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The objective of this study was to analyze the trends in publications on intrathecal baclofen (ITB) therapy. We searched Elsevier's Scopus database in February 2022 to find articles focused on ITB therapy. Data extracted included citation count, publication year, author's country and income category, journal and its 5-year impact factor, research type, disease requiring ITB, and target population. The analysis covered 615 articles from 1985 to 2022. The average citation count per article was 27.47 (95% confidence interval 23.75–31.18) and the mean impact factor was 4.54 (95% confidence interval 3.84–5.24). The majority (76.42%) were primary research, with 8.1% being interventional and 91.9% observational. Even so, one half of the top ten most cited were interventional. Secondary research and case reports made up 12.68% and 10.73% respectively, with narrative reviews making up most of the secondary research (79.48%). Only 1 study conducted a meta-analysis. The United States was the most prolific country. High-income countries published 96.42% of articles. The rising number of ITB articles and citations indicates growing interest and expanding knowledge in this field. However, there's a notable scarcity of research from low- and middle-income countries, particularly those with high prevalence of ITB-treatable diseases. The need for more evidence to overcome potential barriers to ITB implementation is emphasized. Despite an increasing number of publications, a large proportion presented low levels of evidence, such as case reports and narrative reviews, highlighting the need for more rigorous research methods to solidify the evidence base for ITB therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that regulatory trust is established and maintained through a relationship between stakeholders and the government, with the former group of organizations and individuals relying on their understanding of this relationship. Federal administrative law in the United States makes the expectations about the regulatory environment on which stakeholders rely more meaningful by granting stakeholders the right to bring actions in court when their expectations are being (or seem likely to be) dashed. To make this argument, I begin with the threshold question of how courts serve as a forum for voicing claims of distrust in regulatory regimes. I then consider the importance of political accountability over regulatory decision making, illustrating the concerns about the structure of agencies that regulate consumer and housing finance. Next, I will discuss a second major challenge to trust that arises from the extent to which the authority of regulatory agencies is circumscribed by legislation. Along the way, I draw on the case law presented to argue that problems of trust in financial regulation center on the reliance interests of stakeholders. Finally, the argument suggests a research agenda into trust as a reliance interest that I sketch in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laws such as 0.08 blood alcohol content, open container, and license revocation provide a policy framework for reducing drinking and driving. Drinking and driving behavior is difficult to assess; unlike property and violent crimes, where incidence statistics can approximate behavior, most drink-driving trips go undetected. The authors develop a novel measure of drink-driving propensity by estimating an item response model using national survey data. The authors illustrate their measures in the aggregate and as they relate to law enforcement efforts in the American states. (Contains 4 tables, 4 figures and 8 notes.)

Although Congress often uses grants and other fiscal incentives when delegating policy to the states, it also incorporates nonfiscal arrangements, or joint partnerships, into legislation. These partnerships include joint state-federal oversight boards, intergovernmental task forces, as well as other nondistributive programs and services. We examine the conditions under which Congress chooses to increase joint partnerships in a formal model of intergovernmental delegation and test the implications of the model on federal laws from 1973 to 2010. We argue with evidence that Congress may rely on collaborative nonfiscal partnerships with states and localities when technical uncertainty increases but is less likely to do so when political uncertainty rises. Our theory extends existing models of delegation to provide an important step toward a broader theory of legislatively designed collaborative governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congress packages pork‐barrel spending in complicated proposals that belie theories of distributive politics. We theorize that roll‐call voting on such bills depends on grant programs' administrative centralization, party ties with presidents or home‐state governors, and differences in geographic representation between chambers. Analyzing votes between 1973 and 2010 using a within‐legislator strategy reveals that House members are less likely to support decentralized spending when they are copartisans with presidents, while senators support decentralization regardless of such party ties. When House members or senators share affiliation with only governors or with neither chief executive, the likelihood of support rises with decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public management researchers are interested in many characteristics of organizations that cannot be directly captured, making aggregated attitudes from surveys an attractive proxy. Yet difficulties in measuring meaningful attributes over time and across organizations have frequently limited statistical designs to a single organization or time. We offer a method for creating such statistical measures across agencies and time using item response theory. Focusing our attention on US federal administrative agencies, we marshal a variety of questions from surveys commissioned by the Office of Personnel Management and Merit Systems Protection Board and employ statistical models to measure three important attributes--autonomy, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation--for 71 agencies between 1998-2010. Our study provides a wealth of data for quantitative public management research designs as well as an adaptable framework for measuring a wide range of concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government agencies service interest groups, advocate policies, provide advice to elected officials, and create and implement public policy. Scholars have advanced theories to explain the role of agencies in American politics, but efforts to test these theories are hampered by the inability to systematically measure agency preferences. We present a method for measuring agency ideology that yields ideal point estimates of individual bureaucrats and agencies that are directly comparable with those of other political actors. These estimates produce insights into the nature of the bureaucratic state and provide traction