political party, will make substantial changes to the policies of the state they were elected to lead. The focus of this paper is on whether party affiliation matters in determining Canada's priorities and policies in its trade relationship with the United States (US). It will compare policy statements and performances of Liberal, Progressive Conservative, and Conservative governments from 1968 to the present and it will argue that party affiliation has had little impact on Canada's US trade policy over this period. The analysis will proceed in four parts. In the first part, the role of political parties in Canada will be outlined briefly. This will be followed by an overview of Canada's exports to the US. The third section of the paper will examine the economic priorities of Canadian governments concerning the US from 1968 to present as gleaned from major policy statements (e.g. white papers and speeches). The final part of the paper will set out some of the reasons why party affiliation has had little substantive impact on Canada's trade policy with the US over the last forty years. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the multiple sources of disequilibria?group, institutional, and individual?that account for the evolution of the coal policy subsystem over the course of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines efforts of American Indian tribes to influence state legislation affecting them. I find that tribes can win certain policy changes--even on contentious or unpopular issues--by cultivating their expertise about policy and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper wants to study how the PRC perceive the Taiwan Problem and explain how it made and implemented Taiwan policy incrementally from three perspectives(individual actors,domestic structures, and contextual constraints). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents competing models of state power that incorporate both hard and soft power, with the assertion that such a model more completely portrays the power of a state than a model that examines only one aspect of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I trace out the normative implications of the ecological footprint conception of environmental sustainability in comparison and contrast with those of carrying capacity, an alternative conception of sustainability which the footprint ought (or so I shall argue) to replace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why challengers are able to break down policy subsystems in one area but not another through a study of policy change in two areas of environmental policy: timber policy in national forests and grazing policy on public lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines institutional effects on the frequency of policy punctuations. It does so by using the theoretical framework of Baumgartner and Jones in a comparative study of Danish civil defense and Danish national home guard policy 1949-2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores motivations behind state interventions aimed at regime change and argues that these interventions, whose history extends well before the current war in Iraq, are best understood as demonstrations of state resolve and credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party politics in Europe has become more volatile. Parties require flexibility to respond to this volatility, but the EU constrains the behavior of parties. This paper examines how this contributes to the volatility of the European party space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking at changes in policy-making in Italy and France stimulated by proposals at the EU level, this paper examines various labor-market reform strategies to illustrate the effects of voluntary reforms in social policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using 2000 World Values Survey data from the U.S. and Mexico, this paper argues that contextual variables are more influential than policy preferences on environmental issues in explaining levels of civic engagement in environmental organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper address how the opinions and decision calculi of leaders impact a community's decision to pursue a policy innovation, in this case an economic development strategy centered around the siting of a state prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a comparative perspective, this paper investigates the reasoning behind the communication and mobilization strategies political actors in the field of agriculture use, at the national and the EU level, in order to promote their policy options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine empirically the impact of citizen participation on the evaluation of government policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion research continues to have difficulty distinguishing between moderate, ambivalent, and indifferent policy attitudes. Krosnick (1991) notes that the number of respondents who appear to have moderate policy preferences is likely inflated because midpoint responses do not distinguish between those with meaningful moderate preferences and those who are simply indifferent towards the policy. Others may choose the midpoint because they are ambivalent: torn between good arguments on both sides of the policy debate. Distributions of policy preferences generally show an uptick at the midpoint, likely due to amalgamation of moderate policy preferences, policy ambivalence, and simply indifference. Even when respondents refuse to indicate a policy preference, scholars sometimes override this refusal and place them at the midpoint anyway. I argue, however, that this “muddle in the middle” (Converse 1995) masks important differences between these attitude attributes. Those with a true moderate policy preference favor a middle of the road approach. They want a specific policy enacted and their preference may be weak or strong. For example, they may feel strongly that abortion should be legal, but only in some circumstances (a strong preference for a moderate policy). Those with ambivalent policy preferences are internally conflicted and see the validity of arguments both for and against a policy. Faced with the choice between falsely claiming that they “haven’t thought much about it,” picking sides, or straddling the fence, the select the latter. Indifferent attitudes are those that are simply not that important or relevant to the respondent. Indifferent respondents simply don’t know enough or care enough about the issue to state meaningful preferences. Some will readily admit that they haven’t thought about the issue, while others will place themselves at the midpoint to avoid perceived negative stigma attached to indifference. This paper attempts to disentangle moderate, ambivalent, and indifferent