Shifting Winds: Explaining Variation in State Policies to Promote Small‐Scale Wind Energy

States have increasingly taken leading roles in U.S. environmental policymaking over the past two decades. As laboratories of democracy, states have developed different levels and mixes of policies to address climate change, nonpoint source pollution, alternative energy, and other challenging environmental issues. Policy scholars have sought to explain variation in state environmental policy through two primary theoretical lenses: internal determinants and regional diffusion. While our understanding of state environmental policy adoption has grown to identify which variables are most important, less is known about how these variables interact in particular states to influence policy adoption. This study examines the interactions of variables from both theories to explain how state policies for small‐scale wind energy promotion were adopted in three U.S. states. Our results highlight the nuanced role of citizen ideology, which may be important in contexts at either end of the ideological spectrum but less important in the middle—where economic development is more critical. Results also indicate that interstate competition may be over environmental as well as economic leadership. Interestingly, strength of the wind resource is not necessarily correlated with policy adoption for small‐scale wind energy promotion.     

Defiant Innovation: The Adoption of Medical Marijuana Laws in the American States

Diffusion research often characterizes the role of the federal government in innovation adoption as a supportive one, either increasing the likelihood of adoption or its speed. We examine the adoption of medical marijuana laws (MMLs) from 1996 to 2014 to shed light on what motivates states to adopt innovations that are in explicit defiance of federal law. Furthermore, we examine whether federal signals have any influence on the likelihood of adoption. In doing so, we utilize implementation theory to expand our understanding of how the federal government's position impacts state policy innovation adoption. We find mixed evidence for the influence of federal signals on the adoption of MMLs. The results suggest that medical marijuana policies are much more likely to be adopted in states when proponents have the political or institutional capital, rather than a medical or fiscal need. Moreover, this political capital is sufficient independent of the federal government's real or perceived position.     

Moves and Countermoves: Countermovement Diffusion of State Constitutional Amendments

Policy diffusion literature generally studies the adoption of similar policies across jurisdictions, but often overlooks how opposing policies or legal constraints may influence the enactment of rigid state constitutional amendments. The current study models the spread of state constitutional amendments designed to prevent future policy change. Using conditional event history analysis on all states from 1999 to 2011 the empirical models analyze the spread of same‐sex marriage prohibitive amendments across the United States. Findings suggest that the nearby adoption of opposing policies encourage state legislatures to introduce prohibitive amendments. The regional diffusion effect suggests that policymakers “protect” their jurisdiction from nearby diffusion forces or seek electoral gains by symbolic protection by committing an already existing policy into the rigid state constitutional framework. Regional policy diffusion may, therefore, be explained by a countermovement mechanism unique to the state constitutional amendment process. This protective strategy among state legislatures and citizens may explain why many policy areas are frequently codified in state constitutions.     

Laying Down the Law? Interest Group Influence on State Adoption of Animal Cruelty Felony Laws

Since the late 1960s, the number and types of organized interest groups working at the state level have increased dramatically, but research shows that traditional organized interest groups, such as business and labor unions, are still the most influential in state policymaking ( Thomas and Hrebenar 1996 ). Less is known, however, about the influence of non‐economically focused interest groups in the state policy process. Using pooled cross‐sectional data from the American states, I explore the effect that nontraditional organized interests can have on state policy. Specifically, I examine the influence of the Humane Society of the United States on state adoption of animal cruelty felony laws. Although the Humane Society is not one of the traditional groups expected to have a significant influence in state policymaking, my results suggest that it has played a significant role. However, I also find that the Humane Society's influence on the stringency of these laws is less pronounced.     

The Public Policy Process among Southeastern States: Elaborating Theories of Regional Adoption and Hold‐Out Behavior

Having been adopted by legislatures in over a dozen states, postsecondary merit aid programs are largely concentrated in the southeastern United States. The observed clustering pattern seems to support previous evidence that policies spread between proximate states, a phenomenon referred to by political scientists as policy diffusion. Often, however, policy diffusion is not complete, and one or more states in a region fail to adopt. By interviewing policymakers throughout the southeastern United States—including actors in the three states in the region without merit aid—the study addresses the following question: Why do diffusion pressures lead to adoption in some states but not in others? Studying state “hold‐outs” promises not only to uncover the reasons for failed legislation in specific state contexts but also to better our understanding of the limits of diffusion theory.     

