Regulating Autonomy: An Assessment of Policy Language for Highly Automated Vehicles

Self‐driving cars (also known as driverless cars, autonomous vehicles, and highly automated vehicles [HAVs]) will change the regulatory, political, and ethical frameworks surrounding motor vehicles. At the highest levels of automation, HAVs are operated by independent machine agents, making decisions without the direct intervention of humans. The current transportation system assumes human intervention though, including legal and moral responsibilities of human operators. Has the development of these artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous system (AS) technologies outpaced the ethical and political conversations? This paper examines discussions of HAVs, driver responsibility, and technology failure to highlight the differences between how the policy‐making institutions in the United States (Congress and the Public Administration) and technology and transportation experts are or are not speaking about responsibility in the context of autonomous systems technologies. We report findings from a big data analysis of corpus‐level documents to find that enthusiasm for HAVs has outpaced other discussions of the technology.     

The Effects of Women Officeholders on Environmental Policy

Studies show that women and girls consistently demonstrate higher levels of concern for the environment than men and boys. Separately, research also indicates that women officeholders pay particular attention to the issues prioritized by their female constituents. Interestingly, despite the consistency of the gender gap in attitudes to environmental issues the literature has paid scant attention to the role of women officeholders in the adoption of environmental policy. The goal of this paper was to start to address that lacuna. Using pooled cross‐sectional time series analyses of environmental standards in 18 Western parliamentary democracies (1990–2012), our initial findings indicate women officeholders are associated with the adoption of higher environmental standards.     

Policy Narratives across Two Languages: A Comparative Study using the Narrative Policy Framework

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) focuses on the role of narratives, drawing from a rich scholarship in narrative, language, and culture. Despite the understanding that narratives are constructions of language and that narrative construction differs across languages, NPF studies have not focused on policy narratives in languages other than English. Language characteristics of narratives are important to assess the stability of policy narratives when there are multiple dominant languages in a political system. This study investigates the use of narrative elements in policy narratives in agricultural biotechnology policy in India across Hindi and English media coverage to examine the NPF assumption that narratives have generalizable narrative elements irrespective of variation in linguistic context and, specifically, tests the transportability of narrative elements. Findings validate the transportability of narrative elements in Hindi narratives, indicate variation in the use of narrative elements over time, and have implications for applying NPF across languages.     

Venue Preference and Earthquake Mitigation Policy: Expanding the Micro‐Model of Policy Choice

Seismologists have reported that a majority of recent earthquakes in Oklahoma have been triggered by the activities of oil and gas companies. Despite this fact, there is evidence of strong opposition toward earthquake mitigation policy. In this article, we argue that how individuals define issues affect their policy choice. Furthermore, we incorporate the concept of venue shopping from the literature on macro theories of the policy process to investigate the effect of problem definition in shaping individual venue preference for policy choice. Using unique survey data, we find that problem definition, particularly issue causality and issue image, is strongly related to individual support for earthquake mitigation policy. However, a more nuanced relationship between individual problem definition and venue preference is observed. Our findings contribute to scholarly endeavors to understand the politics of problem definition at an individual level, which may be the precursor of understanding policy choices at the institutional level.     

Patterns of Local Policy Disruption: Regulatory Responses to Uber in Ten North American Cities

Since its inception in 2009, Uber has grown into a technology behemoth, with operations in over 70 countries and 500 cities around the world. Along the way, it has successfully forced regulatory upheaval in hundreds of local taxi markets controlled by municipal authorities. In this sense, Uber is not only a market disruptor, but also a policy disruptor. This paper examines the nature of such policy disruption at the local level by reviewing regulatory responses to Uber in ten North American cities. We find that regulatory outcomes are a function of two factors: Uber’s government relations strategy, either cooperative or confrontational, and the degree to which local governments perceive Uber as complementary or harmful to the existing marketplace. We conclude by proposing a typology of regulatory responses to Uber as a basis to identify patterns in the behavior of municipal regulatory authorities and political leaders.     

