Policy Characteristics,Patterns of Politics,and the Minimum Wage: Toward a Typology of Redistributive Policies

The central hypothesis of all policy typologies is that distinctively different patterns of politics can be identified for different types of public policy issues. Lowi identified three different policy types, which he termed distributive, regulative, and redistributive, each of which triggers a distinctively different pattern of political behavior. Unfortunately, Lowi's categories were inductively derived and ambiguously defined, leading to disagreements over how to categorize particular policies. Hayes built on Lowi's seminal effort, deriving Lowi's three policy categories from two underlying dimensions and identifying additional categories Lowi's original formulation had missed. Using the minimum wage issue as an example, this article will identify a critical deficiency in both these typologies. While Hayes' typology defines the boundaries between policy categories more precisely than Lowi's, neither typology is equipped to deal with variations in political patterns occurring within a particular cell. As this article will show, the minimum wage issue, although consistently redistributive in Hayes' terms, has manifested three very different patterns of politics at different points in time. Accordingly, a typology of redistributive policies will be advanced to account for these variations in the redistributive politics of the minimum wage.     

Private Conflict and Policy Passage: Interest-Group Conflict and State Medical Malpractice Reform

James Madison argued in Federalist 10 that "rival political factions" work against the public good. In contrast to Madison's pessimistic account, I suggest that factional conflict can lead to more representative public policy, and thus further the will of the people. I theorize that elected officials often seek a safe political position—one that corresponds to the preferences of the public at large—during periods of high conflict. I assess this theory in one, salient policy area, medical malpractice. I measure conflict with contributions for state candidates given by (i) the health and insurance industries, which generally support malpractice laws, and (ii) lawyers, who frequently oppose the laws. I find that group conflict matters to policy outcomes. I also find evidence that, under conditions of elevated conflict, adopted policies are more likely to move toward the general ideological preferences of the public at large. These results suggest that group conflict affects both the quantity and character of policy in the American states.     

Are Debates about “Morality Policy” Really about Morality? Framing Opposition to Gay and Lesbian Rights

A growing number of studies identify “morality policy” as a distinct category of public policy and have tested several related hypotheses. This article reexamines morality policy as a conceptual category and an empirical phenomenon. As others have pointed out, we should distinguish morality policy from other policies by how political actors frame issues rather than by its substantive content. In the first part of the article, I argue that we should view morality “policy” as one of two broad strategies for framing issues, rather than try to fit it into existing policy typologies. Next, I move beyond viewing morality policy as a single, broad category by identifying several distinct subtypes of morality frames. In the second part of the article, I challenge a basic assumption of the morality policy paradigm—that advocates frame morality policy issues by engaging in moralistic discourse that reflects their basic beliefs and values. Gay rights issues are a strong test of this claim because the literature cites them as typical examples of morality policy, and gay rights opponents would seem especially likely to engage in “morality talk” in framing these issues. Very few studies of morality policy actually observe framing behavior and what it reveals about the political strategy of each side. Congressional and state‐level data reveal that opponents usually do not frame gay rights issues in terms of the morality of homosexuality or religious injunctions against it, even in most states where we would expect to find it. Instead, they emphasize frames that focus on alleged negative social consequences from gay rights and procedural arguments about who should make policy and how it should be made. Although many opponents of gay rights disapprove of homosexuality on moral and religious grounds, their framing behavior reflects more complex strategic considerations. I speculate that opponents deemphasize morality talk because it is politically disadvantageous compared with other kinds of frames, and because of greater acceptance of gays in society. In reducing gay rights debates to moral and religious judgments, the morality policy perspective obscures the complexity of advocates' framing strategies and ignores many of their most important arguments.     

Is State Gambling Policy “Morality Policy”? Framing Debates Over State Lotteries

The politics of so‐called “morality policies” including same‐sex marriage, abortion, gun control, and gambling have captured the attention of both the public and political scientists in recent years. Many studies have argued that morality policy constitutes a category of public policy that has distinctive characteristics (such as technical simplicity and less amenability to compromise) compared with non‐morality policy. However, in a recent contribution Mucciaroni argues that morality “policy” should instead be viewed primarily as a strategy for framing issues. Drawing on examples from the debate over gay rights, Mucciaroni finds that opponents focus on rational‐instrumental or procedural frames more so than engaging in “morality talk.” In this study, I seek to extend Mucciaroni's analysis to the issue of lottery gambling in the United States. Drawing on data from legislative records in four states, I find that lottery critics mostly avoid private behavior‐based morality arguments. Instead, they criticize government's role in sanctioning lotteries and denounce the negative consequences of gambling. Supporters, meanwhile, emphasize the potential benefits of lottery creation and the importance of allowing the state public a voice on the issue. The results indicate that rational‐instrumental arguments coexist alongside morality talk in state lottery debates, and that private behavior morality frames are on the decline while governmental morality frames are on the rise.     

