Community Privilege and Environmental Justice: An Agent‐Based Analysis

Several theories compete to explain observed race‐ and ethnicity‐based environmental injustice in society. This paper focuses on analyzing the extent to which firms' siting decisions based on community privilege can explain this outcome. A unique feature of this analysis is that we include analysis of both unwanted land uses (disamenity firms) and desired land uses (amenity firms). The environmental justice analysis of amenities other than green spaces is rare, but amenities are crucial components of urban areas to which environmental justice studies must attend. We use an agent‐based model to explore community outcomes when environmental disamenities choose locations based on low community privilege, and compare this with scenarios in which disamenities only seek to minimize the cost of land. We also assess differences in environmental justice outcomes when amenities choose locations in areas with high community privilege. While disamenities' focus on locating in areas with low community privilege indeed affects environmental equity, the effect of amenity location is also important, and there are powerful interaction effects. The importance of privilege‐based location is found in these simulations regardless of which social group—majority or minority—is assumed to be the privileged group. This study suggests a limitation of EJ policies and models that focus on the politics of disamenity siting without considering the politics of amenity siting.     

Selecting the Condorcet Winner: single-stage versus multi-stage voting rules

In this paper, I study elections where voters are strategic. I find that the commonly used voting rules, such as Plurality Rule, Majority Rule, Approval Voting, and Single Transferable Vote, do not always select the Condorcet Winner and suffer from multiple equilibria. Multi-stage voting rules offer a way to get around this problem. I introduce two voting rules—Multi-Stage Runoff and the Nominate-Two Rule—that select the Condorcet Winner as the unique equilibrium outcome under mild conditions. I show that a third class of voting rules—Binary Voting Trees—also select the Condorcet Winner.     

Fair rules for siting a high-level nuclear waste repository

Geologic repositories are designed to resolve the ever-growing problem of high-level nuclear waste, but these facilities invite intense local opposition due to the perceived severity of the risks and the possibility of stigma effects. This analysis examines whether the perceived fairness of the siting process affects local residents' support for hosting a repository. In particular, a survey of 1001 Nevada residents is used to test the hypothesis that an individual's willingness to accept a local repository will increase if he or she is convinced that this is the safest disposal option available. A logistic analysis indicates that beliefs regarding relative suitability have an independent effect on the acceptability of a local repository (i.e., Yucca Mountain). The article then considers the question of how to implement an optimizing strategy for siting facilities, comparing an idealized strategy against the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982 and the Amendments Act of 1987. Although choosing the safest site seems as if it could enhance public acceptance of the repository program, there is currently little prospect of identifying the best option to the high-level waste problem and, as a result, little chance of gaining the public support that is necessary to promote a successful siting outcome.     

Justice, Democracy, and Hazardous Siting

In this essay we examine some issues of justice associated with the siting of hazardous industrial facilities. Utilitarian justifications of siting decisions are inadequate because they fail to address questions of fairness. Approaches that consider questions of distributive equity provide a better framework for siting justice, but are still incomplete. Limiting questions of justice to the distribution of benefits and burdens fails to examine the justice of procedures for deciding such issues of distribution. We argue that justice requires a participatory communicative democratic process for siting hazardous facilities, in two respects. It is prima facie unjust to impose a risk on citizens without their having participated in the siting process. Participatory communicative democratic procedures in facility siting, moreover, when structured according to specific norms of discussion and inclusion, are likely to yield the most just outcomes. We propose procedural as well as substantive conditions for such democratic procedures, and briefly apply these conditions to evaluate the siting of a landfill in Switzerland.     

Corruption and citizen participation in local government: Evidence from Latin America

Prior research indicates that corruption hampers economic growth and imposes high social costs. From the perspective of democratic theory, corruption does not just violate the fiduciary obligations with which the public entrusts government officials; it has detrimental effects on the legitimacy of the democratic process as a whole. If citizens view their government as corrupt and dishonest, they become cynical about political life, and as a result, they are less likely to participate in democratic governance. This article examines the effect of corruption—measured through both perception and experience—on citizen participation in local government. Using data from the AmericasBarometer survey on the new democracies in Latin America, we test whether the withdrawal effects registered in terms of participation in elections hold for the participation in city administration. The results show that citizens' willingness to participate in local governance relates positively with their experience of corruption, but not with their perception of corruption.     

