The Issue Politics of Policy Innovation.

The emergence of prison sitings as highly coveted rural development projects sheds light on the literatures of community decision-making, issue definition and policy innovation. We interviewed a cross-section of political elites from eleven counties in North Carolina about prison sitings in their communities during the period 1990-2002. These counties were all potential host counties for a state prison during that period. The data base contains approximately 40 surveys. We will be testing a hypothesis that puts issue definition at the center of policy innovation: to the extent that there is consensus that a prison siting will bring jobs to the county, the leaders are likely to accept it. As a part of our research design, we also examined the diffusion effect by gathering data on presence of sites in counties surrounding the referent country and on the interaction between political leaders from the referent and surrounding counties. Until recently, community leaders defined prisons as a NIMBY and resisted sitings in their counties. In other words, the prison was not among the various options in the community leaders’ “solution set” (Jones and Bachelor). The changing debate over whether to accept prison siting as a form of economic development is a process of issue definition (Rochefort and Cobb). The prison issue qua issue can have plural positive and negative definitions: jobs, clean jobs, recession-proof jobs, risk from break-outs, a cause of increased crime, a drain on sewage and water capacity, or a cause of an influx of “unsavory” immigrants. It should be noted that in North Carolina, the community must ante up the cost of the land and the cost of running sewage and water to the facility, so it is a significant community investment. We documented the process of issue definition through public debate with elite interviews as well as reviews of local media archives to account for their framing of the issue. We found that to the extent there is a consensus in the community that prison equals jobs and the negative issues do not dominate the debate, the leaders are likely to accept the prison siting. Our study controls for a number of rival explanations that would lead to a higher probability of siting: 1) structural economic factors based on relative wealth, 2) the critical event hypothesis accounting for recent jolts to county economies, and 3) the demographic susceptibility of groups poorly positioned to lobby against a NIMBY. We augmented the quantitative analysis with a qualitative review of the elite surveys to examine the diffusion effect of elite interactions between the referent county and surrounding counties. Our results will gauge the effect of policy borrowing (Rose) and of the diffusion of innovation (Walker, Gray, Berry and Berry). The results of our research will illuminate the process by which the community leaders debated prison siting and will reveal systematic factors associated with a community accepting a prison. This paper will lay the groundwork for a general account of the role of issue definition in policy innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]