policy attitudes. The above discussion suggests that moderate preferences are likely just as informed and likely to affect other attitudes and behaviors as more extreme preferences. While ambivalent attitudes are unlikely to affect other attitudes and behaviors, they should nonetheless be informed attitudes. Indifferent attitudes are likely uninformed and unlikely to influence other attitudes and behaviors. There are several design features built into the 2000 NES that are particularly helpful for this task. First, the policy preferences are measured using both traditional seven-point scales and a series of branching questions. The former allow respondents to give moderate policy preferences while the latter do not (by narrowing the permissible policy preferences to four). The branching format also measures the strength of a binary policy preference, rather than measuring a more precise location on a policy preference continuum. Second, two versions of these questions are included for some policies: one that explicitly allows respondents to say that they “haven’t thought much about it” and another that doesn’t. The first version allows respondents to express indifference, while the second discourages doing so. This research provides important insights into the substantive meaning of policy preferences and carries implications for their proper measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project addresses a central question in the comparative study of democratic institutions: How do coalition governments, which are composed of multiple parties with often conflicting ideological goals, manage to make policy? Surprisingly, relatively few studies have examined this issue in a systematic cross-national fashion. Instead, most research on multiparty government has focused on the formation and termination of coalitions, largely neglecting the policymaking process between these events. In this study, we address this question by examining lawmaking in two European parliamentary democracies, Germany and the Netherlands. The theoretical model in the project focuses on a central principal-agent problem that coalition cabinets must solve if they are to govern successfully. Because expertise is needed to plan and implement public policy, governments in parliamentary democracies must delegate important policymaking powers to individual ministers who have control over relevant issue areas. In particular, cabinet ministers enjoy considerable autonomy in drafting government legislation within their jurisdiction. For coalition governments, such delegation creates the risk that ministers will use their autonomy to bias policy in favor of their own parties without adequately taking into account the interests of their coalition partners. The incentive to do so grows particularly strong on issues that greatly divide coalition members. The argument proposed here is that parliamentary oversight provides a key institutional mechanism that allows coalition parties to deal with this problem. While it is difficult to police ministers from within the cabinet, coalition members can make use of the legislative process to scrutinize and amend legislation introduced by hostile ministers. We contend that this mechanism is particularly important where the coalition is internally divided. If correct, this argument challenges the common perception that parliaments in Western Europe are largely irrelevant institutions. Legislatures may play a crucial role as an intra-coalition conflict management tool that allows parties with divergent preferences to govern jointly. To evaluate this argument empirically, we examine the relationship between the extent to which government bills are changed in the legislative process (as measured by the proportion of articles in the bill that are amended) and the policy divisions between coalition partners. We perform statistical analysis using original data on over 400 government bills introduced in Germany and the Netherlands from 1982 to 2002. This paper thus provides one of the first systematic attempts to examine the policy-making process within coalition governments and the vital role that parliaments may play in allowing parties with divergent preferences to govern jointly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper Proposal Policy makers and scholars alike are directing increased attention to water policy in the U. S. Questions of commercial, agricultural, and residential supply and demand of water, property rights, and pollution require analysis and solutions. Past analyses have dealt with specific issues with varying effectiveness, but little has been done to acknowledge the fundamental complexity of water policy in the U. S. At root, there is no single water policy. Instead, there are numerous water policies organized around the problem at hand and its geographic location. Government at all levels have jurisdiction over water--sometimes inclusive, sometimes shared, frequently conflicting. Moreover, water has become a transboundary issue, as subnational governments reach across international borders to define and solve problems. Useful analyses of water policy require first an understanding of the complexity of the different political dynamics of these issues. For scholars and practitioners alike, the first step should be to acknowledge and to understand that water involves several different policy types, located in different parts of government, and that looking for a single, overarching policy or political dynamic is likely to prove frustrating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite heady approval ratings in the wake of 9/11, the growing domestic criticism in response to Bush Administration policies on the Second Gulf War have belied the truism that presidential popularity rises after a successful military incursion. Internationally, continued opposition to US plans for rebuilding Iraq, rising ill will from Muslim nations, and the surge of terrorism within Iraq reveal that winning the war does not equate with winning the peace. In fact, we argue, the Bush Administration faces a set of public expectations, or paradoxes, that threaten its ability to maneuver politically and raise questions about Bush’s electoral chances in 2004. The paradoxes include the desire for a safe and controlled homeland but with freedom for all; war and military domination without casualties, expense, disruption, or long term timelines; vengeance against terrorists without transgressions against civil rights, instantaneous transformation of despotic societies into modern democracies, and certainty in an uncertain world. Unable to meet these expectations substantively, the Administration has pursued a propaganda (i.e. public relations and public diplomacy) strategy as a way to resolve opinion disjuncture and paradox at home and abroad. In place of the usual tools