Policy Adoption and Policy Intensity: Emergence of Climate Adaptation Planning in U.S. States

The United States is experiencing growing impacts of climate change but currently receives a limited policy response from its national leadership. Within this policy void, many state governments are stepping up and taking action on adaptation planning. Yet we know little about why some states adopt State Adaptation Plans (SAPs), while others do not. This article investigates factors that predict the emergence of SAPs, both in terms of policy adoption and policy intensity (goal ambitiousness). Applying the diffusion of innovation theory, I consider the relative influence of internal state characteristics, regional pressures, and test for conditional effects between government ideologies and severity of the problem. The results show interesting differences between predictors that influence policy adoption and ambitiousness. States are more motivated to adopt a policy when faced with greater climate vulnerability, have more liberal citizenry, and where governments have crossed policy hurdles by previously passing mitigation plans. The intensity of policies and goal setting, moreover, is more likely to be driven by interest group politics and diffuse through policy learning or sharing information among neighboring states in Environmental Protection Agency regions. These findings support an emerging scholarship that uses more complex dependent variables in policy analysis. These variables have the potential to differentiate symbolic from substantive policies and capture finer information about predictors of importance.     

Bureaucracies,Neoliberal Ideas,and Tax Reform in New Zealand and Ireland

Why did New Zealand adopt one of the most neoliberal tax systems in the world, whereas Ireland pursued a heterodox tax policy of low rates, deep deductions, and distortionary tax incentives? The diverging tax policy trajectories of these two small liberal market economies since 1980 are not well accounted for by conventional ideational, partisan, or political‐institutional explanations. The article argues that the varying degree of neoliberal reform is better understood as the result of differences in the institutionalization of economic knowledge within the state. Distinct administrative institutions in New Zealand and Ireland gave rise to profound differences in the identities, expertise, economic ideas, and policy advice approach of tax policy bureaucrats, which had a major impact on tax policymaking in the two countries.     

Dysfunctional Policy Transfer in National Tax Blacklists

Common sense and much of the policy transfer literature suggests that learning from abroad delivers better policy at lower cost. In contrast, this article argues that policy transfer in tax blacklists has been a dysfunctional process tending to replicate errors. Rather than reflecting learning, normative mimicry, or market pressures, over‐committed policymakers have responded to complexity and crisis by unreflectively cutting and pasting from foreign models. Facing a short‐term political imperative to “do something” about tax evasion in an environment of fiscal crisis, many policy makers have compiled blacklists of tax havens by copying lists of “the usual suspects” from abroad. Evidence for both the process of transfer and the dysfunctional nature of resulting policy is provided by tracking recurring errors in these lists that are unlikely to have arisen independently.     

Fiscal Policy,Deficits and Politics of Subnational Governments: The Case of the German Laender

The first part of the paper briefly describesinstitutional aspects of the German federal system andexamines the economic and fiscal performance of theGerman Laender since 1970. Taking into account theinstitutional settings, especially the fact that theGerman Laender cannot set tax rates individually, wedevelop a highly stylized model of subnationalgovernments that do not have access to the tax rateinstrument and thus have to use expenditures as apolicy variable. The model implies an expendituresmoothing policy of subnational governments andcomplements the famous tax smoothing model. Theempirical section examines whether governments ofvarious ideology show significant differences infiscal stabilization policy. Our results indicatethat regional differences in public debt accumulationand public expenditure policy in general is largelydetermined by interregional differences in economicperformance, whereas we do not find any significantimpact on the ideological composition of the Laendergovernments.     