Voluntary Approaches to Environmental Problems: Exploring the Rise of Nontraditional Public Policy

Government reliance on voluntary programs represents a significant shift in public policy: moving from command and control regulations to market based mechanisms. This article explores the determinants of Voluntary Remediation Programs (VRPs) in the American States. During the 1980s and 1990s, 44 states adopted VRPs to facilitate remediation of existing hazardous waste sites. Relying on diffusion of innovation theory, I develop a model of state policy adoption that explores the influence of internal state political and economic factors, as well as testing the influence of regional and top‐down diffusion forces. I utilize a discrete‐time event history approach to test this model. The results indicate that state policymaking is responsive to interest group pressure and the pace of cleanup at hazardous waste sites. Additionally, state policymaking is consistently influenced by the actions of surrounding state governments; the probability of adopting a voluntary program increases if surrounding states have already developed these policies.     

Introduction: film policy in a globalised cultural economy

This special issue on ‘Film Policy in a Globalised Cultural Economy’ is devoted to the changing economic and technological context in which filmmaking occurs, the policy responses that these changes have generated and their consequences for the pursuit of cultural objectives. The issue offers discussions of the general economic, technological and political shifts shaping the global film industry as well as case-studies examining the specific policies adopted by different states. While these indicate how governments have been obliged to respond to the economic and technological changes wrought by globalisation they also highlight the variations in approach to film policy and the continuation of tensions between economic and cultural, and public and private, objectives.     

A community out of balance: nationality law and migration politics in the history of post-unification Italy

Italian government policies concerning foreign immigration have to be understood in the context of laws on nationality. Since the time of unification, Italian laws on nationality have been closely determined by policies on emigration and immigration. As a result, the laws regarding the nationality status of Italian emigrants returning from abroad, and for foreign immigrants in Italy, have on the whole been determined by the procedures adopted for the acquisition or deprivation of Italian nationality. This is a subject that has not been studied and this article reconstructs the principal stages in the development of Italian nationality laws from the early twentieth century to the present. This reveals that Italian nationality law treats Italian emigrants and foreign immigrants in very different ways. Both the legal system and government policy has in the past been extremely generous towards the former and has made both the preservation and the reacquisition of nationality relatively easy for Italian nationals, even before there were practical motives for this (e.g. the right for Italians living overseas to vote). When it comes to foreign immigrants, however, Italian law is amongst the most restrictive in western Europe. The article concludes by arguing that this underlying imbalance is a major but largely ignored weakness in Italian democracy.     

SPID: A New Database for Inferring Public Policy Innovativeness and Diffusion Networks

Despite its rich tradition, there are key limitations to researchers' ability to make generalizable inferences about state policy innovation and diffusion. This paper introduces new data and methods to move from empirical analyses of single policies to the analysis of comprehensive populations of policies and rigorously inferred diffusion networks. We have gathered policy adoption data appropriate for estimating policy innovativeness and tracing diffusion ties in a targeted manner (e.g., by policy domain, time period, or policy type) and extended the development of methods necessary to accurately and efficiently infer those ties. Our state policy innovation and diffusion (SPID) database includes 728 different policies coded by topic area. We provide an overview of this new dataset and illustrate two key uses: (i) static and dynamic innovativeness measures and (ii) latent diffusion networks that capture common pathways of diffusion between states across policies. The scope of the data allows us to compare patterns in both across policy topic areas. We conclude that these new resources will enable researchers to empirically investigate classes of questions that were difficult or impossible to study previously, but whose roots go back to the origins of the political science policy innovation and diffusion literature.     

The Limited Effects of Federal Environmental Justice Policy on State Enforcement

The federal government adopted several measures during the mid-1990s to address concerns about race-based and class-based disparities in environmental protection. This article examines whether these measures affected the pattern of state enforcement of three federal pollution control laws. Using differences-in-differences models to estimate the effects of the federal policy adoption, I find evidence of increases in state enforcement of the Clean Air Act in large African-American communities, but declines in enforcement in communities with large poor and Hispanic populations. Similarly, there is evidence that state enforcement of the Clean Water Act decreased in poor and African-American communities, but there were no real changes in enforcement of facilities regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Collectively, the analysis suggests that the federal policy had minimal positive effects on state regulatory enforcement.     

