How Do Different Types of Local Governments' Sustainability Programs Relate to Their Environmental Outcomes

Local governments worldwide have developed a suite of sustainability programs to improve environmental conditions within their jurisdictions. However, critics suggest that local governments' sustainability programs are more symbolic than substantial in that they are often developed to create the appearance of addressing environmental issues rather than actual environmental performance outcomes. Despite the skeptics, as yet, we have little empirical understanding of the environmental impact of local sustainability programs. This paper bridges the gap by considering how the design of 102 county governments' individual sustainability programs relates to improvement of their ozone quality between 2003 and 2013. After controlling for the spatial dependence of ozone quality among neighboring counties, this paper offers the evidence that local sustainability programs are related to improved environmental conditions. Moreover, the sustainability programs that are designed more comprehensively across environmental issues appear to have greater policy efficacy compared to those focusing on a few environmental issues. These findings provide optimistic views about the local, non-regulatory policy effort for improving collective environmental quality. This implication is particularly salient given the lack of strong national and international environmental regulatory regimes.     

Policy Research: The Field Dimension

Field research, defined as an unstructured contact with public problems and programs, is essential to realistic policy research. Research linking governmental action to good outcomes is rare, because those who study government and those whose who analyze public problems are seldom the same. Field inquiry can help give policy research more governmental content. A lack of field contact is one reason why much of the research surrounding welfare reform has been incorrect. Ideally, the connections between policy and outcomes that respondents claim during field research should be verified by statistical analyses that use program data. Unfortunately, field research is discouraged by academic incentives favoring rigor at the expense of realism.     

Policy Feedback: The Comparison Effect and Small Business Procurement Policy

Federal programs to help small business obtain government contracts reflect a type of policy learning termed the comparison effect. In contrast with studies of learning focused on policy instruments, the comparison effect directs attention to a class of policy dissatisfaction that leads to a search for new policy and the translation of dissatisfaction into problem definitions that influence the agenda. In the comparison effect, policy fuels comparisons of government treatment of different groups or sectors that contribute to compensatory or offsetting programs for those deemed to be on the losing end of the comparison.     

European integration through ‘soft conditionality’. The contribution of culture to EU enlargement in Southeast Europe

Abstract

This article discusses how the European Commission employs cultural policy to facilitate EU enlargement processes. Since 1989 the European Commission has funded cultural programs in accession states as a ‘soft’ complement to its ‘hard’ conditionality. It reflects a more general trend in which the EU employs alternative modes of governance to deal with resistance against EU interference in national affairs. By investing in culture, the EU hopes to stimulate transnational cooperation, economic growth, social cohesion and identification with the EU. However, the outcomes of these investments cannot be predicted. Characteristic for soft policy programs is that participating states are responsible for their eventual interpretation and implementation. By comparing the policies and practices of EU cultural investments in accession states Southeast Europe, and particularly in Serbia, this paper discusses the limits and possibilities of EU funded initiatives to enlargement revealing an increasing governing through soft conditionality.     

Degrees of Engagement: Using Cultural Worldviews to Explain Variations in Public Preferences for Engagement in the Policy Process

Scholars have been studying the concept of public engagement and its role in the policy process for some time. Scholars have argued that understanding the interests and motivations of the public and engaging them in the decision‐making process can lead to better policy designs and, ultimately, better policy outcomes. However, studies of public engagement often assume that people have a desire to get involved in the policy process. This paper tests this key assumption using the case of nuclear facility siting in the United States to ask: what factors influence an individual's stated willingness to want to engage in the policy process? Using data from a national web survey fielded in 2013, we ask the public if and to what extent they would likely engage in the siting process if given the opportunity. Findings indicate that the likelihood of engagement varies rather substantially across individuals. We find that an individual's cultural belief system and existing level of political activity account for some of this variation. These findings suggest that public engagement programs may vary across groups and communities. In other words, the prospects of engagement are likely to appeal to some members of the population and not others.     

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.     

Forest Service Budget Requests and Appropriations

In spite of recent arguments that significant changes are occurring in the United States Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, to date little empirical evidence exists demonstrating that this is indeed the case and whether these presumed changes are impacting upon substantive policy outcomes. Most of the current evidence available is from studies that have inferred change by measuring attitudinal change in Forest Service employees. None to date has examined changes in quantitative indicators of agency policy efforts or outcomes. In this article, we analyze trends in the budget requests of the Forest Service, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and appropriations made by Congress, to ascertain whether priorities of these actors concerning the commodity and non-commodity programs of the National Forests have changed since the passage of the National Forest Management Act. The data reveal shifting priorities for the Forest Service, USDA, and OMB. However, although the shifts have been greater for the Forest Service than for the other two agencies, they have been significantly less than the shifts in congressional appropriations. This fact suggests that Congress is changing its view of how the Forest Service should manage its lands more quickly than the Forest Service is changing itself, and that, as some have argued, Congress has been an important external agent of change concerning the agency and its policies.     