Testing for environmental racism: Prejudice,profits, political power?

Economic theories offer many explanations for why exposure to environmental risks may vary by race: pure discrimination by polluters or politicians in siting decisions; differences in willingness to pay for environmental amenities linked to income or education levels; and variations in the propensity of communities to engage in collective action to oppose the location of potential polluters. This article tests these hypotheses by focusing on the capacity decisions of commercial hazardous waste facilities. Zip code neighborhoods targeted for capacity expansion in plans for 1987–1992 by commercial hazardous waste facilities had an average non white population of 25 percent, versus 18 percent for those areas without net expansion. Differences in the probability that residents will raise a firm's expected location costs by engaging in collective action to oppose capacity siting offer the best explanation for which neighborhoods are selected for capacity expansions.     

Regulatory Analysis Procedures and Political Influence on Bureaucratic Policymaking

Well‐known theories suggest that administrative procedures may be used as mechanisms of political control of the bureaucracy. This study investigates whether three common regulatory analysis procedures—cost‐benefit analysis, risk assessment, and economic impact analysis—lead to greater influence by political officials on bureaucratic policymaking. Multivariate analyses of data from a unique survey of state administrators indicate that regulatory analysis requirements are associated with decreases in the perceived influence of elected political officials on the content of administrative rules. This association is particularly evident in cases where proposed rules are subjected to a cost–benefit test. These findings contradict prominent theories of administrative procedures, but are consistent with recent research on the political power of administrative agencies.     

The Political Economy: Political Attitudes and Economic Behavior

It has long been recognized that voters bring their political behaviors in line with economic assessments. Recent work, however, suggests that citizens also engage in economic behaviors that align with their confidence—or lack thereof—in the political system. This alignment can happen consciously or, as we suggest, unconsciously, in the same way that positivity carries over to other behaviors on a micro-level. Using monthly time series data from 1978 to 2008, we contribute further evidence of this relationship by demonstrating that political confidence affects consumer behavior at the aggregate level over time. Our analyses employ measures more closely tied to the theoretical concepts of interest while simultaneously accounting for the complex relationships between subjective and objective economic indicators, economic behavior, political attitudes, and the media. Our results suggest that approval of the president not only increases the electorate’s willingness to spend money, but also affects the volatility of this spending. These findings suggest that the economy is influenced by politics beyond elections, and gives the “Chief Economist” another avenue by which they can affect the behavior of the electorate.     

Social and Political Consequences of Administrative Corruption: A Study of Public Perceptions in Spain

Spain experienced an outbreak of public sector corruption—much of it related to the involvement of regional and local administrators and politicians in the country's urban development boom—that angered the public and sparked calls for government reform. Using data from a 2009 survey that followed these events, the authors examine the association between perceived corruption and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens, including satisfaction with government and democracy, social and institutional trust, and rule‐breaking behaviors. The findings suggest that perceptions of administrative as well as political corruption are associated with less satisfaction, lower levels of social and institutional trust, and a greater willingness to break rules. Although these survey results cannot prove causation, they are consistent with the notion that administrative and political corruption damages the legitimacy of government in the eyes of citizens and weakens the social fabric of democratic society.     

From practitioner wisdom to scholarly knowledge and back again

The relationship between scholarly knowledge in public management and the conventional wisdom of capable practitioners needs to be clarified. If we accept that improving practical wisdom is the ultimate objective of scholarly studies in public management, practitioner experience can usefully serve as the starting point of such studies as well. This article uses the maxims about coping with “overhead agencies” supplied by one respected practitioner, Gordon Chase, as a source of ideas concerning the direction of scholarly work. It also conceptualizes three types of practitioner wisdom—rules, principles, and checklists—and advises academic researchers to concentrate on clarifying the conceptualization of the principles and checklists and empirically refining the rules. A focus on those rules that protect the practitioner against large downside risks is especially important.     

Who Votes for the Future? Information,Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting

Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.     

