The rise and fall of a policy: policy succession and the attempted termination of ecological corridors policy in the Netherlands

In policy analysis, studies on policy termination are rare. This article offers such a study. It presents the story of how, despite attempts by the government to terminate it, Dutch nature policy on ecological corridors continued to be implemented by regional governments and in the field. A case analysis is presented that integrates theories and insights not only from the termination literature but also from the literature on implementation. The different factors identified in the literature that enable or constrain implementation and termination have served as a basis for developing possible explanations of the case study. They cannot, however, serve as generic theories with predictive power. Policy termination as well as policy implementation are highly contextual processes and the question which factors will enable or constrain policy termination and implementation can only be answered on a case by case basis.

Homeland security and citizen response to emergency situations: a perspective on the need for a policy approach to information access

Open access to public information is a hallmark of American political culture; however, the terrorist attacks on and before September 11, 2001 have prompted a reevaluation of how “freedom of information” should be balanced against the need for enhanced homeland security. This essay begins with a summary of legislative and executive actions that have led to restriction of environmental and health-related information formerly available to the public. Drawing on studies of disaster behavior, it is argued that citizen responders may be significantly hampered by restriction of environmental and public health-related information formerly available by means of public access web sites. The Lasswellian policy decision process is examined to explore the basis for a balancing test for agencies contemplating restriction of information related to environmental and public health-related threats. It is suggested that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) implement guidance for federal agencies in weighing decisions concerning the public status of information.

The Limits of Political Citizenship

Policy makers tend to focus on the extension of citizenship as the primary means by which new populations become incorporated into a society. Although acquiring formal citizenship is necessary in order to participate in many aspects of a state's civic, social, and political life, the extension of legal citizenship is far from a guarantee for full membership. Instead of focusing exclusively on naturalizing immigrants, we need to consider T.H. Marshall's three spheres of citizenship—the civil, political, and social. By extending social elements of citizenship prior to or at the same time as we extend other benefits, we will move towards more complete citizenship for and greater civil and political engagement among all residents in our society—non-citizens, naturalized, and native-born, alike.

Economic Sanctions and Political Repression: Assessing the Impact of Coercive Diplomacy on Political Freedoms

This article offers a thorough analysis of the unintended impact economic sanctions have on political repression—referred to in this study as the level of the government respect for democratic freedoms and human rights. We argue that economic coercion is a counterproductive policy tool that reduces the level of political freedoms in sanctioned countries. Instead of coercing the sanctioned regime into reforming itself, sanctions inadvertently enhance the regime’s coercive capacity and create incentives for the regime’s leadership to commit political repression. Cross-national time series data support our argument, confirming that the continued use of economic sanctions (even when aimed at promoting political liberalization and respect for human rights) will increase the level of political repression. These findings suggest that both scholars and policy makers should pay more attention to the externalities caused by economic coercion.

Stuck with Virtue in Our Pro-Life Future

Callahan is wrong to be pro-death, but he’s right to say that to live well—or for society to have a real future—we have to care about more than mere life. Futile attempts to stop the pursuit of extreme personal prolongevity are contrary to our rights-based way of life. It’s also contrary to human love and dignity to regard the old as a threat.

Brothers’ Keepers?

Relying on rarely analyzed public opinion data from the 1930s and early 1940s, we take issue with the notion popular in contemporary liberal circles that the New Deal era represented a period of expansive commitment to the security and well-being of the poor and politically disenfranchised. At least where the public is concerned—as opposed to the progressive policy makers in the Roosevelt administration—the jobless were regarded with suspicion, immigrants should be forced to “go home,” women belong in the kitchen not on the shop floor. The harsher the economic conditions (by state), the more conservative were the public attitudes. Hence New Deal legislative victories accrued despite rather than because of public support.

