Bringing Organizations Back In: Multilevel Feedback Effects on Individual Civic Inclusion

Policy feedback scholarship has focused on how laws and their implementation affect either organizations (e.g., their resources, priorities, political opportunities, or incentive structures) or individuals (e.g., their civic skills and resources or their psychological orientations toward the state). However, in practice the distinction between organizations and individuals is not clear‐cut: Organizations interpret policy for individuals, and individuals experience policy through organizations. Thus, scholars have argued for a multi‐level model of feedback effects illuminating how policies operating at the organizational level reverberate at the individual level. In this theory‐building article, we push this insight by examining how public policy influences nonprofit organizations’ role in the civic life of beneficiaries. We identify five roles that nonprofit organizations play. For each role, we draw on existing research to identify policy mechanisms that either enlarge or diminish nonprofits’ capacity to facilitate individual incorporation and engagement. From these examples, we derive cross‐cutting hypotheses concerning how different categories of citizens may need policy to operate differently to enhance their civic influence; whether policy that is “delivered” through nonprofits may dampen citizens’ relationship with the state; and how the civic boost provided by policy may be influenced by the degree of latitude conferred on recipient organizations.     

Tracking the Coverage of Public Policy in Mass Media

The average citizen often does not experience government policy directly, but learns about it from the mass media. The nature of media coverage of public policy is thus of real importance, for both public opinion and policy itself. It nevertheless is the case that scholars of public policy and political communication have invested rather little time in developing methods to track public policy coverage in media content. The lack of attention is all the more striking in an era in which media coverage is readily available in digital form. This paper offers a proposal for tracking coverage of the actual direction of policy change in mass media. It begins with some methodological considerations, and then draws on an expository case—defense spending in the United States—to assess the effectiveness of our automated content‐analytic methods. Results speak to the quantity and quality in media coverage of policy issues, and the potential role of mass media—to both inform and mislead—in modern representative democracy.     

One Model Does Not Fit All: The Varied Politics of State Immigrant Policies, 2005–16

This article addresses conceptual and measurement challenges that complicate the study of state immigrant policies. First, given the multiple facets of immigrant‐related policy, policy‐specific effects may be obscured by highly aggregated outcomes variables. Second, variables of interest often capture both time‐varying and time‐invariant effects, potentially producing coefficients that are uninterpretable averages of both processes. This article presents a research design that addresses both of these obstacles and applies it to an original dataset of both integrative and punitive policies adopted over the period 2005–16. The findings suggest that the causal roles of growing immigrant populations, partisanship, and wealth vary across different clusters of immigrant policies and that average, cross‐state effects often differ from within‐state effects. Future research would do well to clearly link theoretical expectations to specific types of policy outcomes and test hypotheses over both integrative and restrictive outcomes.     

Designing a socially efficient cultural policy: the case of municipal theaters in Warsaw

While public support for culture has become a less self-evident privilege than in the past, the economic evidence for benefits a society gains from these goods has become essential for both cultural economics and cultural policy. The aim of our study is to investigate socially preferred ways of allocating scarce public resources among municipal theaters in Warsaw. The problem investigated is a current issue for local policy-making, but in a broader sense, it illustrates how state-of-the-art stated preference methods can be employed to support cultural policy. We find that inhabitants of Warsaw assign a positive value to the broader accessibility of the theaters, and their willingness to pay for making them a truly public good (by introducing a program of highly discounted tickets) exceeds the costs of such a policy. However, we also find that the cost-benefit relationship varies across theaters with different types of plays in their repertories. Our results imply a different level of socially efficient support for experimental, drama, children’s and entertainment theaters.     

Researchers,bureaucrats and the lifeworlds of cultural policy

This paper reflects on the value of cultural policy research, particularly when such research forms part of projects that seek to produce insights or ‘outcomes’ that are useful to non-university research partners. The paper draws from the author’s involvement in a project examining cultural diversity in the arts that was funded as part of the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Project scheme. It addresses Eleonora Belfiore’s provocation that this kind of instrumental cultural policy research routinely amounts to ‘bullshit.’ However, in order to understand the critical function of such research, there needs to be greater attention to the lifeworlds of cultural policy and the multiplicity of the policy-making process. This multiplicity both complicates the possibilities for usefulness in policy research, at the same time that it enables such research to be generative in unpredictable ways.     

Australian energy diplomacy

While Australia is considered an energy superpower, Australian foreign policy has often overlooked energy diplomacy. Given the transformations taking place in global energy markets, the time is ripe to begin a policy discussion in Australia on energy diplomacy. I argue that Australian diplomatic efforts should broaden beyond a historical focus on promoting fossil fuels and securing export markets, to driving global energy governance reforms through the G20. This will not only help to ensure that the international energy architecture is capable of achieving governance objectives around energy security, energy access and climate change, but significantly, it will also help Australia to achieve broader foreign policy goals, such as ensuring emerging economies become responsible stakeholders within the international system.     

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.     

Bonded but not embedded: trust in Australia-Indonesia relations,Keating & Suharto to Turnbull & Jokowi

The aim of this article is to use theories of bonded and embedded trust to explain the ‘roller-coaster’ nature of the Australia-Indonesia relationship. An examination of Prime Minister Keating and President Suharto as a case of bonded trust between leaders reveals the value such a relationship has in building trust in bilateral relations. However, it also reveals that such trust cannot survive changes in leadership if it has not become more broadly embedded in both government and society. This is particularly problematic given Australia’s tendency for rapid leadership and ministerial turnover across the past decade. While President Joko Widodo and Prime Minister Turnbull were able to develop a warm relationship which helped to reset the relationship and enabled them to navigate diplomatic incidents, Malcolm Turnbull’s recent political demise only serves to further highlight the necessity of building trust between societies. Without trust, cooperation between the two states will be limited. Building trust between societies will be required if Australia wants to develop a trusting relationship with Indonesia capable of undertaking deeper forms of cooperation on more sensitive issues – something which will be fundamental to Australia’s ability to navigate growing strategic uncertainty in the region.     

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.     

清代垦殖政策与陕北长城外的生态环境

陕北长城外地区位于蒙陕农牧交错带,属于典型的脆弱生境地带。清代中央和地方两级政府针对当地汉民承租蒙民土地从事农牧业生产这一环节,在不同时期制定了不同的垦殖政策,经历了封禁、招垦、禁垦、拓垦四个阶段,这既是清政府对陕北长城外地区逐步认识和开发的过程,同时也是该地区生态环境变化的过程。在政策—人—环境相互作用的关系过程中,制度、政策与权力的结合对区域环境变化的影响具有根本性的驱动作用。