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

Scholars debate the relative strength of economic and ‘socio-psychological’ sources of anti-immigrant sentiment. However, the literature often fails to distinguish legal from illegal immigration and therefore overlooks a major instance in which this debate is moot. To address this issue, we develop a theory that recognizes two different modes of evaluating immigrants: “attribute-based” judgment, in which respondents weigh immigrants’ desirability based on individual characteristics—human capital, race, language ability, and so on—and “categorical” judgment, which disregards these altogether. Categorical judgments arise when a policy issue triggers blanket considerations of justice or principle that obviate considerations about putative beneficiaries’ individual merits, instead evoking overriding beliefs about the desirability of the policy as a whole or casting the entire category as uniformly deserving or undeserving. We use experimental evidence from two national surveys to show that the principal distinction between attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration is not in the relative weight of immigrants’ attributes but the much greater prevalence of categorical assessments of illegal immigration policy, much of it rooted in rigid moralistic convictions about the importance of strict adherence to rules and laws.     

Public support for electoral reform: The role of electoral system experience

What affects public support for electoral reform? How does experience with different electoral systems affect people's willingness to support electoral reform? Given the salience of changes to election rules even when they are passed via the legislature and the increasing use of referenda as alternative mechanisms for change, these questions are critical to understanding when electoral reform will occur. I argue that experience (specifically, with an electoral system similar to that under consideration) affects public opinion by reducing uncertainty about the likely effects of reform and thus affects support for reform (although the direction of the effect depends on partisan bias). Moreover, I argue that experience is most important in the absence of strong party cues. I leverage subnational electoral system variation in the United Kingdom and find that experience does affect support for reform — negative experiences decrease support for reform. The results have implications for the possibility of electoral reform in the UK and beyond.     

The role of compensation in siting hazardous facilities

Empirical evidence indicates that compensation can prove effective in gaining public acceptance for siting facilities on the benign end of the spectrum (e.g., landfills, prisons), but is subject to serious limitations when it comes to facilities that the public regards as particularly risky or of questionable legitimacy such as nuclear waste repositories. These facilities require creative mitigation measures such as independent inspections of the facility and local shutdown power. Even then they may be viewed as too risky to be acceptable with or without compensation. This article proposes a two-stage siting process which recognizes the importance of regulations and safety standards (Stage 1) while employing a voluntary process with compensation to address concerns with equity and efficiency (Stage 2).     

Competing loyalties in electoral reform: An analysis of the U.S. electoral college

A central tenet in the electoral systems subfield is that parties, when in power and motivated by partisan interest, seek desired outcomes via the strategic adoption of electoral rules. Such a focus, however, omits a key point: electoral rules also distribute power among geographic units. If, within a party, the partisan and geographic interests of some members conflict, then the canonical relationship between partisanship and rule choice may be conditional. The U.S. electoral college provides an opportunity to test for such intra-party variation, because it advantages some states over others and thus makes salient geographic allegiances. Using an original dataset on one reform proposal—the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)—I find evidence of competing loyalties. Although NPVIC advances furthest when Democrats control state lawmaking, a state's status as a swing—but not as an overrepresented—state weakens the relationship to the point where even Democrats are unlikely to aid NPVIC.     

Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs

Economic elites regularly seek to exert political influence. But what policies do they support? Many accounts implicitly assume economic elites are homogeneous and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. We shed new light on heterogeneity in economic elites' political preferences, arguing that economic elites from an industry can share distinctive preferences due in part to sharing distinctive predispositions. Consequently, how increases in economic elites' influence affect inequality depends on which industry's elites are gaining influence and which policy issues are at stake. We demonstrate our argument with four original surveys, including the two largest political surveys of American economic elites to date: one of technology entrepreneurs—whose influence is burgeoning—and another of campaign donors. We show that technology entrepreneurs support liberal redistributive, social, and globalistic policies but conservative regulatory policies—a bundle of preferences rare among other economic elites. These differences appear to arise partly from their distinctive predispositions.     

