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We explore the annual number of death sentences imposed on black and white offenders within each US state from 1989 through 2017, with particular attention to the impact of aggregate levels of racial resentment. Controlling for general ideological conservatism, homicides, population size, violent crime, institutional and partisan factors, and the inertial nature of death sentencing behavior, we find that racial hostility translates directly into more death sentences, particularly for black offenders. Racial resentment itself reflects each state's history of racial strife; we show powerful indirect effects of a history of lynching and of racial population shares. These effects are mediated through contemporaneous levels of racial resentment. Our findings raise serious questions about the appropriateness of the ultimate punishment, as they show its deep historical and contemporary connection to white racial hostility toward blacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial disparities in traffic stop outcomes are widespread and well documented. Less well understood is how racial disparities may be amplified or muted in different contexts. Here we focus on one such situational factor: whether the initial traffic stop was related to a traffic safety violation or a (broadly defined) investigatory purpose. This is a salient contextual characteristic as stop type relates to different levels of assumed discretion and purpose. While all traffic stops involve some officer discretion, investigatory stops are more easily used as justifications to conduct a search based on an officer's diffuse suspicion; traffic safety stops are more often just what they seem. Using millions of traffic stops from several states, we show that black male drivers are more likely to be searched and less likely to be found with contraband and that this relationship is amplified where the initial stop purpose is investigatory. One implication of this is that one path to alleviating disparities in traffic stops for agencies is emphasizing traffic safety, rather than using stops as a supplemental investigatory tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Law enforcement traffic stops are one of the most common entryways to the US justice system. Conventional frameworks suggest traffic stops promote public safety by reducing dangerous driving practices and non-vehicular crime with little to no collateral damage to individuals and communities. Critical frameworks interrogate these assumptions, identifying significant individual and community harms that disparately impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and low-income communities. Methods: The Public Health Critical Race Praxis (PHCRP) and multi-level frameworks from community anti-racist training were combined into a structured diagram to guide intervention and research teams in contrasting conventional and critical perspectives on traffic stops. The diagram divides law enforcement and drivers/residents as two separate agent types that interact during traffic stops. These two agent types have different conventional and critical histories, priorities, and perspectives at multiple levels, including individual, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural levels. Conventional solutions (identifying explicitly racist officers, "meet-a-cop" programs, police interaction training for drivers) are born from conventional frameworks (rewarding crime prevention regardless of cost, the war on drugs saves lives, driver behavior perfectionism). While conventional perspectives focus on individual and interpersonal levels, critical perspectives more deeply acknowledge dynamics at institutional and cultural levels. Critical solutions may be hard to discover without critical frameworks, including that law enforcement creates measurable collateral damage and disparate social control effects; neighborhood patrol priorities can be set without community self-determination or accountability and may trump individual and interpersonal dynamics; and the war on drugs is highly racialized and disproportionally enforced through traffic stop programs. Conclusions: Traffic stop enforcement and crash prevention programs that do not deeply and critically consider these dynamics at multiple levels, not just law enforcement-driver interactions at the individual and interpersonal levels, may be at increased risk of propagating histories of BIPOC discrimination. In contrast, public health and transportation researchers and practitioners engaged in crash and injury prevention strategies that employ law enforcement should critically consider disparate history and impacts of law enforcement in BIPOC communities. PHCRP, anti-racism frameworks, and the included diagram may assist them in organizing critical thinking about research studies, interventions, and impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. policymakers adopted draconian criminal justice polices including widespread use of extremely long sentences, including life without parole. The country is now coming to face the consequences of these policies: a new class of geriatric prisoners posing little threat to public safety as they age into their seventies and beyond. Using a perspective drawn from bounded rationality, framing, and agenda-setting, we recount how policymakers adopted these policies, with key blind spots relating to obvious consequences of these harsh laws. We show how political leaders can over-respond to a perceived public policy crisis, particularly when powerful frames of race, fear, and dehumanization come to dominate the public discourse. We show how these trends are radically changing the demographics and needs of prison populations through a chronological review, mathematical simulation of the prison population, review of statistics about prison population, and personal stories illustrating these themes drawn from