Social Networks and Policy Entrepreneurship: How Relationships Shape Municipal Decision Making about High‐Volume Hydraulic Fracturing

Well‐resourced and well‐connected individuals, or “policy entrepreneurs,” often play an important role in advocating and securing the adoption of policies. There is a striking lack of inquiry into the ways that social networks shape the ability of these actors to achieve their aims, including the ways in which network ties may channel policy conflict. To address these gaps, we analyze data from an original survey and an original database of policies to assess the success of policy entrepreneurs (PEs) active in a highly contentious arena: municipal policymaking concerning high‐volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) in New York. We use text‐mining to collect social network data from local newspaper archives, then use those data to construct municipal HVHF policy networks. Municipal anti‐HVHF PEs appear more successful when they operate in less cohesive networks, act as bridges to relative newcomers to the governance network, and have a larger number of network connections. Pro‐HVHF PEs appear more successful when they can forge high‐value connections to key decision makers. Policy entrepreneurs on both sides of the issue are more successful when they have a greater number of sympathetic coalition partners.     

Vested Interests and the Diffusion of Education Reform across the States

How do interest groups shape the diffusion of policies they oppose across the states? This study explores this question using the case of teachers' unions and education reform policies. Using a novel dataset on charter, voucher, and performance pay policies spanning 1992–2013, I find evidence that strength of the teachers' unions decreases the likelihood of performance pay and that additional strength is less impactful with more Democratic control of the legislature. Teachers' unions are weakly related to a lack of charter laws and do not impact voucher laws. The latter two policies are more strongly associated with policymaker learning and education reform advocacy groups, respectively. These findings suggest that vested interests most strongly impact the policies that most fundamentally threaten their organizational strength and that this effect is conditioned on the party in power; increases in interest group strength are not necessary when policymakers are already sympathetic.     

Compared to What? Changes in Interest Group Resources and the Proposal and Adoption of State Teacher Policy

What is the relationship between changes in interest group resources and the proposal and adoption of state policy? Using a dataset of proposed and enacted teacher policies across five legislative cycles in all 50 states and measures of interest group relative and absolute resource strength, I estimate a series of within-state fixed effects models that gain identification from changes in interest group resources and teacher policy over time. I find that legislatures propose more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies toward teachers' unions in states where teachers' union opposition interest groups are expending more election (but not lobbying) resources over time. Further, I find that more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies are adopted in states where teachers' union opposition groups are growing in election resource strength. Expanding on prior empirical work, this study suggests that interest group resources matter for policy change and highlights the importance of capturing interest group resource dynamics over time.     

Renewable Energy Politics: Policy Typologies,Policy Tools,and State Deployment of Renewables

This paper investigates the competing forces driving the development of renewable energy in the American states. We formulate a framework of state renewable energy politics and develop a set of hypotheses regarding the role of politics, policies, and prices in renewable energy development. We test these hypotheses with a fixed effect vector decomposition model using a panel data set for the U.S. states from 1990 to 2008. The results indicate that renewable energy development is influenced by regulatory institutions, the party affiliations of the governor and legislators, and the professionalism of the legislature, accompanied by the effects of various policy instruments.     

Laboratories of (In)equality? Redistributive Policy and Income Inequality in the American States

Prior literature has emphasized demographic, economic, and political explanations for increasing income inequality in the United States, with little attention paid to the role of state‐level policy. This is despite great variation across states in both the level of inequality and the rate at which it is rising. This paper asks whether differences in state policy choices can help explain this variation; specifically, we examined a range of state redistributive policies enacted between 1980 and 2005 and identified four common approaches likely to impact inequality: taxes on the wealthy, taxes on the poor, spending on the poor, and labor market policies. We used pooled cross‐sectional time‐series data and a fixed‐effects model to assess the relationship between states’ use of each policy approach and two measures of market income inequality: the Gini coefficient and the income share of the top 1 percent. We find policies played a significant role in shaping income inequality in the states. For three of these four policy approaches, we found less inequality following expansions of state redistributive policy. Yet, for another, we identified the opposite pattern. These findings highlight the importance of state policy choices in shaping market inequality, and have implications for designing state policies to reduce income inequality since the success of these efforts depends on the policy approach used to redistribute income and wealth.     