Policy Failure and Policy Learning: Examining the Conditions of Learning after Disaster

The policy learning literature indicates that governments can and do learn after a policy failure but not always. The purpose of this study is to examine the conditions under which policy failure leads to policy learning. It asks two questions. First, is policy failure associated with policy learning? Second, if policy is associated with policy learning, does the failure initiate different types of learning? Using the policy failure and learning literatures as an organizing framework, this paper analyzes three comparative cases of policy failure revealed by tornados in Greensburg, Kansas (2007); Joplin, Missouri (2011); and Moore, Oklahoma (2013). It finds that failure of the policy process in agenda setting is associated with instrumental policy learning. It also finds that there are two types of failure of decision making: failure to make a timely decision and failure to make any decision. The two types of decision‐making failure are associated with different types of policy learning. In addition, the contextual factors underpinning the link between policy failure and learning are prior experience with the policy problem and capacity to learn.     

Governments and unpopular social policy reform: Biting the bullet or steering clear?

Abstract. Under which conditions and to what extent do governments pursue unpopular social policy reforms for which they might be punished in the next election? This article shows that there exists substantial cross‐cabinet variation in the degree to which governments take unpopular measures and argues that current studies cannot adequately explain this variation. Using insights from prospect theory, a psychological theory of choice under risk, this study hypothesises that governments only engage in unpopular reform if they face a deteriorating socio‐economic situation, a falling political position, or both. If not, they shy away from the risk of reform. A fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) of the social policy reform activities pursued by German, Dutch, Danish and British cabinets between 1979 and 2005 identifies a deteriorating socio‐economic situation as necessary for unpopular reform. It is only sufficient for triggering reform, however, if the political position is also deteriorating and/or the cabinet is of rightist composition. This study's findings further the scholarly debate on the politics of welfare state reform by offering a micro‐foundation that helps one to understand what induces political actors aspiring to be re‐elected to engage in electorally risky unpopular reform.     

How Governments Respond to Business Demands for Tax Cuts: A Study of Corporate and Inheritance Tax Reforms in Austria and Sweden

How responsive are democratic governments to business demands for tax cuts? We research this question in comparative case studies of cuts in corporate taxes and inheritance taxes in Austria and Sweden. We find that governments, regardless of partisan composition, are responsive to business demands, but that fiscal and electoral goals attenuate responsiveness. In both countries, the limited revenues generated by inheritance taxation and greater alignment of business demands with middle‐class voter interests resulted in governments heading business demands for an abolition of this tax. Goal conflict were larger for corporate tax cuts. In both countries, governments tried to minimize these goal conflict by adopting compensatory policy measures, specifically measures to broaden the tax base and simultaneous tax cuts for low‐income groups. The findings suggest that the policy output of business‐friendly tax cuts reflect a balancing of conflicting goals, rather than outright business dominance.     

An Analysis of the Time to Adoption of Local Sales Taxes: A Duration Model Approach

The timing of the decision of local governments to adopt a local sales tax is explored in a duration model with time‐varying covariates. Our framework suggests a set of factors associated with the decision to adopt a local sales tax and we find empirical support for these factors. We also consider whether the adoption by one jurisdiction depends on the adoption by neighboring jurisdictions and find empirical support for interdependency of behavior.     

When do governments trade domestic reforms for external rewards? Explaining policy responses to the Millennium Challenge Corporation's eligibility standards

Journalistic reports and case study evidence suggest that governments have made policy and institutional reforms to achieve or maintain eligibility for assistance from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). However, the empirical scope of the “MCC Effect”—across countries, policy domains, and time—remains a subject of speculation and debate. There is also little rigorous evidence about the conditions under which the MCC eligibility standards have influenced the reform efforts of developing country governments. To address this challenge, we construct an original data set that measures whether, when, and how governments in low‐income and lower‐middle‐income countries responded to the eligibility requirements for MCC assistance between 2004 and 2010. Our econometric analysis of the data set calls attention to an underappreciated factor that shapes the adoption and implementation of externally influenced reforms: the presence of a technocratic reform team with executive authority to introduce disruptive changes to the status quo.     