Collective Action and Citizen Responses to Global Warming

This paper expands the relevance of the collective interest model of mass political action to explain collective-action behavior in the context of global warming and climate change. The analysis is an attempt to answer Ostrom’s call for a behavioral model of collective action that can be generalized beyond political protest to other collective-action problems. We elaborate, specify, and empirically test a collective interest model approach to citizen policy support, environmental political participation, and environmental behavior related to the issue of global warming. Key elements of the collective interest model—perceived risk, personal efficacy, and environmental values—are found to be directly, and positively, related to support of government policies and personal behaviors that affect global warming. We also discuss the links between the collective interest model and other important approaches to political behavior.

Campaign Activism and the Spatial Model: Getting Beyond Extremism to Explain Policy Motivated Participation

To date, most models of policy motivated campaign participation claim participation derives from the intensity or extremism of one’s policy views. I approach the policy motivation differently, generalizing the logic of proximity voting to model policy motivated campaign participation. Modeling participation as a function of extremism captures the activist’s policy preferences and suggests those with strong preferences participate more, while modeling participation as a function of proximity captures both the activist’s policy preferences and the relevant comparisons to the positions of the candidates. Noting the two alternatives lead to different predictions about variation in individual participation beyond turnout (e.g. campaign activities), I find consistent support for a proximity model of activism and I find no independent effect of extremism once I control for proximity. Moreover, the proximity model’s predictions about ideological responsiveness to changes in the candidates’ locations over time prove robust, while predictions based solely on ideological extremism do not.

Does Political Advertising Persuade?

Well over $1 billion was spent on televised political advertising in the U.S. in 2004. Given the ubiquity of the 30 second spot, one might presume that ads must affect viewers’ vote choices. Somewhat surprisingly, though, scholars have yet to make much progress in confirming this claim. In this paper, we leverage a comprehensive dataset that tracks political ads in the nation’s top media markets and a survey of presidential and U.S. Senate voters in 2004. We ask whether exposure to presidential and Senate advertising influences voters’ evaluations of candidates and the choices that they make at the ballot box. In the end, we find considerable evidence that advertising persuades—and that its impact varies depending on the characteristics of the viewer.

The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments

We report the results of an experiment designed to replicate and extend recent findings on motivated political reasoning. In particular, we are interested in disconfirmation biases—the tendency to counter-argue or discount information with which one disagrees—in the processing of political arguments on policy issues. Our experiment examines 8 issues, including some of local relevance and some of national relevance, and manipulates the presentation format of the policy arguments. We find strong support for our basic disconfirmation hypothesis: people seem unable to ignore their prior beliefs when processing arguments or evidence. We also find that this bias is moderated by political sophistication and strength of prior attitude. We do not find, however, that argument type matters, suggesting that motivated biases are quite robust to changes in argument format. Finally, we find strong support for the polarization of attitudes as a consequence of biased processing.

How High-Yield Farming Saves Nature

High-yield farming—more agricultural output per acre of farmland—has been a boon to mankind and to nature. If today’s agricultural efficiency was the same as in the 1950s, the world would need three times the cropland to produce today’s food supply. That would mean that 15-16 million mi² of forest would have been destroyed—all the global forest area available today. Rising population and increased affluence will require a tripling of agricultural efficiency in the next 50 years if we are to protect wildlife at the same time. More investment in agricultural research and education will be required, but this is what produced the previous green revolution.

Business responses to environmental and social protection policies: toward a framework for analysis

This conceptual paper seeks to advance neo-institutional work that has traditionally portrayed environmental and social protection policies as constraints followed by businesses. Drawing from the policy sciences literature, we propose that in the United States, businesses tend to show increasing resistance as the protective policy process moves from initiation to selection and growing cooperation thereafter. Most importantly, we also contribute to the neo-institutional theory literature by positing that this inverted U-shaped policy process–business response relationship proposed for the U.S. context may be moderated by variations in the level of democracy, system of interest representation, regulatory approach, and national income.

International Obligations and the Morality of War

Americans are not as religiously divided on foreign policy questions as they are over such hot-button, culture war domestic issues as abortion and gay marriage. Nevertheless, surveys suggest that Americans’ attitudes on several foreign policy fronts are consistent with a religious worldview. This analysis draws primarily on the findings of various PRC polls to examine the relationship between religion and three areas of foreign policy: the role of the USA in the world; the nature of international obligations; and the morality of war.

