U.S. Environmental Policy Implementation on Tribal Lands: Trust,Neglect, and Justice

This study investigates the implementation of U.S. environmental protection laws under American Indian tribal governance. The landmark laws of the 1970s that form the core of America's environmental policy regime made no mention of American Indian tribal lands, and the subsequent research literature on environmental policy has given them little attention. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has primary implementation responsibility for environmental protection laws on tribal lands, which offers a unique opportunity to study direct federal implementation apart from typical joint state–federal implementation. Further, because Indian reservations are homes to a disproportionately poor, historically subjugated racial group, analysis of environmental programs on tribal lands offers a unique perspective on environmental justice. We analyze enforcement of and compliance with the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to compare the implementation of environmental policy on tribal lands with nontribal facilities. Analysis reveals that, compared with nontribal facilities, tribal facilities experience less rigorous CWA and SDWA enforcement and are more likely to violate these laws.     

Sustained Organizational Influence: American Legislative Exchange Council and the Diffusion of Anti‐Sanctuary Policy

Building upon existing literature, we offer a particular model of network policy diffusion—which we call sustained organizational influence. Sustained organizational influence necessitates an institutional focus across a broad range of issues and across a long period of time. Sustaining organizations are well‐financed, and exert their influence on legislators through benefits, shared ideological interests, and time‐saving opportunities. Sustaining organizations' centralized nature makes legislators' jobs easier by providing legislators with ready‐made model legislation. We argue that sustaining organizations uniquely contribute to policy diffusion in the U.S. states. We evaluate this model with a case study of state‐level immigration sanctuary policy making and the role that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) played in disseminating model legislation. Through quantitative text analysis and several negative binomial state‐level regression models, we demonstrate that ALEC has exerted an overwhelming influence on the introduction of anti‐sanctuary legislative proposals in the U.S. states over the past 7 years consistent with our particular model of network policy diffusion. Implications are discussed.     

Studying Immigrant Policy One Law at a Time

This article shows that, in the study of immigrant integration policy in the U.S. states, it is critical to report data and coding decisions for individual laws. This analysis uses an updated and public database of law‐level decisions, which includes 2,703 legislative actions recorded by the National Conference of State Legislatures from 2005 to 2016. These data are used to estimate models of aggregate state policy activity in a variety of ways: as a single continuum of policy balance versus separate models of welcoming and hostile, lumping all policy subareas together versus analyzing a specific subarea, and lumping all years together in one cross section versus panel analysis. The results in these models differ enough to indicate that reporting codes for individual‐level laws is absolutely essential so that each researcher easily can construct the measure that fits his or her theoretical framework best.     

Understanding the Field of Public Affairs through the Lens of Ranked Ph.D. Programs in the United States

The goal of this article is to understand the multidisciplinary field of public affairs. Based on data and text mining on the profiles and publications of all faculty members from a list of research‐oriented U.S. public affairs programs, we describe the landscape of public affairs schools and scholars, identify 15 topics in public affairs research and discuss their trends of change between 1986 and 2015, and show the clustering and hiring networks of public affairs schools. Our results suggest a broader approach to understanding the field of public affairs than the public administration focus in the literature. Although public administration is highly visible in the field, which is evidenced by the journals most favored by public affair scholars, various specific policy areas (such as health, social, urban, environmental, global, and education policies) show strong representations based on our topical analysis of public affairs research.     

Acting on the Hill: Congressional Assertiveness in U.S. Foreign Policy

A controversy has developed in recent years pitting those who see a resurgent Congress in U.S. foreign policy against those who argue that Congress remains largely acquiescent and uninvolved. This article addresses the disagreement, using a database of congressional foreign policy activity from 1946 to 1997 to weigh the competing claims. Our results show that congressional foreign policy activity has declined over the post-World War II era while congressional foreign policy assertiveness, relative to the administration's requests, has increased during this same period. Congress is thus less active but more assertive. Based on these results, we offer a two-dimensional model of congressional foreign policy behavior that better reflects the variety of congressional roles in U.S. foreign policy.     

Shifting Constellations of Actors and Their Influence on Policy Diffusion: A Study of the Diffusion of Drug Courts

The existing studies of policy diffusion have paid insufficient attention to how policy actors in the macroenvironment of local jurisdictions influence the process of policy diffusion, what kind of mechanisms drive the interdependent spread of a policy, and how the diffusion process changes over time. We explore, both theoretically and empirically, the role different go‐betweens can play in policy diffusion, what kind of interactions take place between the micro level and macro level, and how shifts in the constellations of actors in the macroenvironment of a local jurisdiction can influence the mechanisms and rate of policy diffusion. Our empirical study of the diffusion of drug courts in four U.S. states demonstrates that there can indeed be significant interactions between the micro level and the macro level and that these interactions are likely to shape the diffusion process.     