Continuity,change, and priorities: The quality and use of regulatory analysis across US administrations

This paper compares the quality and use of regulatory analysis accompanying economically significant regulations proposed by US executive branch agencies in 2008, 2009, and 2010. We find that the quality of regulatory analysis is generally low, but varies widely. Budget regulations, which define how the federal government will spend money or collect revenues, have much lower‐quality analysis than other regulations. The Bush administration's “midnight” regulations finalized between Election Day and Inauguration Day, along with other regulations left for the Obama administration to finalize, tended to have lower‐quality analysis. Most differences between the Bush and Obama administrations depend on agencies' policy preferences. More conservative agencies tended to produce better analysis in the Obama administration, and more liberal agencies tended to do so in the Bush administration. This suggests that agencies more central to an administration's policy priorities do not have to produce as good an analysis to get their regulations promulgated.     

Does Earmarked Revenue Provide Property Tax Relief? Long‐Term Budgetary Effects of Georgia's Local Option Sales Tax*

This study examines the long‐term effects of the 1% General‐purpose Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) on the level of property tax in Georgia counties with a pooled interrupted time‐series analysis. The LOST has been earmarked for property tax relief in Georgia counties since 1976, but debates remain on whether the proceeds have been used as additional revenues. We find that the adoption of LOST brought short‐term property tax relief but not long‐term property tax reduction. The result suggests that long‐term property tax relief would not be realized by earmarked revenue without careful policy design to safeguard fungibility.     

Creating Public Value with Tax and Spending Policies: The View from Public Economics

According to the framework rooted in public economics, governments can create public value by focusing tax and spending policies on remedying market failures and addressing concerns about fairness embodied in a social welfare function. By pursuing optimal tax and spending policies, governments navigate the omnipresent trade‐offs between equity and efficiency. Of course, in practice, the process by which policies are adopted does not resemble the planner's problem in social choice theory. In addition, real fiscal policies do not look much like the recommendations that arise from the optimal tax literature. Governments operate in public choice environments that are not conducive to focused remedying of market failure, and they suffer from their own tendencies to fail to achieve their objectives. Nevertheless, many of the tools are in place to help the federal and state governments focus tax and spending in ways that can maximize public value.     

Revenue authorities: are they the right vehicle for improved tax administration?

It is now well recognised that reforms to tax administration are as important as tax policy changes for overall fiscal reform. One institutional model of tax administration, which has been quite widely adopted in Africa in recent years, is that of the semi‐independent Revenue Authority. This approach is based on the executive agency model, widely adopted in the UK and elsewhere, as a way of improving performance of certain governmental functions. This article looks at the arguments for and against the Revenue Authority model, and examines a number of practical issues in the design of such an agency. It draws on the recent experience of Revenue Authorities in a number of countries. It concludes that the Revenue Authority model can offer an appropriate institutional framework for reforming tax administration, particular where low pay rates and rigid civil service systems inhibit effective management. However, Revenue Authorities do not solve all problems, and can only be expected to deliver results if they form part of a wider reform. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Partisan effects in morality policy making

Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.     

从“救济”到“治理手段”？——当前农村低保政策的实践分析：以河南F县C镇为例

作为国家推行的一项福利政策，农村低保要实现对农村贫困人群的救助。然而，在现实中，低保政策经历了从“绝对贫困”到“相对贫困”、从以户为单位到以人为单位的扭曲和变通，以至低保政策在某种程度上成为了基层政权的一种治理手段，从而背离了政策的本意。事实上，低保政策执行中出现的种种问题既是监管力度不够及制度建设不到位所导致，更与税费改革后乡村组织的治理困境密切关联。在这个意义上，基层政权的治理状况既是保障低保政策能否顺畅执行的根本，也是一个现代国家基本治理能力强弱的重要体现。     

Strategic Re‐framing as a Vote Winner: Why Vote‐seeking Governments Pursue Unpopular Reforms

