Now You See It, Now You Don't: The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Split Bond Rating in States

Bond ratings on state-issued debt provide a signal to credit markets that help them charge an appropriate interest rate, based on the risk of payment default. Though actual default may occur only in extreme circumstances, observed differences in ratings and interest costs across states and time demonstrate that a sound economy, strong financials, and stable policies matter. When data on the factors that presumably affect ratings is public and easily accessible, making sense of differences of opinion between bond rating agencies is difficult. We suggest that such differences—observed as so-called split bond ratings—are often ephemeral. Utilizing a simulation method to uncover the latent credit risk presented by each state, we show that split ratings on state bonds are often due to the fact that presumed category overlap between rating agencies is absent when evaluated on a common latent scale. Most observed state bond rating splits from 1997 through 2006 can be explained by this category mismatch. Our approach has broad implications for pricing state debt, as well as pricing rated debt in other capital market sectors.     

The Reemerging Concern over Air Pollution in China: the Smog of the State’s Efforts to Guide Public Opinion

In January 2012, Beijing began releasing air quality report of PM 2.5. The move has been credited as a major breakthrough in China’s environmental governance as it is argued that online environmental activists in China were the major driving force behind it. Since then, the issue of air pollution has reemerged as one of the hottest issues and a series of new policies addressing air pollution have been adopted. Facing a relatively new phenomenon (wumai) and heightened public concerns, to what extent is the state still capable of guiding the pubic perception and opinions about the issue? By analyzing the discourse of air pollution in People’s Daily and comparing it with public opinion survey data, the paper finds that the state’s ability to guide public opinion is rather limited, indicating that opportunities do exist for civil society to play a bigger role in China’s environmental governance.     

The Public Cost of Unilateral Action

Scholarship on democratic responsiveness focuses on whether political outcomes reflect public opinion but overlooks attitudes toward how power is used to achieve those policies. We argue that public attitudes toward unilateral action lead to negative evaluations of presidents who exercise unilateral powers and policies achieved through their use. Evidence from two studies supports our argument. In three nationally representative survey experiments conducted across a range of policy domains, we find that the public reacts negatively when policies are achieved through unilateral powers instead of through legislation passed by Congress. We further show these costs are greatest among respondents who support the president's policy goals. In an observational study, we show that attitudes toward unilateral action in the abstract affect how respondents evaluate policies achieved through unilateral action by presidents from Lincoln to Obama. Our results suggest that public opinion may constrain presidents' use of unilateral powers.     

Environmental Protection Versus Economic Development: A False Trade‐Off?

Is a trade‐off between the social benefits of regulation and the economic benefits of development inevitable? We argue that environmental regulation may deter economic growth in some contexts, however, in other contexts the benefits of regulation may be obtained with little or no economic loss. We develop an explanation of the economic impacts of state environmental policy based on a model of public influence on private resource allocation decisions. In this model, we assume utility‐maximizing firms will make investment choices based upon the projected profits on their investments and their willingness to accept the risk associated with the investments. We assert that state policies and administrative institutions influence perceptions of risk by increasing or decreasing uncertainty over future environmental policy and influence return on investments at particular locations by affecting firm‐level production costs. Our results confirm that certain administrative arrangements for environmental regulation may enhance, rather than impede, economic development.     

The Spreading of Innovation: State Adoptions of Energy and Climate Change Policy

The American states are engaged in a variety of policy efforts to mitigate climate change and alter energy usage. While a number of studies have considered the reasons for adoption of renewable energy and climate change policies, they typically consider only one policy in isolation. This study examines policy adoption of 14 energy and climate change programs in a pooled event history analysis. Our primary research questions consider average effects of horizontal policy diffusion, while also identifying factors that vary across policy type. We offer a method of testing whether predictors vary across policies and use this test to incorporate interactions by policy in the statistical analysis. Our results indicate that many of the primary drivers of adoption are political in nature, including state ideology, environmental interest group membership, and diffusion via ideologically similar neighbors. In addition, we find that given policy heterogeneity, a number of determinants vary by policy type, though differences are in magnitude rather than direction.     

