Determinants and Evaluation of Local Energy‐Efficiency Initiatives from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

This article examines variation in local‐level energy‐efficiency grants and corresponding initiatives from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) in the United States. The analysis is based upon a hurdle model of counts of energy‐efficiency grants received by 348 local governments that received these grants from 2009 to 2013, as well as 348 matched local governments that did not receive such funds. City‐level characteristics including amount of federal financial support, per capita income, signaling of preferences for sustainability policies, manufacturing, and political influences are shown to be empirically important determinants of variation in local energy‐efficiency initiatives. The evidence suggests that all else held equal, the $21.8 billion in ARRA funds expended with the intent of increasing local energy‐efficiency programs and policies successfully led to this end.     

Federalism, Preemption, and Implementation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act

This essay provides a positive analysis of regulatory federalismin the dynamic telecommunications industry since the 1996 federalTelecommunications Act. While the 1996 legislation clarifiedsome contentious issues, and established a framework for resolvingothers, implementation by the FCC has not been as smooth asmany participants originally assumed. State regulators havecontinued to play an important role in the industry, which courtdecisions have often upheld. As some jurisdictional issues doget resolved, others that were not anticipated in the legislationare emerging, largely related to regulation of Internet services.     

Implementation of the Federal Chief Financial Officers Act

The Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act of 1990 proposes to rationalize the many financial practices and systems of the federal financial establishment. Due to the significant number and magnitude of the changes required by the Act, those involved in implementing the Act are encountering unanticipated practical problems and issues. This article addresses some of the surfacing difficulties, including, the qualifications of CFO's; implementation costs, standards, and authority; content of financial statements; and the scope of audits including performance measurement.     

Risk and the National Industrial Recovery Act: An Empirical Evaluation

This paper examines the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 to see if the law helped “stabilize” the U.S. economy during the Great Depression. The test measures sample variances of the rates of return in stock price indices for six major U.S. industries as well as the overall stock market and compares those variances across five time periods. The statistics reveal that the NIRA did not reduce risks faced by these firms. Stocks for NIRA-regulated industries did not significantly decline in risk during the NIRA period, as compared with sample variance changes elsewhere during the Great Depression. The paper then interprets the results from a public choice point of view.     

Implementation of the Routine Use Clause of the Privacy Act

Information privacy, the privacy of personally identifiable data held by organizations, gained access to the federal policy agenda in the sixties. The passage of several legislative acts resulted in protection for information privacy in specific environments and circumstances. In 1974, the Privacy Act was passed, providing citizens limited protection for data held by agencies of the federal government. While the Privacy Act is the cornerstone of protection for citizens with regard to government-held data, the law has been less effective than its designers hoped it would be. One major deject of the law is the routine use clause, which has been subjected to broad interpretation and distortion, to the benefit of executive branch agencies which handle personally identifiable data. This article examines the issue of information privacy, with focus on the misuse of the routine use clause and subsequent implications for citizen privacy.     

Performance-Based Budgeting to Enhance Implementation of the CFO Act

On August 5, 1992 the United States Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs passed the "Government Performance and Results Act" sponsored by Senators Roth and John Glenn. In introducing this legislation in 1991 Senator Roth made the following statement. ^* This legislation (S. 20) is intended to put teeth into federal efforts to introduce performance measurement currently under implementation by the Office of Management and Budget under the authority of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990.     

The Politicization of Marriage in Contemporary American Public Policy: The Defense of Marriage Act and the Personal Responsibility Act

The sexuality politics terrain in the United States is currently marked by a complex and contradictory set of developments‐non-traditional family structures are becoming more common, popular opinion is moving in a more tolerant direction, and the lesbian and gay rights movement has enjoyed some victories, but conservative family values and patriarchal heterosexual marriage have been vigorously promoted by influential right-wing social movements and more deeply institutionalized through important public policy initiatives and court decisions. This article considers the theoretical implications of these developments with respect to the conceptual approaches to citizenship and sexuality. It then analyses two major pieces of federal legislation in depth: the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Personal Responsibility Act (PRA). DOMA effectively encourages the states to ban same-sex marriages. The PRA is generally considered as a welfare 'reform' law that imposes compulsory 'workfare' schemes and time limits for benefit recipients. It nevertheless has a significant sexual regulation dimension. Both the religious right's campaign against same-sex marriage and the welfare reformers' attack on the rights of single mothers contribute to a reactionary politicization of marriage. In conclusion, the article contends that it is only insofar as lesbian and gay rights issues are understood more broadly as but one aspect of sexual regulation and citizenship rights struggles that we can develop more effective ways of advancing the sexual liberation movement as a whole.     

当代美国地方政府间关系协调的实践及其启示

当代美国联邦制的实践需要对地方政府间关系进行协调,而协调实践中市场机制与科层制都无法解决全部问题,因此组织间网络作为一种新型治理机制应运而生;当代美国地方政府间关系协调成功的关键在于有效的制度建设,包括多元化的治理机制、良好的制度环境和相对规范的地方政府,这对当代中国类似问题的有效治理具有借鉴意义。     

Fiscal Capacity and Tax Effort of the American States: Trends and Issues

The author examines the historic context of state taxing power and fiscal capacity, and the current efforts of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations to measure fiscal capacity and tax effort using a Representative Tax System (RTS). The two most commonly used methods of distributing federal aid to states are population and personal income, both incomplete measures of fiscal capacity. RTS estimates how much revenue each state and its localities would raise if it levied the national average tax rate for commonly used state and local taxes. The author considers the strengths and weakness of RTS as a measure of fiscal capacity and examines state rankings and trends since 1975.     

