Institutions, Bureaucratic Decisions, and Policy Outcomes: State Insurance Solvency Regulation

Although over the past 2 decades several scholars have documented a link between institutional arrangements and policy choices, few studies have demonstrated how different institutional arrangements give rise to different policy outcomes. Further, although some studies have related bureaucratic resources to policy decisions, almost none have illustrated that the way state agencies actually deploy regulatory resources—policy outputs—significantly influences policy outcomes. Focusing specifically on the insurance industry in the United States, in this article we illustrate the impact of state regulatory activities on the solvency of firms in the insurance industry from 1987 to 1997, and in doing so we emphasize the differences between policy outputs and policy outcomes. In the case of policy outputs, for example, we find that elected insurance commissioners, divided state government, budgetary resources, and larger insurance sectors lead to more aggressive solvency examinations of insurers. In addition to examinations, however, we discern an important role for both regulatory and political institutions in subsequent insurer insolvencies.     

Unemployment and Labour-market Policy in the New Voivodeship System in Poland

The systemic transformation process and the introduction of market mechanisms involved in the labour market have brought about changes in the state and structure of the labour market in Poland. A measurable effect of those changes has been a drop in employment and the appearance of registered unemployment, whose level soon surpassed that of frictional unemployment and became a basic social problem. The situation in the Polish labour market is aggravated by the fact that there are wide regional differences in unemployment that persist despite variations in the level of national unemployment. The administrative reform implemented on 1 January 1999 has introduced a division of the country into 16 new voivodeships in place of the existing 49. The new system of big voivodeships endowed statutorily with a combination of central government and self-government functions was supposed to create conditions for a more effective labour-market policy at the regional scale. The aim of the present article is to analyse changes in the regional differences in unemployment resulting from the transition from the 49- to 16-unit administrative system. The analysis also covers changes in the institutionalization and implementation of labour-market policy at the regional level which followed from the reform.     

Policy Influence and Policy Responsiveness in State Pollution Control

This article develops an integrated theory of state policy influence and responsiveness, then operationalizes this theory to account for variations in the strength and scope of state water pollution control and hazardous waste management programs. The analysis finds that economic, ideological, interest group, and political system characteristics act in concert to affect state policymaking, and that the influences behind policymaking vary systematically and predictably across policy areas within environmental protection.     

南京国民政府法币政策的实施与各省地方政府的反应

1935年11月,南京国民政府宣布实施法币政策的直接导因,是为了制止白银外流,但实施统一的法币政策一直是南京国民政府整合中央与地方关系的重要步骤,从某种意义上而言,制止白银外流只是法币政策实施的一个契机。本文试图以南京国民政府的法币政策为中心,对法币政策实施前后中央与各省地方政府之间的互动关系作一考察。     

E-mail Communication and the Policy Process in the State Legislature

E-mail has changed the policy process in state legislatures because political actors now have a new way to present their message to state legislators. What little research has been conducted on this topic examines e-mail communication generally and does not compare results by policy actor. Using an original survey of state legislators in eight states, we test for systematic effects of variables on general e-mail views and for effects specific to particular policy actors. We find that legislators have a nuanced approach to e-mail usage in the policy process with their assessment of its impact differing significantly for constituents, intermediary groups, and policy insiders. Only gender consistently shapes legislators' beliefs about e-mail with all groups, but institutional features, legislator characteristics, and legislator beliefs shape views on e-mail with different target groups. Clearly, legislators are attuned to the audience communicating via e-mail, and they value e-mail with each group differently.     

明清州县衙门陋规的存留与裁革

明清州县的陋规收入很多,衙门的陋规固随地皆有,但不能随意多取,按规定额度收取者为合法,其额外苛求者则为非法。明清州县陋规的90%来自于理财,而理财中的大宗来自于赋税、平余、盐当、杂课,州县官在理财额内收取的陋规,一般都能够达到"不贪不滥,一年三万"的收入水平。如果额外苛求,是私派陋规、勒索陋规、需索陋规、私受陋规等,一旦发觉则要受到惩处。关于陋规是否存留,还是全部或部分裁革,无论是统治者,还是官员、学者都各有看法,可以说议论纷纭,莫衷一是。     

Applying Policy Termination Theory to the Abandonment of Climate Protection Initiatives by U.S. Local Governments