How Disgust Influences Health Purity Attitudes

Food and health regulations are increasingly being pushed onto the political agenda, with rising concerns about genetically modified foods, obesity rates, and vaccination. Public beliefs and attitudes on these issues often conflict with the scientific evidence, yet we know relatively little about what influences opinion on these issues. The public lacks clear partisan cues, and many food and health attitudes cut across the ideological spectrum. We argue that these issues represent new ‘purity’ attitudes that are driven by the emotion of disgust. Across three studies, both by measuring individuals’ trait disgust sensitivity and experimentally inducing an emotional state of disgust, we demonstrate the impact of disgust on food and health policy attitudes. Our results show that greater sensitivity to disgust is associated with support for organic foods, opposition to genetically modified foods, and anti-vaccination beliefs. However, we find only limited evidence that experimentally manipulated disgust affects attitudes toward genetically modified and organic foods. Overall, our results demonstrate that disgust plays an important role in attitudes regarding public health and broadens our understanding of purity attitudes.     

流域治理中的政府间环境协作机制研究——以小东江治理为例

跨区域的河流污染问题不仅引发公用地灾难,还制约上下游地区经济社会发展,甚至还容易导致群体性事件,影响社会和谐.但是,传统以地域为边界的管理方式在治理这类跨区域河流污染问题上捉襟见肘.因此,需要常态的治理区域公共事务的机制,以保证跨区域河流污染得到及时、有效的治理.而工程技术层面的流域治理机制必须建立在有效的治理机制上才能充分发挥效用,建立统一的流域管理机构对于小流域治理则制度成本过高、可操作性也不强.因此,地方政府间环境协作是有效治理跨市(县)河流污染的必然选择.采用个案研究方法,通过对粤西地区的小东江(跨茂名市和湛江市)治理实践的研究,发现广东省和相关市政府在作为治理主体时都存在内生性不足,碎片化的治理结构因而最终陷入了治理困境.因此,政府间环境协作是小东江污染治理的必然要求,而这必须建立上级政府监管权威、健全公众参与和流域内地方政府间民主协作的多元治理机制.     

Gone with the Wind: Federalism and the Strategic Location of Air Polluters

In federal systems, both state governments and firms have incentives to strategically locate polluting facilities where the environmental and health consequences will be borne as much as possible by residents of other jurisdictions. We analyze air polluter location in the United States using a spatial point pattern model, which models where events occur in latitude and longitude. Our analyses indicate that major air polluters are significantly more likely to be located near a state's downwind border than a control group of other industrial facilities, results that are robust to a wide variety of model specifications and measurement strategies. This effect is particularly pronounced for facilities with toxic air emissions. The observed pattern of polluter location varies systematically across states and time in ways that suggest it is responsive to public policy at both the national and state levels.     

Responsiveness without Representation: Evidence from Minimum Wage Laws in U.S. States

How well does public policy represent mass preferences in U.S. states? Current approaches provide an incomplete account of statehouse democracy because they fail to compare preferences and policies on meaningful scales. Here, we overcome this problem by generating estimates of Americans' preferences on the minimum wage and compare them to observed policies both within and across states. Because we measure both preferences and policies on the same scale (U.S. dollars), we can quantify both the association of policy outcomes with preferences across states (responsiveness) and their deviation within states (bias). We demonstrate that while minimum wages respond to corresponding preferences across states, policy outcomes are more conservative than preferences in each state, with the average policy bias amounting to about two dollars. We also show that policy bias is substantially smaller in states with access to direct democratic institutions.     

The Perils of Public Health Regulation

Policies that are designed to promote public health should not use coercion to discourage unhealthy decision making. Though public health officials may be experts about medical regularities in a population, they are not experts about which dietary or lifestyle choices are best for particular indiviuals. Experts in regulatory agencies also face several political incentives that undermine their ability effectively to promote health at the population level. Furthermore, without consent, coercive public health policies are extremely difficult to justify to citizens. For these reasons, states should not enforce coercive public health policies, even if the state subsidizes citizens' healthcare. Many of the same reasons to reject coercive public health regulations are also reasons to reject other coercive paternalistic policies.     

Information disclosure policy: Do state data processing efforts help more than the information disclosure itself?