Ethnic return migration and the nation‐state: encouraging the diaspora to return ‘home’

ABSTRACT. Countries of immigration are generally faced with a dilemma: they wish to accept immigrants for economic purposes, but also to restrict immigration for ethnonational reasons. This is especially true in ethnic nation‐states, where immigration is seen as a threat to ethnonational unity more than in civic nation‐states. However, in recent decades, various ethnic nation‐states have adopted immigration policies that have encouraged their diasporic descendants born and raised abroad to return to their ethnic homeland. Ethnic return migration apparently solves the immigration dilemma by providing ethnic nation‐states with a much‐needed unskilled labour force without causing ethnonational disruption because the immigrants are co‐ethnic descendants. After comparing ethnic return migration policies in European and East Asian countries, this article analyses the development of such policies in Japan and their eventual failure to solve the country's immigration dilemma. As a result, Japan (and other ethnic nation‐states) have imposed restrictions on ethnic return migration.     

Motivations for Voluntary Environmental Management

This article examines the motivations for firms to participate in voluntary environmental programs and to adopt environmental management practices using data gathered from a survey conducted in 2005 of facilities located in Oregon operating in six industrial sectors. It is one of the first studies of voluntary environmental management to include small‐, medium‐, and large‐sized facilities as well as to include both privately and publicly owned facilities. In particular, we examine the effects of both external factors such as regulatory, consumer, and investor pressures, and internal factors such as technical and resource capacity, in influencing voluntary environmental behavior. The intent is to describe potential influences that have implications for designing and implementing private and public policies that foster effective voluntary environmental management by firms. We find that larger facilities are more likely to participate in more voluntary environmental programs, but are likely to adopt more environmental management practices only if environmental issues are of significant concern to them. Presence of an R&D department stimulates the adoption of more environmental management practices, particularly if environmental issues are of significant concern to the facility, but does not have a statistically significant impact on participation in voluntary programs. We also find that while regulatory pressures are significant in motivating participation in voluntary programs and adoption of environmental management practices, competitive pressures are only important in motivating the former. Pressure from final good consumers or from investors in publicly traded facilities is not found to have a significant influence on voluntary environmental behavior of facilities in this study.     

"Colorblind" Policy in Black and White: Racial Consequences of Disenfranchisement Policy

Disenfranchisement policies were formulated with discriminatory intent in several states ( Behrens, Uggen, and Manza 2003 ; Mauer 2001 ; Preuhs 2001 ). Does such discrimination persist? Do disenfranchisement laws disparately impact black voters? I argue that disenfranchisement policies target black citizens and impact black voters disparately compared with white voters. I show that disenfranchisement laws have a disparate impact on the black community that becomes increasingly disproportionate as disenfranchisement laws increase in severity. I find that disenfranchisement policies have a significant independent effect on voting rights in the black community and do not have a similar effect on white voters. I conclude that the ability of the black community to achieve adequate representation is substantially diminished as fewer and fewer blacks qualify for voter registration.     

Geographies of generation: age restrictions in international adoption

International adoption relocates minors, and only minors, from one country to another. The centrality of age to adoptive migration may prevent us from seeing the significance of generation: the prospective parent's age is also examined and evaluated for its relationship to the child's age and what this relationship will mean for the creation of a family. Because international adoption results in children crossing borders to enter new kinship formations, the assumptions under which it operates require closer geographical analysis. Generation, or the age range that separates dependents and their caretakers, is a significant but unstated motivator of international adoption policies and practices. This article argues that a normative and biologized sense of intergenerational difference is embedded in international adoption. The presence of generational ideology in national laws and international norms regarding international adoption demonstrate a broader sense in which policies situate more privileged families as acceptable and others as inadequate. I draw material for this analysis from both legal documents and documents which aim to provide interpretation of those laws, with reference to international adoptions from Peru.     

Latinos and Environmental Justice: Examining the Link between Degenerative Policy,Political Representation,and Environmental Policy Implementation

The theory of social construction and policy design is insightful for exploring the circumstances in which the allocation of policy benefits and burdens is attributed to the feed‐forward effect of degenerative policy that institutionalizes bias and reinforces the prevailing categorization and embedded social meaning regarding target populations. However, this theoretical framework has not been broadly adopted to analyze the environment‐related phenomena. With a nationwide, block‐group‐level sample, this study examines the extent to which degenerative policies pertaining to immigrants influence state agencies' environmental regulatory outputs for predominantly Latino communities. Results show that in the states with moderately to most restrictive immigrant policy and high levels of Latino representation in legislatures, the rigorousness of government agencies' compliance monitoring activities decreases for Latino neighborhoods of environmental justice concern, as states' policy stance toward immigrants becomes more unfavorable. More Latino elected officials do not bolster policy implementation efforts for the vulnerable communities or offset the backlash effect of immigrant policy.