inside prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Policy Studies Journal is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Policy Studies Journal is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Evidence that racial minorities are targeted for searches during police traffic stops is widespread, but observed differences in outcomes following a traffic stop between white drivers and people of color could potentially be due to factors correlated with driver race. Using a unique dataset recording over 5 million traffic stops from 90 municipal police departments, we control for and evaluate alternative explanations for why a driver may be searched. These include: (1) the context of the stop itself, (2) the characteristics of the police department including the race of the police chief, and (3) demographic and racial composition of the municipality within which the stop occurs. We find that the driver's race remains a robust predictor: black male drivers are consistently subjected to more intensive police scrutiny than white drivers. Additionally, we find that all drivers are less likely to be subject to highly discretionary searches if the police chief is black. Together, these findings indicate that race matters in multiple and varied ways for policing outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of RAP: Revista Brasileira de Administração Pública is the property of RAP: Revista Brasileira de Administracao Publica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We demonstrate strong self-referential effects in county-level data concerning use of the death penalty. We first show event-dependency using a repeated-event model. Higher numbers of previous events reduce the expected time delay before the next event. Second, we use a cross-sectional time-series approach to model the number of death sentences imposed in a given county in a given year. This model shows that the cumulative number of death sentences previously imposed in the same county is a strong predictor of the number imposed in a given year. Results raise troubling substantive implications: The number of death sentences in a given county in a given year is better predicted by that county's previous experience in imposing death than by the number of homicides. This explains the previously observed fact that a large share of death sentences come from a small number of counties and documents the self-referential aspects of use the death penalty. A death sentencing system based on racial dynamics and then amplified by self-referential dynamics is inconsistent with equal protection of the law, but this describes the United States system well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Law enforcement traffic stops are one of the most common entryways to the US justice system. Conventional frameworks suggest traffic stops promote public safety by reducing dangerous driving practices and non-vehicular crime. Law enforcement agencies have wide latitude in enforcement, including prioritization of stop types: (1) safety (e.g. moving violation) stops, (2) investigatory stops, or (3) economic (regulatory and equipment) stops. In order to prevent traffic crash fatalities and reduce racial disparities, the police department of Fayetteville, North Carolina significantly re-prioritized safety stops. Methods: Annual traffic stop, motor vehicle crash, and crime data from 2002 to 2016 were combined to examine intervention (2013–2016) effects. Fayetteville was compared against synthetic control agencies built from 8 similar North Carolina agencies by weighted matching on pre-intervention period trends and comparison against post-intervention trends. Results: On average over the intervention period as compared to synthetic controls, Fayetteville increased both the number of safety stops + 121% (95% confidence interval + 17%, + 318%) and the relative proportion of safety stops (+ 47%). Traffic crash and injury outcomes were reduced, including traffic fatalities − 28% (− 64%, + 43%), injurious crashes − 23% (− 49%, + 16%), and total crashes − 13% (− 48%, + 21%). Disparity measures were reduced, including Black percent of traffic stops − 7% (− 9%, − 5%) and Black vs. White traffic stop rate ratio − 21% (− 29%, − 13%). In contrast to the Ferguson Effect hypothesis, the relative de-prioritization of investigatory stops was not associated with an increase in non-traffic crime outcomes, which were reduced or unchanged, including index crimes − 10% (− 25%, + 8%) and violent crimes − 2% (− 33%, + 43%). Confidence intervals were estimated using a different technique and, given small samples, may be asymmetrical. Conclusions: The re-prioritization of traffic stop types by law enforcement agencies may have positive public health consequences both for motor vehicle injury and racial disparity outcomes while having little impact on non-traffic crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1976, the United States has seen over 1,400 judicial executions, and these have been highly concentrated in only a few states and counties. The number of executions across counties appears to fit a stretched distribution. These distributions are typically reflective of self-reinforcing processes where the probability of observing an event increases for each previous event. To examine these processes, we employ two-pronged empirical strategy. First, we utilize bootstrapped Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests to determine whether the pattern of executions reflect a stretched distribution, and confirm that they do. Second, we test for event-dependence using the Conditional Frailty Model. Our tests estimate the monthly hazard of an execution in a given county, accounting for the number of previous executions, homicides, poverty, and population demographics. Controlling for other factors, we find that the number of prior executions in a county increases the probability of the next execution and accelerates