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act: Implementation of an Administrative Remedy

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is an administrative remedythat has not been fully enforced to protect the voting rightsof minority citizens in those jurisdictions covered by the VRA.Failure to enforce Section 5 fully is the result of: (I) thestructure of the Section 5 review process, (2) the poor qualityof data received by the U.S. Department of Justice, and (3)the cursory analysis of data by the Equal Opportunity Specialists.What is needed to strengthen Section 5 enforcement is a strongpresidential commitment to protect the interests of minorityvoters. Reform of the Section 5 review process can only takeplace if the president places voting rights enforcement highon his political agenda.     

Race,Representation, and the Voting Rights Act

Despite wide scholarly interest in the Voting Rights Act, surprisingly little is known about how its specific provisions affected Black political representation. In this article, we draw on theories of electoral accountability to evaluate the effect of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provision, on the representation of Black interests in the 86th to 105th congresses. We find that members of Congress who represented jurisdictions subject to the preclearance requirement were substantially more supportive of civil rights–related legislation than legislators who did not represent covered jurisdictions. Moreover, we report that the effects were stronger when Black voters composed larger portions of the electorate and in more competitive districts. This result is robust to a wide range of model specifications and empirical strategies, and it persists over the entire time period under study. Our findings have especially important implications given the Supreme Court's recent decision in Shelby County v. Holder.     

Perspectives on the Capacity of the Australian Public Service and Effective Policy Development and Implementation

It is a long held tradition of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) to invite speakers to address the Fellow's Colloquium as part of the annual symposium, with an aim to spark discussion and debate on a controversial and contemporary topic. In 2010 the debate was focused on the question of whether there had been a degradation of the professional capacity of the Australian Public Service (APS) with regard to effective policy development and implementation. The contributions of each of the four panel members are reproduced here, in part, and they reflect the diverse perspectives which informed a robust and compelling debate. Janine O'Flynn, the editor of these contributions, argues that any claim of degradation is based on rumour rather than hard evidence, and she sets out how we might think about policy capacity from a public sector management perspective. Sue Vardon, the former CEO of Centrelink and the architect of a transformation change program which redefined the delivery of public services in Australia, reflects on the strengths of the APS, but points out the current stresses that it now finds itself under. Anna Yeatman, an expert in political theory and its application to citizenship and public policy, argues that in the last twenty years we have witnessed degradation in the work of government and that this has impacted on policy capacity. Lyn Carson, an expert in deliberative democracy, points to the unrealised capacity that could come from increasing citizen involvement. Policy capacity is degraded, she argues, because we have systems that are neither deliberative nor representative. Individually these contributions spark their own controversies; together they ask us to consider the question in different ways.     

简论在就业指导工作中对医学生实施医德教育

在新的教育改革背景下,教育部要求进一步加强医学院校医德教育,并贯穿于整个医学教育全过程。阐述医德教育与就业指导之间的关系,医学院校就业指导工作中,医德教育实施路径如下:在信息指导中传递医德教育;在思想指导中融入医德教育;在求职技术中嵌入医德教育。     

The Paradox of Implementing the Government Performance and Results Act: Top-Down Direction for Bottom-Up Implementation

Research on the implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act generally has not considered how the strategic plan, annual performance plan, and annual performance report are produced and used. Are the documents good decision and management tools, as the act intends, or are agencies internalizing them to meet the unique needs of their organization? Interviews with representatives of 14 cabinet‐level federal agencies suggest that implementation of the act is not standardized. Instead, it is influenced by the unique challenges that agencies face. Further, there is a relationship between the implementation challenges and the overall use of the documents.     

When the Past is Not Prologue: The Wagner Act Debates and the Limits of American Political Science

The debates over the Wagner Act could have represented a key moment in the ongoing development of the discipline of American Political Science, as neo-Marxist and related class analyses of American politics began to be taken seriously. Instead the debates have been forgotten, and neo-Marxism remains as marginalized as ever. This article examines how one influential scholar, Theda Skocpol, successfully characterized neo-Marxism as hopelessly reductionist and functionalist. Despite successful rebuttals to Skocpol's arguments by Michael Goldfield in particular, the discipline proved more than willing to continue to ignore what neo-Marxism had to offer.     

Insurance Subsidies,the Affordable Care Act,and Financial Stability

This paper measures the effects of subsidies in the Affordable Care Act on adverse financial outcomes using administrative tax data and credit data on financial outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences design with propensity score reweighting, I find that at $100 per capita, ACA premium tax credits and cost-sharing reduction subsidies reduced consumer bankruptcies and severe auto delinquency by 8 percent and 7 percent, respectively, and substantially reduced right-tail delinquent debt and third-party collections. The value of recipients’ risk protection against medical debt payments amounts to approximately 16 to 21 percent of the cash costs of the subsidies, while the subsidies provided substantial indirect transfers to external parties.     

Do Politicians Listen to Experts? The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 and The Capacity to Budget

Last year offered a unique opportunity to compare the ideas of experts and politicians. The 1990 Budget Enforcement Act changed the federal budget process. Allen Schick's 1990 book, The Capacity to Budget, included ideas on how to improve budgeting at the federal level. A comparison is made between the new law and the new ideas in several areas of the budgetary process: deficit reduction; resource rationing; adjustment to changing expenditures; increasing budget honesty; decreasing conflict; rou-tinizing the process; integrating the parts of the budget; and balancing claims and resources.     

States, Counties, and the Questions of Trust and Capacity

This study indicates that there is a high level of confidenceamong county representatives that state officials will be responsiveto local needs, but less confidence in state willingness toprovide fiscal support for programs. The preference for continuedfederal funding of programs is strongly evident. County representativesfeel that their policymaking and administrative responsibilitiesare increasing but that their fiscal (taxing and borrowing)capacities are not being expanded as quickly. The highest levelsof trust in state officials were found among those county representativeswho perceived the greatest increases in local government capacitiesto respond to local problems.