Most political science accounts assume that governments in Western democracies avoid unpopular reforms to protect their re‐election chances. Nevertheless, governments sometimes embark on electorally risky reforms – even in times when they have no slack in the polls. In this article, it is argued that pursuing unpopular reforms can be a perfectly rational strategy for vote‐seeking governments. Based on a simple game theoretical model that compares strategic framing with the classic blame avoidance strategy, it is demonstrated that unpopular policy reforms allow governments to pursue gains of both policy and votes by opting for a highly visible strategy of reframing the substantive reform issue in question. This general argument is illustrated with the substantial 2011 retrenchment of Danish early retirement benefits. This particular welfare state programme was highly popular. Nevertheless, the incumbent Liberal prime minister proposed to abolish it only a few months prior to a national election while his government was trailing significantly in the polls.     

Policy Tool Interactions and the Adoption of State Renewable Portfolio Standards

We contribute to extant policy theory by focusing on interrelationships between existing policies and innovation. In particular, we call attention to the link between supply‐side incentives and demand‐side innovation, which has not been systematically investigated. Our research expectation is that supply‐side policies generally will complement demand‐side policy, leading to a positive impact on the adoption of demand‐side innovations. We test this idea by examining adoptions of renewable portfolio standards (RPS), a demand‐pull approach targeted to renewable energy generation by utilities, in the American states from 1991 to 2008. Event history models show that an index of supply‐side financial incentives has a strong positive influence on RPS adoption. We do not find support for the hypothesis that this effect is contingent on in‐state carbon‐based energy generation. In conclusion, we argue that the study of policy adoption needs to give greater consideration to the interrelationships among policy instruments.     

Are Green Vehicles Worth the Extra Cost? The Case of Diesel‐Electric Hybrid Technology for Urban Delivery Vehicles

A central question for environmental policy is whether the long‐term benefits of energy‐saving technologies are sufficient to justify their short‐term costs, and if so, whether financial incentives are needed to stimulate adoption. The fiscal effects of incentivizing new technologies, and the revenue effects of using the technology, are also policy relevant, given current fiscal constraints. This study evaluates the economic and fiscal effects of promoting diesel‐electric hybrid technology in urban delivery vehicles, an application supported by U.S. policymakers. An economic model is used to simulate the conditional probability density functions of the net present values (NPVs) of diesel electric hybrids annually from 2012 to 2030. The NPV time paths, which reflect fuel price, environmental, and technology trends, show the expected dates that hybrids become economically viable, and allow an evaluation of the net benefits of hybrid technology as an investment over the entire simulation horizon. The NPV distributions are computed for five stakeholder classes, including transportation firms, parties benefiting from reduced externality damages, state and local governments, and the larger society. The analysis shows that hybrid technology investment does not appear to be justified from a societal perspective at a 7 percent discount rate, but the probability for positive net returns increases substantially at a 3 percent rate.     

Testing the Effects of Sale Method Restrictions in Municipal Bond Issuance: The Case of New Jersey

Can state governments save money by restricting the practice of selling tax‐exempt bonds through negotiation, or do such regulations impose additional costs? Circumstances in New Jersey recently created a natural experiment to test this proposition. This study finds significant cost savings for those issues sold through competition both before and after such restrictions were put in place. All else equal, issues sold competitively after the policy change did not have significantly higher interest costs, despite a shift in volume toward competitive sales, suggesting that there exists room for increased use of competitive sales without incurring a cost penalty.     

The Demise of Tax Credits

Introduced in the late 1990s, tax credits grew under successive Labour governments to become a cornerstone of UK social policy. Distinguished from traditional welfare policies by their target group and their mode of administration, and with goals that appeared capable of commanding support across the ideological spectrum, tax credits until recently seemed to hold the key to tackling poverty in a politically popular manner. But since 2010 the tax credit system has been systematically dismantled, initially qualitatively and latterly also quantitatively. This paper discusses the multiple factors that help to explain the rapid fall from grace in the UK of this liberal approach to supporting the incomes of poor working households.