its timing. Once a jurisdiction goes down a given path, the path becomes self-reinforcing, causing the counties to separate out into those never executing (the vast majority of counties) and those which use the punishment frequently. This finding is of great legal and normative concern, and ultimately, may not be consistent with the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare patterns of change in budgetary commitments by countries during periods of democracy and authoritarianism. Previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on democratic governments, finding evidence of punctuated equilibria. Authoritarian regimes may behave differently, both because they may operate with fewer institutional barriers to choice and because they have fewer incentives to gather and respond to policy-relevant information coming from civil society. By analysing public budgeting in Brazil, Turkey, Malta and Russia before and after their transitions from or to democracy, we can test punctuated equilibrium theory under a variety of governing conditions. Our goal is to advance the understanding of the causes of budgetary instability by leveraging contextual circumstances to push the theory beyond democracies and assess its broader applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The budgeting literature has long focused on 'institutional friction' as a cause of ubiquitous punctuated equilibrium (PE) findings. A recent wave of scholarship looks to identify specific institutional mechanisms that affect the number of punctuations in policy outputs. We contribute to this growing body of research by focusing on the complexity of the institutional environment surrounding a policy area as well as that of the government as a whole. These factors have opposite effects: the more complex a policy area, the greater the likelihood of extreme spending changes. But, higher institutional capacity in general leads to greater stability. To test these ideas, we develop a novel index of budgetary change that balances the conceptual importance of extreme changes while analyzing the entire distribution of budget changes, not only the tails. In addition, we also demonstrate that findings are robust to a number of important distinctions, such as between series associated with slowly moving demographic trends or quickly moving stochastic events. We, therefore, demonstrate the robustness of important findings from the established literature, add a new measure of the dependent variable, and push the literature forward with a new focus on issue complexity and institutional capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on some of the steps made toward the development of an integrated literature about comparative public policy, particularly related to studies of the policy process. Topics mentioned include the development of an integrated intellectual community throughout national borders, the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), and the differences that affect the comparative public policy.

A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single-party governments compared to those with multiple-party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black male victims comprise 61 percent of homicide victims in present day Louisiana, yet their killers have been executed in only three cases out of 12,949 homicides since Gregg v. Georgia reinstated the death penalty in 1976. This is less than 6 percent of the execution rate for killers of all other victims, and 1/48th the execution rate for the killers of white women. A thorough analysis of Louisiana's homicides and a complete review of its history of executions, using FBI statistics and the Espy File of national executions, reveals that the ultimate punishment has long been reserved for crimes other than killing black men. New here is the compilation and analysis of a complete database of all 241 Louisiana post-Gregg death verdict cases, including their 316 victims. In these cases, 80 percent of the victims are people other than black males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since political scientists were introduced to the concept of ‘the scope and bias of the pressure system’ by Schattschneider more than half a century ago, we have grappled with the lack of a standard against which to assess bias. Still, scholars have continued to address Schattschneider's provocative claim. This means that they must have in their minds at least implicit images of the unknown state of an unbiased interest system. We uncover these implicit images in this analysis both for their own intrinsic interest and perhaps as a foundation for more progressive research on biases in interest representation. Ten scholars who have done considerable work on the politics of interest representation were asked to provide a brief description of what he or she would see as an unbiased interest system. After presenting each, we summarize the themes that emerged and discuss possible avenues for empirical research on bias. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Spain has a highly partisan media system, with newspapers reaching self-selected partisan audiences and espousing explicitly partisan editorial preferences. Do the newspapers of the left and right differ in how they cover politics in ways that can be predicted by their partisan leanings? We review theories of issue ownership, journalistic standards, and information scarcity and test hypotheses derived from each. We find that the parties converge substantially in virtually every aspect of their coverage. Few differences emerge when we look at what topics are covered or in the dynamics of which topics gain attention over time. However, we confirm important differences across the papers when they make explicit reference to individual political parties. Journalistic norms result in a surprising focus on the faults of one’s enemies, however, rather than the virtues of