Variations in the Diffusion of State Lottery Adoptions: How Revenue Dedication Changes Morality Politics1

Previous studies of morality policy adoption and diffusion often have failed to define the characteristics of a morality policy that result in certain kinds of politics. For example, studies of lottery diffusion include all lottery adoptions, treating them as possessing characteristics that render their politics similar. In this article we explore the possibility that different types of lotteries generate different types of politics. Although all lotteries involve considerations of morality, some types of lotteries can involve additional values beyond concerns about the “sin” of gambling. The dedication of lottery revenue to a specific purpose can arouse these additional concerns and change the politics of adoption. We hypothesize that dedication of lottery revenue to the general fund will therefore generate different politics of adoption than lotteries designed to fund education. We find that previous findings on lottery diffusion apply only to general fund lotteries. If lottery revenue is dedicated to education, the potent symbol of children's education significantly changes the politics of adoption.     

The Temporal Diffusion of Morality Policy: The Case of Death Penalty Legislation in the American States

The social learning theory of policy decisionmaking provides clear expectations for the temporal diffusion of policy through the American states (Gray, 1973; Rogers, 1995; Walker, 1969). But the diffusion of morality policy, with its technical simplicity, potential for high salience, and debate over basic moral values, may be driven by nonroutine decisionmaking. We hypothesize that morality policy will diffuse in patterns that depend on the purity of the morality debate surrounding it and the distribution of citizen values regarding it. We identify three distinctive temporal diffusion patterns for state death penalty policies that vary on these characteristics. We conclude that political decisionmaking driving some morality policy diffusion involves less policy learning, and more concern about majority public opinion, than does nonmorality policy.     

People, Places, and Policy: A Politically Relevant Framework for Efforts to Reduce Concentrated Poverty

This article identifies the persistence of spatially concentrated poverty, reviews the literature on an implicit people-place binary theory of antipoverty policy, proposes a more integrated heuristic for understanding policy, and discusses how the classification can be the basis for a more refined understanding of the evolution of antipoverty policy, how and when politics drive the antipoverty agenda and uses the heuristic to encourage evaluators to refocus research on the multiple aspects of poor peoples' lives. In general, proponents of either people-based or place-based policies have dominated the urban poverty debate. This tension has led to a fragmented and piecemeal approach to spatially concentrated poverty that focuses on either people or places and does not best serve the poor. The new heuristic specifies both the policy targets and the policy mechanisms for major programs, examining the degree to which each focuses on people or places, and the degree to which each relies on supply and demand side assumptions. This reclassification suggests that the assumptions inherent in public policy can provide insight into how antipoverty policy makers and advocates might respond to political cycles and major sociopolitical events, as well as how they might more critically evaluate their efforts.     

The Rising Agenda of Physician-Assisted Suicide: Explaining the Growth and Content of Morality Policy

Employing theories and methods of agenda-setting analysis, this article explains the rapid rise of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) on the national political agenda based on its status as a morality policy. PAS reached the mass agenda before the professional agenda, probably because PAS is an outgrowth of previous right-to-die policies and Dr. Jack Kevorkian's assisted suicides provided major focusing events. As in other morality policies, competing groups fight for the last word, but PAS has been blocked on most governmental agendas because its image and media tone has been mostly negative and public opinion is divided. Groups in a few generally liberal states have tried to enact policy through referenda when legislators failed to address the issue. We speculate that competing interest groups will become more active and that state courts will become a venue of choice in the future.     

Theoretical reflections

The article starts with a discussion about the frequent statement that culture is a marginal area in politics. It proceeds with an analysis of the phenomenon and concept of “the cultural turn” and its possible consequences for cultural democracy. Then there follows a reflection on the potential power of religion and culture in political developments. After these introductory sections I present and discuss what I call five “democracy dimensions” of cultural policy: norms and ideologies; distribution of economic resources; institutional structures and decision‐making procedures; agents and interests in the policy‐making process; and access to and participation in cultural life. The conclusion is that under certain circumstances culture may mobilise huge masses of people in political actions but this is unlikely to happen in Western European democracies where culture in a long historical process has been privatised and isolated from big politics by the establishment of a specific sphere with its own structures, norms, logics and discourses. It is questionable if cultural policies will be more democratic under the reign of global capitalism and new liberalism. “The cultural turn” is an ambivalent phenomenon which cannot by itself bring about more cultural democracy. The future of cultural democracy cannot be decided for by cultural life or the cultural policy system themselves, it is dependent on what will happen to democracy as a total political system, of which cultural policy is only a small part.     