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) was expected to reduce health risks stemming from emissions of hazardous chemicals by increasing public pressure on polluters. However, raw TRI data fails to transmit accurate information fitted to the public's interest. TRI is a massive and complex data set that, in its raw form, provides information on the pounds of toxics released, rather than the risks these releases pose to human health, which is the true quantity of interest. Consequently, raw TRI data needs to be refined and interpreted in terms of health risks by its users, which requires analytical sophistication and substantial data processing. State governments have attempted to increase of the usefulness of the TRI to the general public via two types of policies: (1) selection and dissemination of raw TRI data for plants within the state, and (2) data processing activities producing more refined reports and further data analysis. This study assesses the effectiveness of those two policies, asking how much each contributes to the intended policy outcome of reducing health risks. Our results show that state‐level data dissemination efforts lowered the total number of pounds of chemicals released, but had little effect on health risks. State‐level data processing efforts, in contrast, did lead to significant reductions in health risks. We conclude that simple dissemination of the data was ineffective (and even counterproductive in some instances), and that the states' data processing efforts have played a critical role in achieving the TRI's intended policy goal by providing better information to end users. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Logrolling under fragmented authoritarianism: theory and evidence from China

This paper provides a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of logrolling between interest groups on social welfare in a non-democratic political system. In particular, we focus on China, where bureaucratic interest groups are separate vertical organizations reaching down from Beijing to the provinces and cities. The key question in this paper is: what are the effects of the logrolling of parochial interest groups on state policies and social welfare in autocracies? We address this question both theoretically and empirically. The theory predicts a specific distortion in resource allocation because of logrolling, while the empirical results confirm the theoretical prediction. We find policy outcomes under logrolling are characterized by excessive spending on all the interest groups’ preferred goods and insufficient spending on public goods. We test the existence of logrolling between the Ministry of Civil Affairs and Ministry of Health in China. Our result shows logrolling between the two ministries lead to inefficiencies in social security and health care policies.     

The Democratic Deficit in the States

We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state‐level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy‐specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking “democratic deficit”: policy is congruent with majority will only half the time. The analysis considers the influence of institutions, salience, partisan control of government, and interest groups on the magnitude and ideological direction of this democratic deficit. We find the largest influences to be legislative professionalization, term limits, and issue salience. Partisanship and interest groups affect the ideological balance of incongruence more than the aggregate degree thereof. Finally, policy is overresponsive to ideology and party—leading policy to be polarized relative to state electorates.     

Environmental Commitment among the States: Integrating Alternative Approaches to State Environmental Policy

This article examines variation in state commitment to protectingthe natural environment. We contribute to theoretical and empiricalresearch in this area in two primary ways. First, our dependentvariable consists of a general measure of state commitment tothe environment. Second, we develop a causal model that integratessix major explanatory approaches to state environmental policy.Our results show that stales with liberal public opinion, strongenvironmental interest groups, liberal legislatures, and professionalizedlegislatures are the most committed to environmental protection.States' manufacturing interests and economic resources playa relatively minor role, and slates' environmental conditionsand the influence of the federal government play virtually norole in explaining variation in general state commitment toenvironmental protection.     

When Government Subsidizes Its Own: Collective Bargaining Laws as Agents of Political Mobilization

Government policies can activate a political constituency not only by providing material resources to, or altering the interpretive experiences of, individual citizens, but also by directly subsidizing established interest groups. We argue that state laws mandating collective bargaining for public employees provided organizational subsidies to public sector labor unions that lowered the costs of mobilizing their members to political action. Exploiting variation in the timing of laws across the states and using data on the political participation of public school teachers from 1956 to 2004, we find that the enactment of a mandatory bargaining law significantly boosted subsequent political participation among teachers. We also identify increased contact from organized groups seeking to mobilize teachers as a likely mechanism that explains this finding. These results have important implications for the current debate over collective bargaining rights and for our understanding of policy feedback, political parties and interest groups, and the bureaucracy.     