on a host of questions about American politics. We discuss what these estimates reveal about the political environment of bureaucracy and their potential for testing theories of political institutions. We demonstrate their utility by testing key propositions from Gailmard and Patty's (2007) influential model of political control and endogenous expertise development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federalist Nos. 41-43 provide a unified justification for the powers granted to the national government by posing a series of questions about the four classes of responsibilities, such as declaring war. This essay examines the role of polarization in limiting the coordination of powers needed for effective administration and uses ideology estimates for four states to illustrate the difficulties embedded in shared power between national and state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the president's relationship to Congress has been carefully studied, the broader executive branch has received far less attention in that context. Scholars rely on assumptions about the relationship between the president and cabinet departments that remain untested. We construct the first statistical portrait of executive branch ideology by estimating ideal points for members of Congress, presidents, and the heads of cabinet-level departments between 1991 and 2004 in a Bayesian framework. We empirically assess claims about the composition of the president's administrative team and the influence of institutions on the ideology of principal executive decision makers. We also test an important claim regarding the trade-off between ideological congruence and budgetary authority to demonstrate the utility of our estimates for other scholars. Our analysis reveals a new picture of the executive branch as ideologically diverse, casting into doubt some essential assumptions in a substantial body of work on the separation of powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in district boundaries in small magnitude electoral systems can have substantive consequences for representation. In the U.S., each decennial redistricting cycle infuses House districts with a large number of new voters, changing personal representation for many citizens. What effect does the influx of these new voters exert on member behavior? By assessing the extent of this change in constituencies in conjunction with member voting behavior on roll calls, we can determine if significant changes to a congressional district impact post-redistricting legislative behavior. Using panel data estimators and various measures of legislator behavior, we show evidence that supports this claim. Our findings have notable implications for debates over representation and electoral accountability in legislative assemblies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Historians of the U.S. Congress often draw claims from interpretations of legislators’ rhetoric and the outcomes of key votes. In this article, the author tells a cautionary tale: Such strategies ignore the correspondence between roll-call voting on select issues and broader coalitional structures in Congress. He does so by examining contrary positions about a key issue during the New Deal: On the one hand, some researchers claim that reasoned congressional deliberation on the issue of administrative oversight was separate from the prevailing legislative concerns of the day. Other scholars, on the other hand, assert that the prevailing issue dimensions in Congress included administrative oversight. Using a Bayesian measurement method, Ordinary Least Squares, and probit regression, and a novel selection of roll-call data, the author tested these claims, concluding that broader coalitional structures subsumed issues of administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have focused attention toward congressional influence over distributive grant allocations, but they have less frequently examined the extent to which administrative agencies play a role in that process. We present a new theory of ideology-contingent executive decision making within a multiple-principals framework to explain the geographic distribution of policy benefits. Our theory is novel in that it locates interbranch ideological conflict and confluence at the center of bureaus' allocational strategies. Discretionary Department of Labor (DOL) grants and Department of Defense (DOD) contracts from 1991 to 2002 are examined to provide evidence that agencies deliver more grants to senators with proximate ideologies. To measure bureaucratic ideology, we generate comparable ideology estimates for cabinet secretaries, presidents, and members of the U.S. Senate via an item-response model. Our findings suggest that ideological congruence between senators and DOL or DOD is associated with significantly larger amounts of grants or contracts, respectively. These findings are important as they recast our understanding of distributive politics into ideological terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All U.S. states have laws designed to discourage people from drinking and driving, but enforcement varies across the states. Existing studies offer conflicting evidence on the effectiveness of these strategies in deterring drinking-and-driving behavior. Deterrence theories imply that the mere existence of such laws has little impact on criminal behavior, but the perception of enforcement and the probability of being detected have a deterrent effect. To test these hypotheses, we develop a measure of the propensity to drink and drive using item response theory and national survey data. Inferential models test the impact of perceptions of enforcement, actual enforcement levels, and deterrence laws on criminal propensity. Results indicate that the existence of statutes impacts only those least likely to drink and drive, while perceptions of the likelihood of arrest and individual agreement with the goals of drinking and driving laws significantly reduce the propensity for almost everyone. Actual enforcement rates display no behavioral effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biokinetic models are the scientific underpinning of internal dosimetry and depend, ultimately, for their scientific validation on comparisons with human bioassay data. Three significant plutonium/americium bioassay databases, known to the authors, are described: (1) Sellafield, (2) Los Alamos and (3) the United States Transuranium Registry. A case is made for a uniform standard for database format, and the XML standard is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cabinet secretaries represent their departments when testifying before Congress on a broad range of legislation. Do they also represent the president's views on such legislation? Consistent with institutional theories of the presidency, we posit that, in some instances, cabinet secretaries take public positions contrary to those of the president, suggesting ideological distinctions between presidents and their appointed secretaries. We