The Freedom of Expression in Global Perspective

This paper presents recent events including the Danish cartoon crisis occasion—a re-examination of John Stuart Mill’s argument for freedom of expression. Despite the appeal of liberalism, Mill’s philosophy had from the start been subject to intense criticism. The rise of political Islam opens a new phase in the debate; the difficulties pointed out by Mill’s critics are indicative of the obstacles that liberalism still faces.

Longevity Ancient and Modern

The article examines illustrations from ancient and modern societies to consider the connections between power, social elites and knowledge of techniques to promote longevity. In pre-modern societies, knowledge of practices and substances to promote longevity were cultivated by elites such as the Chinese imperial court. In modern societies, new technologies—cryonics, cloning, stem-cell applications and nanotechnology—will offer exclusive and expensive methods for prolonging life for the rich. However one important difference between the ancient and modern world is that with secularization longevity is no longer connected with a moral life; longevity is not a reward for sanctity. We have democratized the ambition for long life but not necessarily its realization. The modern quest for longevity appears to be connected with the desire of Baby Boomer generations to hold on to their assets, but while modern medicine may help us to survive forever, it cannot tell us how to live forever.

Would You Volunteer?

Being motivated to volunteer is a crucial condition for both the volunteers and those seeking their services. Yet the reigning conceptual model of volunteering in the field of nonprofit sector studies—an economic one based on the idea that the first may be defined as people engaged in unpaid labor—offers at best a superficial explanation of the motives encouraging them to altruistically offer their time. In light of this conceptual deficiency another definition of volunteering (and hence volunteer) has, of late, been gaining acceptance. Sometimes referred to as a volitional definition, it roots in sociology and social psychology: volunteers feel they are engaging in a leisure activity, which they have had the option to accept or reject on their own terms.

Cohabitation,Marriage, and Child Wellbeing: A Cross-National Perspective

Non-marital cohabitation has become widespread in modern, Western nations. It has led to dramatic declines in marriage rates and contributed to high levels of unwed births and lone-parent families, thus negatively affecting child wellbeing.

Iraq the Vote: Retrospective and Prospective Foreign Policy Judgments on Candidate Choice and Casualty Tolerance

In this article, we model the effect of foreign policy attitudes on both vote choice and casualty tolerance, using survey data collected during the 2004 election. We show that prospective judgments of the likelihood of success in Iraq and retrospective judgments of whether the war in Iraq was right are significant determinants of both vote choice and casualty tolerance. The prospective judgment of success is key in predicting casualty tolerance, while retrospective judgment of whether the war was right takes precedence in determining vote choice. In addition, there is an important interaction between the two variables, so the effect of one is conditional on the value of the other. We believe this is compelling evidence that foreign policy matters, and that it matters in reasonable ways.

State greenhouse gas reduction policies: a move in the right direction?

The lack of significant efforts at the national level to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in the United States has provided the impetus for a number of state programs. This article assesses the efficiency of these programs in making real progress in GHG reductions. It also explores the effect of state programs on the eventual adoption of a strong national GHG mitigation policy. While state programs are likely to demonstrate the viability of new mitigation approaches, they are also likely to create a set of expectations and precedents that will make a strong and coherent national policy more difficult.

International Soft Law, Human Rights and Non-state Actors: Towards the Accountability of Transnational Corporations?

During this age of globalisation, the law is characterised by an ever diminishing hierarchical framework, with an increasing role played by non-state actors. Such features are also pertinent for the international enforceability of human rights. With respect to human rights, TNCs seem to be given broadening obligations, which approach the borderline between ethics and law. The impact of soft law in this context is also relevant. This paper aims to assess whether, and to what extent, this trend could be a proper path to enforce the legal accountability of transnational corporations for human rights. It will be argued that the interplay between law and ethics should be assessed differently depending on which kind of correlative duty is at stake. With regard to negative duties, soft law tools concerning TNCs’ conduct may weaken the impact of hard law. By contrast, when positive duties are concerned, insofar as the horizontal effect of rights cannot be assumed, soft law turns out to be much more useful.