A considerable amount is known about the factors that influence policy adoption and implementation across different issue areas. Less is known, however, about the factors that influence governments to abandon programs or policies prior to reaching their stated objectives or originally specified end‐points. This article applies termination theory to local climate protection initiatives and examines cities’ withdrawal from the dominant sustainability organization facilitating these efforts. In the face of national government inaction, large numbers of U.S. municipalities voluntarily committed to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and joined the ICLEI's Climate Protection program. After steady membership increases for nearly a decade, ICLEI attained its largest size in 2010 with 565 city members. Over the next 2 years, this number plummeted by 20 percent. Positioned in the literature on policy change, we empirically test three hypotheses for why a substantial portion of cities ended their affiliation with this organization and terminated the explicit climate protection objectives associated with it: (1) political ideology and interest group pressure, (2) fiscal constraints, and (3) perceived program ineffectiveness. Analytical results support the first and third hypotheses. We identify factors that influence the termination of local GHG reduction initiatives and discuss theoretical implications of these findings.     

State,Industrialization and Agricultural Policy in Korea

Analyses of Korean (Republic of Korea) development point to the strong role of the state in directing the industrialization process. State intervention has also been pronounced in agriculture, as state agents have mobilized bureaucratic resources to direct agricultural production activities in support of the national development project through the creation of strategic agroindustrial linkages. The Korean green revolution campaign to achieve rice self-sufficiency is used to illustrate the state's role in fostering intersectoral linkages. Agriculture is brought back into the debate about Korean development.     

Policy Merchandising and Social Assistance in Africa: Don't Call Dog Monkey for Me

The title of this article draws on a Yorùbá aphorism that roughly translates into ‘don't sell me a dummy’. The dark side of social policy, the theme of this Debate, has a distinct character in the African context. The transformation of the African public policy landscape, shaped by the ‘counter-revolution’ in development thinking, has taken a new form with the donor ‘policy merchandising’ of cash transfer schemes. The stratified and segregated social policy on offer contrasts with the historical experience of ‘donor’ countries themselves. The policy instrument advanced is cast as ‘a silent revolution in development’, embodying the idea of development shifting from structural transformation to poverty alleviation. What is promoted is an impoverished version of development. Within the discourse of ‘working with the grain of African politics’, the politics of social assistance policy merchandising starts with a notion of politics as clientelist. It then deploys the instrumentality of clientelism — within an imperial deployment of power — in the manufacture of civil society and policy coalition, to ensure the local adoption of a policy instrument that the extra-territorial donor actors offer. This modality of public policy formulation contrasts sharply with the historical experience of public policy making in the ‘donor’ countries themselves. The result is the subversion of the consolidation of democracy in the African client states.     

State Expenditures and Policy Outcomes in Environmental Program Management

Comparative state environmental research seeks to explain the factors contributing to intergovernmental environmental management. In pursuing the answer to this query, researchers have relied on either fiscal (expenditures) or nonfiscal (ranking) measures of state environmental effort. Respecting the debate surrounding state policy outputs and fiscal versus nonfiscal measures, we evaluate comprehensive state environmental management comparing spending and ranking measures in our analysis. Though pronounced differences do exist between the two models, we find pollution and state size to be the primary factors affecting a state's environmental effort no matter which measure is used.     

State Implementation of Federal Environmental Policy: Explaining Leveraging in the Clean Water State Revolving Fund

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.     

Language Policy and State in Morocco: The Status of Berber

Moroccan society has had a long tradition of multilingualism. It is socially and linguistically diverse, and its cultural makeup is one of the richest in North African countries. Its strategic location at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East has made Morocco open to a variety of linguistic influences. Morocco has been invaded by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greek, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spanish, and French. All these civilizations have deeply influenced Moroccan language policy and cultural diversity. The cultural and linguistic context of Morocco is characterized by the significant use of Arabic, as well as the presence of Berber, French, Spanish, and English. Berbers are the indigenous populations of Morocco and have existed in North Africa since time immemorial. Despite its complexity, the language policy of Morocco reveals an overarching monolingualism, with the hegemony of Classical Arabic as the only official language of the country. Recently, however, language education policy in Morocco has attempted to accommodate multilingualism. The linguistic situation of Berber has taken a new twist as it has been incorporated into the realm of Moroccan schools. The new Moroccan constitution also represents a historical turn in that it has acknowledged Berber as an official language, a move that has raised several questions with regard to the real motivation behind it. Berber implementation policy was based on an entirely top‐down bureaucratic model of language policy. Moroccan policymakers and the state seem to be aware of how other dramas are playing out in Morocco and around the world as theories of multiculturalism and effects of globalization are influencing their decisions. However, this language policy encounters many hurdles, from the improvisation to lack of qualified teachers. This article is an attempt to understand the intricate diversity and plurality of Moroccan language situation and the role of the state in Berber language policy. It also examines the invisible politics behind implementing it.     