Policy Frames and Ethical Traditions

Discussions of the framing of policy issues have developed in the policy process and policy analysis literatures. This article uses a concept of “ethical traditions” derived from ideology theory to analyze the framing of programs promoting homeownership for the poor. It argues that the rhetoric surrounding the legislation of these programs was drawn from a tradition of agrarian republicanism, and concludes with some comments about the implications of this finding for designing antipoverty policy.     

Determinants of postdisplacement reemployment outcomes and occupation changes

We investigate the roles played by agglomeration (proxied by population density) and occupational distribution on postdisplacement employment outcomes for US workers, focusing on the probability of being employed, the likelihood of changing occupations, and the occupational distance between the old and new occupations (where occupational distance is defined as the difference in job tasks between two occupations). Overall, we find that the local occupational distribution has a greater impact on our outcome variables compared with our agglomeration measure. Our findings suggest policy makers should look closely at occupational distribution when designing job training programs and proposals for relocation vouchers.     

Belief in a Just World and Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action

The effect of identity, as socially constructed by race and gender, on social policies has been widely examined in policy analysis. Policy analysis would be improved by a wider discussion that includes the influence of social‐psychological constructs on social provision. We fill this gap by drawing on the theory of the “belief in a just world” and link this theory to attitudes toward the support of controversial government programs. We argue that this theory is a critical antecedent to the previous research on social construction. We hypothesize that citizens who perceive that the world is just and that opportunities are equal between groups are much less likely to favor government interventions altering market outcomes. We find that after controlling for race, sex, and political ideology, respondents who believe that luck is the primary determinant of success (low belief in a just world) are more supportive of preferential hiring programs for African Americans and women.     

How Should We Wage the War on Drugs? Determinants of Public Preferences for Drug Control Alternatives

When citizens are presented with alternative policy solutions to a given social problem, why do they choose to support one over another? In this article, the authors analyze a survey of residents of the five largest U.S. metropolitan areas to understand determinants of public support for spending on three major components of American drug control policy: law enforcement programs, rehabilitative services for addicts, and school‐based prevention programs. The authors estimate effects of self‐interest, political socialization, and policy attitudes on support for total drug control expenditures and on preferences for each drug control alternative versus the others. Effects of group self‐interest, societal interest, and political socialization change dramatically across dimensions of support. Policy attitudes are strong predictors of both types of support, whereas individual self‐interest measures are not associated with either dimension.     

Navigating the Social Safety Net: A State‐Level Analysis of the Relationship between Medicaid and Consumer Bankruptcy

The social safety net in the United States consists of a variety of programs administered by both federal and state governments. Although the populations served by social programs such as Medicaid and consumer bankruptcy likely overlap, policymakers tend to look at individual programs unilaterally and often fail to communicate appropriately with legislators and political leaders at differing levels of government. The result of such an incremental approach to policy reform is a fragmented social safety net system in the United States. In this study, the relationship between two social programs belonging to the larger social safety net is examined, and recommendations for policymakers are offered.     

AMERICAN POLICY FOR HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: A COMPARATIVE EXAMINATION

The United States and the major northern European countries all have developed a variety of strategies for governmental intervention in housing and urban development. These include rent supplements, subsidized mortgages, incentives to homeownership, land clearance, and construction and management of housing by public authorities. Despite similarities in the types of programs offered, the countries vary markedly in levels of public expenditure, consistency of policy, and institutional structure of the housing market. Differences in housing policies and institutions produce different outcomes. Settlement patterns, housing costs, level of home-ownership, and availability of housing for different income groups can be traced to these varying contexts for housing investment. Explanation of national differences lies in the differing organization of economic interests through the respective political systems.     

Policy Feedback Effects on Mass Publics: A Quantitative Review

There has been an impressive stride in the research on policy feedback effects on mass publics over recent years. However, we lack systematic evidence on how large such policy feedback effects are in the literature. This article provides a review of 65 published studies and quantifies the findings and key themes in the policy feedback literature. The results show a great degree of heterogeneity in the domains and outcomes being studied and in the effects of policies on the public. In line with the findings from narrative reviews, feedback effects are greater for outcomes related to political participation and engagement. Last, the review sheds light on important theoretical and methodological limitations to be addressed in future research.     

