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The Clean Water State Revolving fund (CWSRF) program provides states with significant discretion to design, implement, and administer the program to meet their water quality needs. An important aspect of the program is the decision whether to leverage existing funds to generate additional capital for loans. This article seeks to explain the leveraging decision process, using three models as explanators. We conceive leveraging as a two-stage process--(1) the decision to leverage and (2) the decision of how much to leverage. By employing regression techniques, we find that the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) stated reasons for leveraging--environmental needs and demand for loans--are not significant in the decision to leverage, although needs are significant at the second stage. Likewise, there is limited support for Lester's (1994) 'capacity/commitment' model of environmental implementation. A third model employing a larger range of independent variables is the best predictor of both the decision to leverage and the amount of leveraging. Furthermore, the factors important at each stage of the decision process differ substantially, reinforcing our conception of a two-stage decision process., Introduction Much of the recent discussion of the redefinition of federalism, and concomitant changes in environmental policy implementation, is predicated on the assumption that states possess the resources to assume [...]

This study builds an interactive, quantitative model to explain U.S. foreign aid allocations. We develop an explanation based on Kingdon's multiple streams model to argue that aid decisions are the result of trade ties, socialist orientation, human needs, and the political ideologies of the administ ration and the senate interacting with adjustments to baseline funding. We find that there are significant conditional relationships between economic and security-related assistance and our external and domestic variables with external variables generally being more important. The findings have implications for the study of public policy, the future of the foreign aid program, and theoretical attempts to develop more generalizable explanations of policy that encompass foreign and domestic issues., John Kingdon's (1995) work on multiple streams has emerged as a major theoretical breakthrough in the study of public policy (Sabatier, 1999). Despite high accolades, however, few analysts have attempted [...]

This study examines the relationship between U.S. economic assistance and military allocations in 84 states that received such aid during the period 1977-84. The fungibility of U.S. economic aid in general, and disaggregated by program, for military purposes is evaluated. Economic aids is found to have a differential effect on recipient states' military allocations depending on the cateogy of aid, but U.S. economic aid does not exercise a primary influence on those allocations.

Review the book `United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Aid,' by Vernon W. Ruttan.