of foreign policy: building alliances, engaging allies in policy debate, conducting diplomacy, etc., the Bush Administration approach seeks to use symbols, arguments, and rhetoric to conduct foreign policy and thereby “win the peace.” This paper examines the Bush Administration’s approach to “winning the peace” by: (1) Illustrating how the current administration communication strategy corresponds to historical patterns described in propaganda scholarship (2) Discussing the paradoxical expectations that public relations and public diplomacy attempt to resolve based on a content analysis of world/national media coverage on the war and its aftermath, (3) Reviewing and assessing the debate over the use of public diplomacy to “fix” international opinion, also noting the strategies employed by other nations in what has become a global media battle (4) Providing an assessment of possible impacts of the Bush Administration propaganda strategy for both international and domestic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many policies or programs surrounding us today, from highway safety policies, innovation or science and technology policies to privatization policies or child wellbeing programs are implemented or reiterated without a sufficiently thorough and systematic analysis of their impact. Understandably, using comprehensive public policy analysis methodologies is not always a welcome or affordable option. However, in those instances when the use of such methods is sought, as well as in many other instances, two extremely powerful and yet not so often used methodological tools can be of tremendous value: time series based analyses and pragmatic eliminative induction enhanced quasiexperimental inquiry (QEI). The Quasi-experimental tradition underscores the importance of identifying and eliminating threats to validity from our analysis based on quasiexperimental settings. A very new and not so well known development in this tradition is the addition of context validation (elimination of context based threats to validity) to the four already traditional types of validations, respectively statistical conclusion validity, internal validity, external validity, and construct validity (Dunn 1997). This is done through pragmatic eliminative induction (PEI). PEI suggests a way to determine and test “an approximately complete set of rival hypotheses” (Dunn 1997) and not solely some rival hypotheses chosen most often because they are readily known or easily testable. Employing the methodology in our study is (1) scientifically more complete, and (2) likely to yield interesting insights that may not have been uncovered so far. In this paper, we offer a systematic description of the use of the pragmatic combination of these methods, their advantages and practical challenges to their application. We exemplify by briefly applying the combined methods to various policy analytical settings, such as assessing success of innovation or science and technology policies, forecasting or assessing success of implemented privatization policies, and assessing success of some Public Health programs. We also propose and test a small modification to the original (Dunn 1997) PEI technique for enhancing QEI based methodologies, likely to make the process more affordable and less time and resources intensive This study thus offers one of the first practical applications of the extremely new and thus seldom used PEI enhanced quasi-experimental method in scientific policy analysis. Combining PEI with the use of other policy impact analytical tools should empower policy analysts with a new powerful, quasi-complete and now relatively affordable tool in their methodological toolbox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the results of a soon to be published book titled LEARNING FROM DISASTER (Georgetown University Press). I argue that large, unexpected focusing events provide evidence of policy failure, and therefore lead to learning opportunities among citizens, journalists, and, in particular, elite policy makers. This learning will involve ways to better understand how policy tools work, ways of understanding the implicit causal stories told about disasters, and ways to harness the recent catastrophe to improve rhetorical appeals for policy change. The key case studies in this research are natural disasters (earthquakes and hurricanes) and aviation security events, the latter study being particularly relevant in the wake of the September 11 attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the paper I am proposing is to explore the role of political regimes in the causal process that generates the observed national differences regarding the accumulation of human capital. More concretely, I will focus on why developing countries continue to show different outcomes on their primary and secondary enrollment rates despite their level of per capita income. It is a well-documented fact that the level of economic development is a strong predictor of a nation’s educational profile. Yet after controlling for per capita income, there is still variation unexplained among developing countries. My aim is to include political economy factors into the explanation, in particular the type of regime, and provide theoretical mechanisms to explain how the interaction of economic and political forces brings about the observed educational patterns of countries. In this work, institutions are exogenous and distinguished by who controls decision power. In line with the standard political economy literature, conflicts over policies in democracy are resolved by majority voting. Provided that certain conditions concerning individual preferences are satisfied, the person who dictates policy is the median voter. In contrast to the conventional idea that all dictatorships are the same, I will separate them into two types: left-wing or populists regimes, and right-wing autocracies. It is assumed that left-wing dictatorships maximize the welfare of individuals who are poorer than the person with the median income, while right-wing dictatorships maximize the welfare of individuals who are wealthier than the mean income in economy. In order to test my hypotheses, I will use a pooled time-series cross-sectional sample that includes all developing countries and all annual observations for which comparable data on enrollment rates are available. Also, and because of the endogenous sampling of political regimes, I will use selection models in the estimation analysis to obtain unbiased statistical results [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focused on sensitivity over liberalizing emerging land markets to foreigners, this paper tells the story of how policies towards foreign land ownership developed in East-Central Europe in the 1990s. It also explains why foreign ownership can be a potential gold mine for