Learning from Schools: School Choice,Political Learning,and Policy Feedback

This article investigates the policy feedback and political learning effects of school vouchers. Of particular interest is how market‐based policies affect the likelihood that program participants will connect their experiences with the policy to the government. I examine parent survey data from an evaluation of the Milwaukee school voucher program. I find that voucher parents are more likely than public school parents to perceive that the government has influenced their child's schooling and to believe that their experiences with their child's school have taught them about how government works. Further, voucher parents report that their experiences with the policy have made them more politically active. While majorities of voucher and public school parents support increased public school expenditures, there is some evidence that school vouchers may decrease support for public schools.     

Explaining State Budget Punctuations: Policy Transparency,Political Institutions,and Electoral Incentives

What factors cause policies experiencing long periods of stability to be interrupted occationally by a short period of large changes? This study argues that electoral incentives might influence the search, supply, and processing of information on constituency issues, as well as the associated cognitive or institutional frictions, and thus determine the presence and variation of punctuated policies. This article develops and evaluates this claim within a systemic framework consisting of policy transparency, political institutions, and electoral incentives. For the purpose of identifying policy punctuations, this research uses the Generalized Pareto Distribution in the Extreme Value Theory. This study analyzes budget spending data collected from FY 1988 to FY 2008 for all 50 American states. This study finds that greater policy transparency is associated with larger spending stability. By contrast, greater gubernatorial competition is more likely to produce extreme spending changes. Electoral incentives shaped by public preference and political term limits have a profound impact on nonincremental policy changes. The impact of policy transparency is conditional on public preference, while that of electoral competition and legislative professionalism is moderated by political term limits. Particularly, a transparent policy consistent with public preference and legislative professionalism with term limits are more likely to give rise to punctuated policies, while gubernatorial (legislative) competition leads to less punctuated changes when governors (legislators) are subject to term limits.     

Rethinking American Public Policy: The Environment, Federalism, States, and Supranational Influences

The politics of American public policy recently have transformed in response to changing power relationships between levels of government in the United States. Certain policy choices now are made in different arenas–for example, state and local government institutions often make policy decisions that previously had been within the jurisdiction of America's national government. At the same time, new policy relationships between states also are altering previous political patterns. This article highlights and explains this phenomenon, and focuses particularly on the changing power relationships between levels of government in the United States–national, state, and local–and the resulting policies and politics. More specifically, it closely examines two 20th century innovations in government and public policymaking within the context of a discrete case study. One of these innovations is institutional–the rise of public authorities or public corporations as highly insulated, governmental entities. The other is procedural–the environmental impact statement process. Together, these innovations, in concert with broader international and global trends, have played a large role in the shifting power structure and politics underlying American public policymaking activities.     

The Conditioning Effects of Policy Salience and Complexity on American Political Institutions

Years ago, Bill Gormley introduced public policy scholars to a new and innovative salience- complexity typology for regulatory policies. This typology not only helps scholars catalog numerous policies into distinct categories, but also helps explain variation in political processes. Specifically, different policies provide different incentives for political actors to be involved in policymaking. Salience encourages activity on the part of elected officials; complexity often requires policymaking outside of the public sphere. In this article, I extend Gormley's salience-complexity typology to more than just regulatory policies and confirm that levels of institutional activity vary across this range of public policies. I also expand on Gormley's contribution by differentiating the distinct impacts that policy type has on the policy activities of Congress and the presidency, and propose that institutional activity differs according to the dynamics of a policy's salience.     

Obeying,Believing and Rebelling

Abstract

This article offers a decisive alternative to a growing consensus within public theology that political liberalism represents the pro-Pelagian, atomistic and un-ecclesial face of modernity. Through a careful reappraisal of the sceptical theology of Michel de Montaigne I claim that contemporary Christian advocates of liberalism can develop a deeply Augustinian counter-account which has the ability to reconcile notions of individual autonomy and conscience with a strong sense of ecclesial authority. At the centre of this innovative settlement, I point to the value of Montaigne’s theological anthropology, which, in its sensitivity to human fragility and sin, offers a rich validation of pluralistic and tolerant societies by contesting absolutist claims to both knowledge and power. In framing political liberalism in these explicitly theological terms, such an account comes into sharp confrontation with the movement known as Radical Orthodoxy, which has defined the liberal tradition as intrinsically anathema to an authentically Christian understanding of politics. In contrast, this article claims that political liberalism, far from being automatically antagonistic to Christian theological commitments, can be justified by them.     

Typologies, Taxonomies, and the Benefits of Policy Classification

Although one of the most durable analytic frameworks in political science, policy typologies suffer from some well-known flaws. Key among these is the problem of classification: thus far, it has proved impossible to consistently and objectively assign specific policies into conceptually distinct categories. The ambitious original promise of policy typologies, that is, to provide a precursor to a general theory of politics has gone unfulfilled in no small part because of the inability to overcome the classification obstacle. This article reexamines the idea of policy classification by assessing the potential contributions of policy taxonomies. Although a taxonomic approach to policy classification raises problems of its own, it may offer advantages above and beyond traditional typologies.     