examine all congressional testimonies of secretaries of labor, commerce, and agriculture from 1991 to 2002, coding their positions taken on legislation considered on the floor of the Senate. Though these public disagreements are infrequent, our evidence suggests that agreement is more likely as support for the president's position among oversight committee members increases, yet less likely as secretaries’ tenure in office increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs a novel statistical strategy to examine the determinants of turnover intention in government service. To appropriately measure a main determinant of turnover intention--functional preferences--I estimate an ordinal item response model using data from the Federal Human Capital Survey. The sample is selected to facilitate an important comparison: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has undergone significant performance-based pay reforms for supervisors, but not for nonsupervisors, whereas the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), also a subunit of the U.S. Treasury, has not. Inferential models of turnover intention reveal among other things that functional and friendship solidary preferences are important determinants of turnover intention, but increased accountability is associated with greater turnover among subordinates. IRS supervisors, who face paybanding, are significantly less likely to consider leaving than their counterparts in the OCC, who do not face such incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pay-for-performance reforms create "high-powered" incentives for civil servants to meet or exceed specified performance objectives as measured by such things as customer satisfaction. Economists and social psychologists have advanced the claim that high-powered incentives for performance may empirically lessen the effect of civil servants' intrinsic motivation toward achieving agency goals (motivation can be "crowded out"). Nonetheless, well-designed pay-for-performance incentives may "crowd in" intrinsic motivation. A number of federal agencies and subagencies have undergone personnel management reforms that raise the specter of this pattern of "motivation crowding." Does it happen? Is intrinsic motivation crowded in or crowded out? This paper employs item response theory to create measurement models for the estimation a latent trait of intrinsic motivation for employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) using data from the 2002 Federal Human Capital Survey. The IRS, but not the OCC, implemented a paybanding system that imposed high-powered performance incentives on supervisors, but not an non-supervisory personnel. Results suggest that the IRS reward structure crowded in intrinsic motivation at the lowest levels, but that at the highest levels of motivation intrinsic motivation is crowded out, a pattern not seen in the OCC data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural reform litigation involves legal action against public bureaucracies alleging that an official has violated the legal rights of an agency's client. A pattern of rights infringements raises the specter of systemic dysfunction. If the court finds for the plaintiffs, or if the defendant agency agrees to settle, the remedy reconstitutes agency operations. What are the incentives faced by public managers whose agencies are involved in structural reform litigation? How might public managers retain public accountability while strategically using the institutional arrangements present in such cases? This article examines these questions through a spatial bargaining model and discusses its analytical implications in the context of a comprehensive suit against the child welfare agency in Kansas City, Missouri. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of managerial responsibility is a shining thread in the literature of public administration, but its definition within our constitutional scheme remains elusive. How will we know responsible public management when we see it? We propose one answer: Public administration should be conducted according to what we term a ‘precept of managerial responsibility,’ which involves four interrelated elements derived from the classical literature of public administration: judgment, accountability, balance, and rationality. We apply this precept to one of the most vexing problems of public administration theory and practice, institutional reform litigation. This application illustrates how the precept solves a major theoretical problem of American public administration by defining a role for administrative officers that fully comports with the Madisonian scheme of separated institutions‘legislative, executive, and judicial’sharing power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To evaluate publication trends in nonobstetric brachial plexus injury research. In September 2020, Scopus was searched for articles on nonobstretric brachial plexus injury. Citation count, year of publication, country of corresponding author and its income category, destiny journal and its 5-year impact factor (IF), and research type were retrieved. The analysis comprised 1245 articles. Mean number of citations per article was 18.01 (95% confidence interval 16.46–19.55). Mean IF was 3.60 (95% confidence interval 3.25–3.95). The 5 most prolific journals had an IF <5. The journal with the highest number of articles was the Journal of Hand Surgery (American Volume) (n = 70, 5.6%). The most prolific country was the United States (n = 313, 25.1%). There were 913 articles (73.3%) from high-income countries, 246 (19.8%) from upper middle–income countries, and 68 (5.5%) from lower middle–income countries. No articles were from low-income countries. The representation of middle-income countries increased from 2.1% of published articles in 1980–1989 to 40.0% in 2010–2019. Primary research represented 64.0% (n = 797) of articles, while secondary research and case reports represented 13.0% (n = 162) and 23.0% (n = 286) of articles, respectively. Narrative reviews (n = 142, 11.4%;) and systematic reviews (n = 20, 1.6%) comprised articles from the secondary research group. While high-income countries still represent the majority of publications, the contribution of researchers from middle-income countries is increasing. The most common destiny journals are field specific, with a relatively low IF. Although most articles are primary research, a representative portion have a shallow level of evidence (case reports and narrative reviews). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the state of the defense industry in the United States. Military budget cuts; Military spending policies; Economic conversions; Problems and politics of defense downsizing; Nuclear testing moratoriums; Transformation partnerships.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on the determinants of immigrant policy in the 50 U.S. states between 2005 and 2011, another on the activities of lobbyists and a report on the impact of the opposition over crime policy in Denmark.