one’s allies. Our assessment is based on a comprehensive database of all front-page stories in El País and El Mundo, Spain’s largest daily newspapers, from 1996 through 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Does the president have the ability to set the congressional agenda? Agenda setting is a prerequisite for influence, so this is an important element in understanding presidential-legislative relations. We focus on the State of the Union address and show that popular presidents can, indeed, cause Congress to shift attention to those topics most emphasized. The impact is tempered by divided government and time, however. No matter the state of divided government, however, popular presidents can direct congressional attention, at least for a little while. Unpopular presidents, by contrast, are irrelevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important demonstrations of power in Washington is the ability to recruit sitting government officials to become active proponents of one’s position. Many have suggested money is the key: Campaign contributions buy friends, access, and perhaps even policy activism. We provide an alternative view based on a deceptively simple observation: Lobbyists rarely lobby alone. We show empirically that government policymakers respond to the overall structure of conflict, not the resources of individual lobbying groups. Our project is based on in-depth interviews with over 300 policy advocates and systematic information on each of more than 2,000 advocates playing a significant role in a random sample of 98 policy issues in the United States federal government from 1999 to 2002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore budget data from twenty-nine Western countries from 1948 to 2012 to investigate the impact of partisan control of government on spending patterns. We use a variety of empirical methods, but the central element of analysis is to code spending allocations as “consistent” or “inconsistent” based on the partisanship of the majority party in government. Looking across the board, we show that inconsistent allocations occur at almost exactly the same rate as consistent ones. The implication is that budgets are best understood not as an expression of partisan priorities but as a reaction to changing contextual circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Which European universities and research centres are most prominent in research on European Union (EU) interest groups? What are the theoretical perspectives employed currently in this scholarship? What research designs do scholars employ to study and investigate EU interest groups? And finally, what are the academic works that constitute the core building blocks on which researchers of EU lobbying build their theoretical arguments and empirical research? We answer these questions by analysing an original, built-for-purpose dataset providing information on the theoretical approaches, research designs and bibliographic references employed in 196 academic articles published on the topic of EU lobbying and interest groups in 22 European and American journals of political science and public policy. The dataset also contains information about authors' academic affiliation and Ph.D.-awarding institutions. We combine two approaches employed in the literature on systematic analyses of a discipline: the research synthesis and meta-analysis approach, and the bibliometric approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'divided government' is more complicated than scholars have allowed. In the USA, truly unified government, where the president enjoys a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate as well as a majority in the House, is rare. In France, truly unified government has been more common, but divided government has also occurred several times. Democratic governance requires that parties address important issues and they do so regardless of the patterns of institutional control. Nevertheless, policy changes or important laws are affected by the higher level of institutional friction associated with divided government. Looking at both the USA and France, we find that periods of unified government show higher levels of production of important laws in the USA, but we find no difference for overall legislative productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring media attention to politically relevant topics is of interest to a broad array of political science and communications scholars. We provide a practical guide for the construction, validation, and evaluation of time series measures of media attention. We review the extant literature on the coherence of the media agenda, which provides evidence in support ofandevidence against the emergence of a single, national news agenda. Drawing expectations from this literature, we show the conditions under which a single national news agenda is likely to be present and where it is likely to be absent. We create 90 different keyword searches covering a wide range of topics and gather counts of stories per month from 12 national and regional media sources with data going back to 1980 where possible. We show using factor analysis wide variance in the strength of the first factor. We then estimate a regression model to predict this value. The results show the conditions under which any national source will produce time series results consistent with any other. Key independent variables are the average number of stories, the variance in stories per month, and the presence of any “spike” in the data series. Our large-scale empirical assessment should provide guidance to scholars assessing the quality of time series data on media coverage of issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A review of the article "Reassessing the concept of policy paradigm: aligning ontology and methodology in policy studies" by Pierre-Marc Daigneault, which is in this issue, is presented.