Land Policy and Farming Practices in Laos

The government of Laos has identified the eradication of poverty as a priority. Given the primarily agricultural character of the country, it has selected land reform as a core policy to reach this goal. The policy has two major aims: to increase land tenure security in order to encourage farmer involvement in intensive farming, and to eliminate slash‐and‐burn agriculture to protect the environment in a country still rich in forest resources. State intervention takes the form of land allocation, a process which combines the protection of some areas of village land with the formal recognition of private ownership in authorized farming areas. In a country with different types of geography, the effects of the policy are variable, but the research presented in this article demonstrates that the land laws have shortcomings which allow for differing interpretations depending on the local social relationships. Since local specificities are not taken into account, the reform is proving counterproductive for both forest protection and agricultural modernization, as well as having a negative social impact by marginalizing the poorest farmers.     

Greening America's Skylines: The Diffusion of Low-Salience Policies

The diffusion literature is replete with examples of highly salient policies spreading across subnational governments. However, low-salience policies that do not benefit from a groundswell of public opinion also spread across jurisdictions in patterns that appear similar to those of other, more well-known policy ideas. This research is an investigation of the mechanisms that propagate low-salience policies. I analyze the adoption of the U.S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) Leadership in Energy Efficient Design standard across 119 U.S. cities from 2000 to 2008. The investigation indicates that a knowledge broker, in this case the USGBC, occupies critical roles in linking a low-salience policy to a broader set of widely held societal values, developing a common policy vocabulary, providing a base policy that jurisdictions may freely adapt, and creating a diffusion infrastructure by acting as a communication hub for existing and interested jurisdictions to discuss innovations and progress.     

JURY DECISION MAKING MODELS AND THE SUPREME COURT: THE JURY CASES FROM WILLIAMS v. FLORIDA TO BALLEW v. GEORGIA*

This article analyzes recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in cases relating to the size and unanimity of juries as an example of the use (and abuse) of social science by the Court in the realm of policy analysis. The four cases reviewed “cast an unflattering light on the U.S. Supreme Court's ability to integrate social science findings into public law.”     

The Causes of Regional Variations in U.S. Poverty: A Cross-County Analysis

The persistence of poverty in the modern American economy, with rates of poverty in some areas approaching those of less advanced economies, remains a central concern among policy makers. Therefore, in this study we use U.S. county-level data to explore potential explanations for the observed regional variation in the rates of poverty. The use of counties allows examination of both nonmetropolitan area and metropolitan area poverty. Factors considered include those that relate to both area economic performance and area demographic composition. Specific county economic factors examined include economic growth, industry restructuring, and labor market skills mismatches.     

从地缘政治视角看美国边界安全的空间特征与政策变化——兼论对中国边界安全的启示

本文将美国边界安全置于地缘政治视角之下进行研究,通过对美国边界的空间形态与特征进行分析,总结美国边界安全在当前空间状态下存在的有利和不利因素。在全球反恐背景下,以"9·11"事件作为转折点,对比恐怖主义袭击前后20年美国政府在边界安全政策问题上的认知和态度变化,在对美国边界安全政策进行梳理后,阐述在新的边界安全环境下,美国所采取的保障陆海空边界安全的一系列强有力措施。在此基础上提出了美国经验对中国边界安全的五点启示,以期对中国的国家安全政策和实践提供借鉴。     

Urban Systems of Accumulation: Half a Century of Chilean Neoliberal Urban Policies

We analyse a half‐century of Chilean urban reforms to explain the introduction of a system of urban accumulation by dispossession of public resources and opportunities. Three stages have been conceptualised in the imposition of a neoliberal creative‐destructive process: proto‐neoliberalism, roll‐back and roll‐out periods. Empirical studies have traditionally analysed this process by examining a single urban policy's evolution over time. In this paper, we go beyond these types of studies by performing a systemic analysis of multiple urban policy reforms in Santiago, Chile. We use a genealogical thematic analysis to track changes in laws, government programmes and planning documents from between 1952 and 2014. Our analysis identifies different “urban systems of accumulation” by looking at the interplay of four urban policies: (1) urban planning deregulation; (2) social housing privatisation; (3) devolution of territorial taxes; and (4) decreased public service provision. Moreover, our multidimensional policy analysis in Santiago characterises a more radical, fourth expression in the creative destruction process of “accumulation by dismantling”. Consequently, we advocate for more multidimensional urban policy research that goes beyond a three‐period analysis in order to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary neoliberal creative‐destructive processes in variegated geographies.     