Tense Layering and Synthetic Policy Paradigms: The Politics of Health Insurance in Australia

This paper analyses the substantial financial subsidy, alongside other regulatory changes, introduced to support private health insurance in Australia at the end of the 1990s. The concept of policy layering is developed and refined theoretically in terms of changes in policy paradigms in order to chart a lengthy period of tense layering in Australian health-care politics between private and public health insurance and the bipartisan convergence on a universalism plus choice policy paradigm during the 1990s. This is the key dynamic underlying the Coalition's support of private health insurance after 1996 rather than a neo-liberal ambition to dismantle the health-care state and return to a predominately privately financed health-care system with a residual, public safety net.     

Anti‐Immigrant Sentiment and the Adoption of State Immigration Policy

Over the last two decades, the American states have become increasingly active in shaping U.S. immigration policies. One consistent predictor in studies of state immigration policies revolves around public opinion or mass political attitudes in the form of anti‐immigrant sentiment. Unfortunately, past research relies extensively on blunt demographic proxies or other alternative replacements to measure mass opinion. Through incorporating a direct measure of anti‐immigrant sentiment constructed from public opinion surveys, we uncover mixed results. In static models, anti‐immigrant sentiment predicts a state’s overall immigration policy restrictiveness or policy “tone”; however, mass opinion fails to consistently predict immigration restrictiveness in more dynamic models of annual policy change and total number of hostile policies. We theorize that state legislators are likely responding to mass opinion with immigration policy restrictiveness when citizens mobilize and demand accountability during times of heightened issue salience. However, during times of reduced salience among the populace the influence of anti‐immigrant sentiment wanes, and commercial and political elites are seemingly able to shift individual immigration policies in more accommodative directions. Anti‐immigrant sentiment can motivate state immigration policy restriction, but likely only during select periods of heightened issue salience and attentive, engaged citizenry.     

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.     

The Impact of Program Design on Enrollment in State Children's Health Insurance Programs

The success of State Children's Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP) in expanding insurance coverage among low‐income children varies considerably across states. Scholars have looked to different program characteristics to explain this variation, but have arrived at disparate conclusions regarding the impact of one of the most significant design choices—the decision to create a new program or to pursue increased child health insurance rates through an expansion of the existing Medicaid program. This study suggests that understanding the impact of programmatic choices requires a more careful consideration of the mechanisms through which these different program designs might influence enrollment than has been offered in previous research. Employing a multilevel governance framework, it suggests that there is a hitherto unexplored indirect impact, where design choices influence administrative behavior, which in turn influences enrollment success in SCHIP programs. It is important to understand the effect of administrative design choices because this is one of the key areas in which states exercise discretion in the implementation of many federal programs.     

Origins of State Housing Policy in Canada: the Case of the Central Mortgage Bank

In the literature, Canadian federal housing policy is most often considered to be a post-Second World War phenomenon and to have been effectively initiated, at least in an institutional sense, with the establishment of Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (chmc) in 1945 (Bettison, 1975; Hatch. 1975; Rose, 1980). It is generally accepted that the state was led to intervene in the private housing market as a result of an unprecedented demand from returning servicemen. This demand was heightened by increasing levels of disposable income and exacerbated by reduced levels of housing production during the war. In this scenario. the state is seen to have been responding to a specific market crisis; the response resulted in the creation of various agencies, most notably cmhc, and in National Housing Act amendments, virtually all of which took place in the post-war era. The ‘market-crisis’ perspective to the study of federal housing policy tends to overlook the initiation of state monetary and credit system management during the 1930s and its implications for the form of state intervention in housing during the 1940s and beyond. I wish to make a case here for pushing back the study boundaries to at least the early 1930s in conjunction with a brief examination of the Central Mortgage Bank (cmb). The argument is that the essential ‘actors’ in the determination of housing policy at the federal level (i.e. the Department of Finance, the institutional lenders [particularly the insurance companies], and the provinces) came to be delineated in the 1930s around the issue of debt management in the wake of widespread mortgage default, especially in the rural districts of the prairie provinces. The cmb, although never becoming active, is seen here as the first substantial collaboration between the state and finance capital in the area of residential mortgage lending practices. It represents an additional facet of state monetary and credit system management that proceeded apace with the formation of the Bank of Canada in 1935.