On the accuracy of regulatory cost estimates

This study compares ex ante estimates of the direct costs of individual regulations to ex post assessments of the same regulations. For total costs the results support conventional wisdom, namely that the costs of regulations tend to be overestimated. This is true for 14 of the 28 rules in the data set discussed, while for only 3 rules were the ex ante estimates too low. For unit costs, however, the story is quite different. At least for EPA and OSHA rules, unit cost estimates are often accurate, and even when they are not, overestimation of abatement costs occurs about as often as underestimation. In contrast, for those rules that use economic incentives, unit costs are consistently overestimated. The difference between the total‐cost and the unit‐cost results is caused by frequent errors in estimates of the effects of individual rules, which suggests, in turn, that the rule's benefits may also be overestimated. The quantity errors are driven both by difficulties in determining the baseline and by incomplete compliance. In cases of unit‐cost overestimation, unanticipated technological innovation appears to be an important factor — especially for economic incentive rules, although procedural and methodological explanations may also apply. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy and Management.     

Governance conditions,roles and capacity‐building needs in the rebel‐held areas of Southern Sudan

An assessment is made of the state of sustainable human development (SHD) and the institutions of governance that are in the process of being established in the rebel‐held areas of Southern Sudan. The development roles of the main governance actors—government, civil society and the private sector—are examined and capacity‐building needs are described. The importance of good leadership, institutionalised partnerships between government and national and international NGOs, and capacity building for transparency and accountability is stressed. Most pointedly, the risks of allowing governance practices, suited to the management of a liberation struggle, to spill over into the civil administration of a peaceful state are emphasised. The conditions necessary for the institutionalisation of sound governance practices are discussed. Of particular importance are a genuine desire on the part of the leadership to establish such conditions and a willingness on the part of external donors to address issues of accountability and transparency openly in collaboration with the leadership. The data are also suggestive of broad development strategies that address the bases of SHD and empowerment. These broad strategies are designed to improve the very low levels of health and education that exist in the Southern Sudan, and thereby empower people to engage in economic activity and in governance decision‐making. Rehabilitation and maintenance of the physical infrastructure underlies all development activity. The findings highlight the governance difficulties faced by war‐torn societies, the challenges facing post‐crisis administrations and (confirming Caplan 2002) the need for such administrations to possess sufficient executive authority to be able to perform effectively in situations of ‘pre‐state, post‐imperial chaos’. Most critical of all, however, is the genuine interest of the major powers in doing more than—when it suits them—extinguishing the flames of conflict or establishing acquiescent political regimes following the military pacification of ‘rogue’ or anarchic states. Effective post‐crisis administration and development calls for much greater commitment of resources from the major powers than has been forthcoming to date, reflecting a belief among them that equitable and sustainable global development is the preferred route to the prevention of such crises. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Two-tiered political entrepreneurship and the congressional committee system

Theories of political entrepreneurship usually focus on the construction of coalitions necessary to change policy. We argue that political entrepreneurs who are unable to secure favored policies may redirect their efforts to a “higher tier,” attempting to change the rules of the game to enable the exploitation of future political profit opportunities. We present a taxonomy of three levels of political rules—pre-constitutional, constitutional, and post-constitutional—and identify the salient characteristics of institutional entrepreneurship that targets rules at each level. The development of the congressional committee system is explored as a case study in entrepreneurship over post-constitutional rules.     

Formal independence of regulatory agencies and Varieties of Capitalism: A case of institutional complementarity?

The Varieties of Capitalism literature posits that national economic institutions reflect the mode of coordination of a country's market actors. Despite the importance of this claim and a rich literature on the emergence of regulatory capitalism, few studies test such prediction for Independent Regulatory Agencies (IRAs). This article connects the two fields of research by analysing the impact of economic coordination on the formal independence of IRAs. The results show that, beyond issues of credible commitment and policy stability, the collective action capacity of market actors matters. In particular, regulators in Coordinated Market Economies enjoy less independence than in Liberal Market Economies, while intermediate regimes grant IRAs the least autonomy. The policy implications are nontrivial. Similar to other macroeconomic institutions, inappropriate combinations of economic coordination and IRA independence may engender Pareto‐suboptimal regulatory solutions. In such cases, policymakers should reconsider the rules governing national regulators.