Netflix: Canadian (Dis)Content. Competing Sovereignties and the Cultural Politics of Cultural Policy

Netflix has gained significant attention in Canada because it exemplifies the challenge posed by digital technology to Canada’s long-standing cultural policies. It is increasingly evident that such policies are limited in their ability to encourage foreign investment while safeguarding Canadian cultural expression. Indeed, the policies proposed thus far have generated “Canadian discontent” across the political spectrum, notwithstanding their promised benefits. This article uses Netflix to explore the cultural politics of cultural policy: the historical and political underpinnings that drive ongoing discussions about state intervention in culture. These politics include the debates about the effect of foreign investment on Canadian cultural sovereignty, and the ideological tensions within the notion of sovereignty itself, namely those between state and consumer and between center and periphery. Using a historiographical approach, this article investigates the controversy surrounding recent government responses to the disruptive force of foreign digital multinationals, such as Netflix.     

POLITICS, LABOR RELATIONS, AND PUBLIC PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

The establishment of collective bargaining in the government service necessarily heightens the political context of public personnel administration. The personnel process becomes a more open system for decision-making and consequently subject to a greater variety of influences. Especially in the implementation of policy, the personnel specialist acting as part of the management team shares responsibility with union representatives. Generally, human resource management is characterized by more give and take bilateral relations but the areas of greatest union impact are pay and discipline policies and practices. The viability of public sector labor relations will be severely tested in the eighties as governments face the dual demand for smaller work forces and increased productivity. The outcome will have a direct bearing on the work of public personnel administrators.     

The Struggle between Order and Liberty in Contemporary Russian Political Culture

One of the enduring tensions in Russian political culture is that between order and liberty. Indeed, many fear that when faced with the inevitable cacophony of democratic politics, most Russians demand the restoration of order, and by a 'strong hand' if need be. This lack of commitment to democracy among ordinary people is often seen as a major impediment to the consolidation of the democratic transformation in Russia. The purpose of this article is to assess empirically the degree to which the desire for social and political order undermines support for democratic liberty. Based on a survey of the Russian mass public conducted in 1996, and employing within the survey an experiment on support for the imposition of martial law in Russia, I discover that Russians are indeed willing to surrender some liberty for the restoration of order. The preference for liberty reflects general democratic attitudes more than it is sensitive to the particular context within which liberty is suspended. Nonetheless, the context of the dispute is important because it serves to stimulate particular attitudes; for instance, the intervention of a court transforms the conflict from a political to a legal dispute, thereby activating attitudes toward the rule of law. In the final analysis, I conclude that if elites maintain ordered political competition, it is likely that the mass public will maintain individual liberty, and democracy in Russia will prosper accordingly.     

Political institutions,punctuated equilibrium theory,and policy disasters

This paper develops a theory of the relationship between policy disasters and political institutions. Policy disasters, defined as avoidable, unintended extreme negative policy outcomes, are important political, and historical events above that receive relatively little attention from political scientists and scholars of public policy. Using the predictions of punctuated equilibrium theory, I argue that systems with higher error accumulation will experience more policy disasters. Systems with more veto players and weaker information flows will experience more policy disasters, but information flows will have a stronger impact than veto players. I test this theory using data on financial crises and natural and technological disasters across 70 countries over 60 years. I find strong evidence that systems with weaker information flows and more veto players tend to have greater policy disaster risk.     

Counterterrorism policy in liberal-democratic societies: locating the ethical limits of national security

This article considers the moral limits to national security policies. While it may seem self-evident that there are, and ought to be, limits to counterterrorism policies, there is an increasingly widespread public opinion that political leaders can, and must, do everything they can to protect against terrorist acts. Liberal-democratic societies are facing the threat of domestic terrorism, and for a political leader to say that ‘we cannot stop all terrorist acts and, indeed, neither should we’ would sound the death knell for their career. This article seeks to specify the limiting conditions around counterterrorism policy by reference to policymakers’ public justifications offered for counterterrorism policy. This article presents three normative elements that underpin counterterrorism policy to show that there are important reasons to limit counterterrorism policy, and to suggest that these limits ought to be recognised by political leaders and citizens alike in liberal-democratic societies. Having set out three limiting factors on counterterrorism policy, the article then shows that these factors do indeed play a role in UK counterterrorism policy development—that is, in recognising the justificatory apparatus for national security policies, limiting conditions ought to be found that are sensible to, and accepted by, the proponents of such policies.