Rescaling citizenship: gendering Canadian immigration policy

Tracing the impact of public consultation on policy development is vital to theories of the state. Without investigating how civic participation is transformed into policy outcomes researchers cannot adequately account for the interaction of state and civil society. In particular researchers need to refine their explanations of policy development by highlighting how identity and scale can alter both policy application and outcome. I develop this approach by tracing how the civic participation of immigrant women in Canada advanced the rights of women in the development of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which came into law in June 2002. By tracing the consultation process between Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and Sahara and NAC, two women’s advocacy groups, I reveal how public involvement and concern with gender equity transmitted into policy change. The outcomes of this interaction do, however, present some contradictions. In particular policy changes attempt to limit one source of inequality, but in the process enforce greater state control of mobility. Despite this paradox, I conclude that this political involvement represents a partial victory for immigrant women since it succeeded in promoting concerns with gender within the ‘formal’ arena of national policy development.     

Pet Sounds: Subsystems,Regimes, Policy Punctuations,and the Neglect of African American Farmers, 1935–2006

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) has reoriented the study of public policy and American politics in particular. In this study, we documented how a policy punctuation that appears to take hold at the macro level of the polity in the form of a policy regime has difficulty penetrating subsystem politics. We drew on subsystems theory, PET, and the latest work on policy regimes to document the resistance of the agriculture subsystem to efforts to add a civil rights dimension to agriculture policy between 1935 and 2006. We concluded that the issue evolution of agricultural support programs, and their insulation from civil rights policy, is a prime example of how subsystems use negative feedback to resist change.     

Enemies to Allies: The Role of Policy‐Design Adaptation in Facilitating a Farmer–Environmentalist Alliance

In the period 1985 to 1996, agricultural conservation policy in the United States underwent a fundamental transition from a focus on policy design elements that emphasized short‐term economic returns for farmers and long‐term productivity to a focus on design elements that emphasized systemic environmental concerns. Although farmers' concerns with the environment were doubtlessly real, this adaptation of design elements allowed the agriculture policy community to gain the support of the environmental community for programs that offered new ways to channel short‐term economic support to farmers. The adaptation of design elements was triggered by the severe economic threat farmers began to experience in the late 1970s. This article investigates the language adaptations that facilitated the changes in agricultural conservation policy by analyzing the five policy‐design elements developed by Ingram and Schneider.     

Explaining Advocacy Coalition Change with Policy Feedback

Despite the prominence of exogenous factors in theories of policy change, the precise mechanisms that link such factors to policy change remain elusive: The effects of exogenous factors on the politics underlying policy change are not sufficiently conceptualized and empirically analyzed. To address this gap, we propose to distinguish between truly exogenous factors and policy outcomes to better understand policy change. Specifically, we combine the Advocacy Coalition Framework with policy feedback theory to conceptualize a complete feedback loop among policy, policy outcomes, and subsequent politics. Aiming at theory-building, we use policy feedback mechanisms to explain why advocacy coalitions change over time. Empirically, we conduct a longitudinal single case study on policy-induced technological change in the German energy subsystem, an extreme case of policy outcomes, from 1983 to 2013. First, using discourse network analysis, we identify four patterns of actor movements, explaining coalition decline and growth. Second, using process tracing, we detect four policy feedback mechanisms explaining these four actor movements. With this inductive mixed-methods approach, we build a conceptual framework in which policy outcomes affect subsequent politics through feedback mechanisms. We develop propositions on how coalition change and feedback mechanisms explain four ideal-typical trajectories of policy change.     

Building a Conceptual Approach to Collective Learning: Lessons for Public Policy Scholars

In public policy processes, collective learning among policy actors is important in shaping how these processes unfold and the types of policy outcomes that may result. Despite a widespread interest in learning by policy scholars, researchers face a number of conceptual and theoretical challenges in studying learning across different collective settings within policy processes. In this article, we offer a theoretically grounded approach to defining and understanding collective‐level learning. In defining learning, we first draw out the connection between learning processes and learning products, both cognitive and behavioral. In examining learning processes, we further explore the relationship between individual and collective learning. Then we identify and define the key characteristics of collective settings that will likely influence learning processes. We conclude by offering recommendations for policy scholars to apply this approach in studies of learning across diverse policy contexts.     

Improving Efficiency in Australian Local Government: Structural Reform as a Catalyst for Effective Reform

Municipal amalgamation has been the main policy instrument of local government structural reform programmes in Australia for well over a century. However, council consolidation programs have not achieved the intended cost savings or improved service provision promised by advocates of this means of structural reorganisation. This paper considers whether the failure of municipal amalgamation processes to produce significant economic benefits necessarily implies that structural reform programs that invoke consolidation have no place in Australian local government policy. It is argued that ‘top-down’ state government structural reform policy initiatives carrying the threat of amalgamation constitute an efficient mechanism for evoking optimal ‘bottom-up’ structural change models.