nationalists. Mining the land issue ultimately strikes a deeper tension between foreign-driven pressures to liberalize land markets within a pan-European free market and the still-strong local belief that states should control land sales for the good of the nation. Poland receives in-depth treatment given land’s central position in the recent rise of nationalist right-wing parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is by now widely if still not quite universally accepted that political sophistication has important effects on many of the ways in which ordinary citizens relate to politics, and the variable has become a regular player in analyses of policy preferences, vote choice, and participation, among other things. There is also a still larger consensus that the best way to measure sophistication is through knowledge, using either straightforwardly factual items or placements of parties or political figures on policy or ideological scales. Willy-nilly, every study deploying such a measure has made a variety of nuts-and-bolts decisions in constructing it. Yet, despite some recent attention to the treatment of don’t-know (DK) responses, the issues behind these decisions remain surprisingly little examined. What exactly makes for the best knowledge based measurement? This paper considers the merits of different types of knowledge items and different ways of doing them up. Are placement- or fact-based items superior? What kinds of placements are best, what kinds of facts? What about the choice of absolute versus relative placements? Viz., are the Republican and Democratic placements on a liberal-conservative scale two distinct items, requiring that the Democrats be placed left of center and the Republicans right of center, or do they boil down to a single item, requiring only that the Democrats be placed to the left of the Republicans? How to treat placements at the midpoint (for absolute measures) or at the same point (for relative ones)? Are they correct or incorrect? Does it help to gauge degrees of correctness, rather than simply scoring items as right or wrong? We give special attention to the treatment of DKs and, relatedly, incorrect answers. Should the former be randomly assigned to response categories, as Mondak suggests? Should the latter be subject to a correction for guessing? We consider these questions by examining the correlations with six criterion variables; a mix of alternative measures, causes, and consequences; and the results from a regression model of the sort popularized by Bartels, where sophistication is the key conditioning variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominant theory explaining the creation of the postwar American active labor market policy holds that it was created by two bangs or eras: a brief period under the Employment Act of 1946 and a more prolonged one in the 1960’s with passage of the Area Development Act and the Manpower Development and Training Act. The literature on Active labor market Policy saw an extended fallow period between 1946 and 1961. Previous evaluations of American labor market policies assessed those policies as sporadic and underfunded and of limited success. These evaluations utilized a narrow definition of labor market policies instead of utilizing one covering a broader array of governmental interventions. We analyze the activities of this so called fallow period by looking at those federal legislative acts of public investment , i.e. the G.I. Bill of 1944, the Housing Acts of 1949 - 61, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and the Health Professions Educational Assistance Act of 1963; and those federal governmental activities that indirectly affected the labor market through subsidies of health care, dormitory construction, etc. Using this expansive interpretation, a definition which comports with European Active Labor Market Policy definitions as in Sweden and Germany, the paper finds that federal labor market policies were more substantial than the literature details and was characterized more by continuity than by two bangs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

this paper I generate a model explaining the factors driving the diffusion of policy ideas and policy innovations across states through direct citizen initiatives. I explore the strength of advocacy networks and the framing of policy ideas to understand why certain innovations diffuse more rapidly through initiatives than others. I argue that the speed of an idea?s diffusion depends both on the resources available to the policy network sponsoring an initiative campaign, and the ability of the policy frame to expand the coalition of interests supporting the innovation. The research model is illustrated by looking to initiatives that diffused across states in four different issue areas; Term Limits, Informed Ballot Notations, Medical Marijuana, and Animal Trapping. I argue that each of these issues represents a distinct pattern of policy diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If states form military alliances purposively and endure costs in order to achieve the benefits of policy coordination, how can we understand state decisions to terminate existing alliance relationships? What factors account for these major changes in foreign policy? In this paper, we build an argument that links changes in specific factors within and outside the member states to the decision to abandon sunk costs and terminate a cooperative relationship. We also recognize that alliances end in different ways? some end because their purposes have been achieved, some end because they are replaced by new agreements, and some end through opportunistic abrogation or violation of key provisions. We identify features of the member states and of the design of alliances that account for variance in the ways that alliances end. We evaluate our argument empirically on a sample of bilateral alliances formed between 1815 and 1989 and find support for our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze an environment with incomplete information in which an interest group ideologically matches: the interest group’s resources are employed solely to aid the electoral prospects of politicians that are believed to share the group’s policy preference. We identify conditions under which ideological matching can induce an incumbent to select policies that differ from those selected in the group’s absence. Key to this result is the uncertainty of the interest group as to the incumbent’s policy preference. In equilibrium, there is an inverse relationship between the magnitude of the interest group’s donation to the incumbent and the probability the incumbent selects the group’s preferred policy. You can download the paper at: http://troi.cc.rochester.edu/~foxj/ideological.pdf [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]