Toxic waste and public procurement: The defense sector as a disproportionate contributor to pollution from public–private partnerships

Public procurement is a large sector of the economy with most procurement going to the defense sector. Procurement by the defense sector includes purchases made through contracts to private businesses that manufacture durable goods. Manufacturing of these goods results in pollution production with toxic wastes being among the most dangerous pollutants for public health. Despite green purchasing policy goals, most transactions in the United States through defense contracts result in disproportionately high-toxic pollution releases by manufacturers. We find that persistent exemptions granted defense agencies from following green purchasing policy result in a landscape where contractor environmental performance is unchanging with defense contractors persistently polluting in high amounts. Further, we find that defense contractors are linked to most toxic releases from procurement meaning that exemptions may be hindering potential advancements from green purchasing policy. Results can inform the design of new guidance about procurement and expand understanding of environmental inequality.     

A FRAMEWORK FOR THE ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL REGULATION

The emphasis of this paper is on the development of a framework for analyzing the impacts of governmerit intervention on issues of public health and safety. Government policies are classified into three general strategies: regulatory, fiscal, and educational. In most issues, governments pursue policies in all three categories. The authors explain how the effects not only of specific policies, but also of these general policy types can be assessed over the range of social issues. The conceptual framework is tested with regard to a particular issue–alcohol-related traffic accidents–across the American states from 1979-1 984. The results suggest that fiscal and educational policies had little effect, but certain of the regulatory policies tended to be related to traffic fatalities involving alco- hol. The empirical analysis demonstrates the utility of the conceptual framework presented.     

Public capital stock and interstate variations in manufacturing efficiency

This study focuses on the role of public capital stock in contributing to interstate differences in productive efficiency in manufacturing. Our motivation is to assess the role of public capital as a source of persistent regional variations in efficiency, and thus determine if public infrastructure policies might reasonably be expected to alter the competitive environment of a state's manufacturing sector. We use a stochastic frontier production function model, explicitly incorporating infrastructure capital, to examine the relative performance of the aggregate manufacturing sector across states and over time. We calculate an index of productive efficiency and estimate the determinants of statewide variations in it. These results show that variations in per capita infrastructure stocks significantly affect manufacturing efficiency. Considering the behavior of public capital as both a direct and an indirect input furthers our understanding of the role of infrastructure and its implications for regional economic development policies.     

The Adoption of State Climate Change Policies and Renewable Portfolio Standards: Regional Diffusion or Internal Determinants?

This paper draws upon policy innovation literature and quantitatively explains the adoption of state climate change policies, leading to a broader question—what makes states more likely to adopt policies that provide a global public good? First, existing empirical evidence relating to state climate change policy adoption is reviewed. Following this brief discussion, several analytic approaches are presented that test specific hypotheses derived from the internal determinants and regional diffusion models of policy adoption. Policy diffusion is tested as a function of the motivations, resources, and obstacles of policy change. Motivations for policy innovation include environmental conditions and demands of citizens. Resources include state financial and geographic resources, such as wind and solar potential. Obstacles include a state's reliance on carbon‐intensive industries such as coal and natural gas. The results show that internal factors, particularly citizens' demands, are stronger predictors of states' policies than are diffusion effects from neighboring states.     

Correlates of Co-production: Evidence From a Five-Nation Survey of Citizens

ABSTRACT

We employ data from an original survey of citizens in the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, and the Czech Republic to examine correlates of citizen co-production of public services in three key policy areas: public safety, the environment, and health. The correlates of co-production we consider include demographic factors (age, gender, education, and employment status), community characteristics (urban, non-urban), performance perceptions (how good a job government is doing), government outreach (providing information and seeking consultation), and self-efficacy (how much of a difference citizens believe they can make). We also report on results from a series of focus groups on the topic of co-production held in each country.

Our results suggest that women and elderly citizens generally engage more often in co-production and that self-efficacy—the belief that citizens can make a difference—is an especially important determinant across sectors. Interestingly, good outcome performance (in the sense of a safe neighborhood, a clean environment, and good health) seems to discourage co-production somewhat. Thus citizens' co-production appears to depend in part on awareness of a shortfall in public performance on outcomes. Our results also provide some evidence that co-production is enhanced when governments provide information or engage citizens in consultation. The specific determinants vary, however, not only by sector but across national contexts.