The Politics of Welfare Exclusion: Immigration and Disparity in Medicaid Coverage

The rapid growth of the immigrant population in the United States, along with changes in the demographics and the political landscape, has often raised questions for understanding trends of inequality. Important issues that have received little scholarly attention thus far are excluding immigrants’ social rights through decisive policy choices and the distributive consequences of such exclusive policies. In this article, we examine how immigration and state policies on immigrants’ access to safety net programs together influence social inequality in the context of health care. We analyze the combined effect of immigration population density and state immigrant Medicaid eligibility rules on the gap of Medicaid coverage rates between native‐ and foreign‐born populations. When tracking inequality in Medicaid coverage and critical policy changes in the post‐PRWORA era, we find that exclusive state policies widen the native‐foreign Medicaid coverage gap. Moreover, the effect of state policies is conditional on the size of the immigrant population in that state. Our findings suggest immigrants’ formal integration into the welfare system is crucial for understanding social inequality in the U.S. states.     

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.     

美国对1962年中印边界冲突的反应

美国对1962年中印边界冲突反应与它的南亚政策息息相关。从印巴分治直到中美和解前夕,美国的南亚政策始终有服务于全球冷战的两个目标：力促印巴和解以防止共产主义集团乘机介入;以一切可能的手段使印度放弃中立政策并加入到西方集团。中印边界冲突在美国政府的南亚政策渐入困境时发生,给了美国决策者以莫大的期望,他们企图以其所谓的天赐良机达至以上主要针对中国的冷战目标。然而,中国正确政策及出神入化的实践大大强化了美国在南亚地区既有的结构性困境,使肯尼迪政府利用中印冲突的图谋以失败而告终。     

Campaign Promises,Democratic Governance,and Environmental Policy in the U.S. Congress

One important criterion for assessing the quality of democratic governance is the extent to which the policy process effectively translates citizen preferences into collective choices. Several scholars have observed a discrepancy between citizen preferences for strong environmental protection and weak policies adopted in the United States, indicating that the United States may fall short on this criterion. We examine one possible mechanism contributing to this discrepancy—legislator defection from campaign promises. Our data indicate that legislators in the U.S. Congress routinely defect from their campaign promises in environmental protection, undermining the link between citizen preferences and policy choice. We also find that legislators are much more likely to defect from pro‐environmental campaign promises, which moves government policy toward less stringent environmental programs. Finally, the propensity of legislators to defect from their campaign promises is systematic, with defection affected by partisanship, constituency influence, the influence of the majority party, and the likely consequences of defection for policy choice. These findings contribute empirical evidence relevant to the “mandate theory” perspective on how citizen preferences are translated into collective choices through the policy process. These findings may also complement research in comparative politics concluding that legislatures selected through single member districts adopt less stringent environmental policies than do legislatures chosen via proportional representation in that the mechanism for this effect may go through legislator defection from campaign promises.     

Regulatory Federalism and Environmental Protection in the United States

In this paper we address two aspects of regulatory federalism in U.S. environmental policy. First, we suggest that environmental quality in U.S. states responds positively to increases in income. Second, we provide evidence that environmental quality did not decline when President Reagan's policy of new federalism returned responsibility for many environmental regulations to the states. Thus, state environmental quality appears to reflect more than just the dictates of federal policy. Additionally, we find that a "race to the bottom" in environmental quality did not materialize in the 1980s.     

20世纪40-50年代美国对中国西藏政策的历史演变

The U.S. policy toward Tibet has always changed in accordance with the U.S. international strategy and the U.S. foreign policy toward China. Before the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, the U.S. admitted Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. During the Cold War, due to its anti-communism strategy, the U.S. began to consider recognizing the independence claim of Tibetan separatists, especially after 1959, when the Dalai Lama was exiled abroad. However, the U.S. government has not openly admitted Tibet is an independent country, because, in the light of the historical development of Tibet within China, claims of independence cannot be substantiated and therefore Tibetan separatism cannot win the recognition or support of the majority of countries in the world.