Peter Hall's 1993 article came at the same time as a parallel body of literature was developing, some building explicitly, some only implicitly, on similar ideas. I review some literature on policy communities, ideas, and the nature of policy change before exploring the statistical distribution of budget changes at three levels of aggregation. The similarity of these results suggests that a single process may be at work rather than different processes for first-, second-, and third-order change, as Hall's original formulation has it. As Hall suggests, these processes typically generate only marginal adjustments but occasionally create fundamental change. The degree of discredit to the status quo may be an important unexplored variable in explaining the ability of policy reformers to enact marginal, substantial, or fundamental policy changes. In sum, this article shows the similarities and mutual value of Hall's approach with others that would appear to be starkly contrasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain's newspapers are characterised by strong partisan identities. We demonstrate that the two leading newspapers nonetheless show powerful similarities in the topics of their coverage over time. The media system is strongly related to the policy process and it shows similar levels of skew (attention focuses on just a few topics) and friction (attention lurches rapidly from topic to topic) as others have shown for policy processes more generally. Further, media attention is significantly related to parliamentary activities. Oral questions in parliament track closely with media attention over time. Our assessment is based on a comprehensive database of all front-page stories (over 95,000 stories) in El País and El Mundo, Spain's largest daily newspapers, and all 7,446 oral questions from 1996 to 2009. The paper shows that explanations of friction and skew in governmental activities should incorporate media dynamics as well. Political leaders are clearly sensitive to media salience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public policy toward the poor has shifted from an initial optimism during the War on Poverty to an ever-increasing pessimism. Media discussion of poverty has shifted from arguments that focus on the structural causes of poverty or the social costs of having large numbers of poor to portrayals of the poor as cheaters and chiselers and of welfare programs doing more harm than good. As the frames have shifted, policies have followed. We demonstrate these trends with new indicators of the depth of poverty, the generosity of the government response, and media framing of the poor for the period of 1960-2008. We present a simple statistical model that explains poverty spending by the severity of the problem, gross domestic product, and media coverage. We then create a new measure of the relative generosity of U.S. government policy toward the poor and show that it is highly related to the content of newspaper stories. The portrayal of the poor as either deserving or lazy drives public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science , Frank Baumgartner and Beth Leech characterized a series of problems in the interest group research published between 1950 and 1995. In this article, we assess whether recent research has become more theoretically coherent, more attentive to context, and broader in both scope and topical focus, all of which are crucial to advancing the systematic study of interest groups and their policy-making activities. Overall, we observe more large-scale and longitudinal studies between 1996 and 2011 than Baumgartner & Leech observed between 1950 and 1995. This newer literature also is much more likely to focus on key issues for students of politics, and to give attention to the context in which organizations operate to affect public policy. However, we see minimal evidence that scholars addressing similar questions within the subfield are operating from one or a few shared theoretical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the Policy Study Journal's special issue on punctuated equilibrium, we provide an overview of the approach, how it evolved, some of the major critiques directed at it, and some of the major developments it has spawned. We argue that the most important aspect of a theory or framework is not whether it is right or wrong, but the extent to which it is fruitful; that is, the extent to which it stimulated further research. Finally, we review the articles in this issue and put them in context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major new understandings of policy change are emerging from a program to measure attention to policies across nations using the same instrument. Participants in this special issue have created new indicators of government activities in 11 countries over several decades. Each database is comprehensive in that it includes information about every activity of its type (e.g., laws, bills, parliamentary questions, prime ministerial speeches) for the time period covered, typically several decades. These databases are linked by a common policy topic classification system, which allows new types of analyses of public policy dynamics over time. The authors introduce the theoretical and practical questions addressed in the volume, explain the nature of the work completed, and suggest some of the ways that this new infrastructure may allow new types of comparative analyses of public policy, institutions, and outcomes. In particular, the authors challenge political scientists to incorporate policy variability into their analyses and to move far beyond the search for partisan and electoral explanations of policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors show that the number of lobbyists active in a given issue area is driven not only by social mobilizations and economic trends but also by government activity. The effect of government spending is smaller than that of congressional interest as reflected in the number of hearings. Much lobbying is in response to regulations, not budgets. The authors augment their analysis by considering indicators of presidential activities. In areas where the president is traditionally active, presidential activity is shown to divert lobbying away from Congress, reducing overall lobbying levels. The authors find strong support for the congressional demand model of lobbying. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Do patterns of policy attention at the state level influence agenda setting in Washington over the short term? We examine this question by first developing a series of hypotheses about such linkages. We test these conjectures with a data set pooling measures of policy attention at the national and state levels for several years and several policy areas. We find little evidence that changes in state policy agendas in the aggregate influence national patterns of policy attention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]