How Values Shape Program Perceptions: The “Organic Ethos” and Producers’ Assessments of U.S. Organic Policy Impacts

Among the more recognizable programs related to natural and sustainable food is the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program. Although the robustness of the organic food market is difficult to contest, many debate the extent to which U.S. organic policy outcomes adequately serve consumers and the organic agriculture producers they rely on. This paper engages the debate from the perspective of certified organic producers. Drawing on the results of a nationwide survey of USDA‐certified producers, we first provide a snapshot of how producers assess the environmental, consumer, and market impacts of U.S. organic food policy. We then examine the extent to which organic producers’ policy impact perceptions are associated with their alignment with an “organic ethos”—understood as producers’ commitment to core organic principles and the organic movement. The paper highlights producers’ values as perceptual filters and cognitive mechanisms that help shape producers’ policy impacts perceptions, illustrating a contributing factor to the enduring nature of organic policy debates.     

Conservation in Context: Toward a Systems Framing of Decentralized Governance and Public Participation in Wildlife Management

Governance scholars have long championed the adaptive utility of decentralized management institutions, in part due to their ability to bring diverse stakeholders into decision‐making processes. However, research into the link between decentralization and participation often looks at policy design but bypasses important system feedbacks that shape sustained participation over time. To paint a more robust picture detailing how decentralization and participation are related, this paper uses a complex systems framework to explore interacting structural, operational, and cultural components of decentralized wildlife governance institutions in the United States and Botswana. Through this comparative analysis, I argue that the landscape of public participation in decentralized governance institutions appears to be significantly impacted by three factors: 1) how decentralization processes occurred, 2) where in the process of decision making participation is situated, and 3) perceptions of power distribution between groups with competing interests.     

The devil we know and the angel that did not fly: An examination of devil/angel shift in twitter fracking “debates” in NY 2008–2018

Recent work has applied the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine narrative strategies in policy debates on social media platforms. We contribute to the literature by applying the NPF to fracking policy debates in New York using well-established Natural Language Processing tools, including sentiment analysis. We combine this computational approach with a qualitative hand-coding of pro- and antifracking Twitter influentials. This approach allows us to consider a much larger corpus of tweets over a much longer time frame than has been done thus far. We adapt and test NPF propositions related to the use of the devil/angel shift strategies before and after a major state-wide policy change, that is, a state-wide moratorium on high volume hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Overall, we find evidence for the use of the devil shift narrative strategy by the pro-fracking coalition aimed at the Governor prior to the moratorium. After the moratorium, the relative percentage of Tweets containing devil shift sentiments decreases as the pro-fracking coalition generally downshifts in its use of angel shift language without a corresponding increase in devil shift language, whereas, conversely, the anti-fracking coalition generally downshifts in its use of devil shift language without a general increase in angel shift language. When we shifted our analysis to Tweets containing fracking and the Governor, we found a similar postban decrease in devil shift language among anti-fracking users. Our findings offer lessons for using computational tools in the NPF as an approach to expand analytic ability and for the operationalization of concepts such as narrative strategies and policy entrepreneurs.     

Neuerungen im Obsorgeverfahren

Der Senat h?lt es für notwendig und sachgerecht, der Maxime des Kindeswohls (§ 137 Abs 1 ABGB) im Obsorgeverfahren dadurch zu entsprechen, dass der OGH aktenkundige Entwicklungen, die die bisherige Tatsachengrundlage wesentlich ver?ndern, – ungeachtet des im Revisionsrekursverfahren an sich herrschenden Neuerungsverbots (§ 66 Abs 2 Au?StrG) – auch dann berücksichtigen muss, wenn sie erst nach der Beschlussfassung einer der Vorinstanzen eingetreten sind.     

Sachbezugsverordnung

§ 2 der Sachbezugsverordnungen wird als gesetzwidrig aufgehoben (wobei die Aufhebung der zuletzt genannten Bestimmung mit Ablauf des 31. 12. 2008 in Kraft tritt).