Stereotypes in Context: How and When Do Street‐Level Bureaucrats Use Class Stereotypes?

Stereotype use in street‐level work and discretionary judgments is important because of the possible introduction of bias. This article contributes to the study of stereotypes in street‐level work by suggesting that stereotypes are related to both cognitive and social uncertainties. A distinction between uncontrolled stereotype activation in the interpretation of information and controlled stereotype application in decision making is made to allow for a more nuanced study. A unique design combining semistructured interviews and a vignette experiment is presented to accommodate this theoretical framework. Results show that stereotype activation is conditioned by class difference and involves both categorization and simplified assumptions. Stereotype application is conditioned by class as well as by the homogeneity of the social contexts of street‐level institutions. These results suggest that in order to decrease stereotypical bias in frontline encounters, one solution may be to increase social heterogeneity.     

Citizen Participation in Budgeting: A Trade‐Off between Knowledge and Inclusiveness?

Research on citizen participation has noted a tension between fostering an inclusive policy‐making process and simultaneously maintaining a competent pool of participating citizens. This article investigates the implications of this trade‐off by testing the impact of measured levels of inclusiveness and participating citizens’ knowledgeability on two performance metrics: citizen engagement and process efficiency. Results indicate that although inclusiveness may be negatively associated with the level of engagement, both knowledgeability and inclusiveness are positively associated with process efficiency. Overall, the findings suggest that policy makers can pursue the democratic ideal of opening policy making to the citizenry while still maintaining an efficient process.     

Does Disclosure of Performance Information Influence Street‐level Bureaucrats’ Enforcement Style?

Governments use different regulatory instruments to ensure that businesses owners or “inspectees” comply with rules and regulations. One tool that is increasingly applied is disclosing inspectees’ performance information to other stakeholders. Disclosing performance information has consequences for street‐level bureaucrats because it increases the visibility of their day‐to‐day work. Using a survey (n = 507) among Dutch inspectors of the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, this article shows that the disclosure of performance information has an impact on enforcement style at the street level. Findings show that perceived disclosed performance information positively enhances all three dimensions of street‐level bureaucrats’ enforcement style (legal, facilitation, and accommodation). This effect is strongest for facilitation and accommodation and weakest for the legal style. Perceived resistance by inspectees partly explains this effect. Contrary to expectations, more perceived disclosure does not result in more but in less perceived resistance of inspectees by street‐level bureaucrats.     

Environmental Protection Versus Economic Development: A False Trade‐Off?

Is a trade‐off between the social benefits of regulation and the economic benefits of development inevitable? We argue that environmental regulation may deter economic growth in some contexts, however, in other contexts the benefits of regulation may be obtained with little or no economic loss. We develop an explanation of the economic impacts of state environmental policy based on a model of public influence on private resource allocation decisions. In this model, we assume utility‐maximizing firms will make investment choices based upon the projected profits on their investments and their willingness to accept the risk associated with the investments. We assert that state policies and administrative institutions influence perceptions of risk by increasing or decreasing uncertainty over future environmental policy and influence return on investments at particular locations by affecting firm‐level production costs. Our results confirm that certain administrative arrangements for environmental regulation may enhance, rather than impede, economic development.     

Do Primaries Improve Electoral Performance? Clientelism and Intra‐Party Conflict in Ghana

We consider the effect of legislative primaries on the electoral performance of political parties in a new democracy. While existing literature suggests that primaries may either hurt a party by selecting extremist candidates or improve performance by selecting high valence candidates or improving a party’s image, these mechanisms may not apply where clientelism is prevalent. A theory of primaries built instead on a logic of clientelism with intra‐party conflict suggests different effects of legislative primaries for ruling and opposition parties, as well as spillover effects for presidential elections. Using matching with an original dataset on Ghana, we find evidence of a primary bonus for the opposition party and a primary penalty for the ruling party in the legislative election, while legislative primaries improve performance in the presidential election in some constituencies for both parties.     

Should Love Conquer Evidence in Policy‐Making? Challenges in Implementing Random Drug‐Testing of Welfare Recipients in Australia

The Australian Government announced in its 2017 budget that it would trial random drug‐testing of recipients of the Newstart Allowance and Youth Allowance in three locations from January 2018. The Prime Minister described it as a policy ‘based on love’, but that sentiment is hard to find in the policy rhetoric, which situates it in a suite of measures designed to ‘ensure taxpayers’ money is not being used to fund drug addictions which are creating significant barriers to employment'. The policy may make it harder for people to buy drugs with their welfare payments, through income management, but research suggests it will not help them overcome addiction and its costs will exceed any savings it generates in income support. Furthermore, the policy perpetuates ‘medicalisation’ of the problem of long‐term unemployment by suggesting it stems from deficiencies in individuals that can be ‘treated’, despite evidence to the contrary. Finally, the policy claims to close loopholes in enforcement of mutual obligation requirements without addressing structural weaknesses in the welfare‐to‐work model. Each of these issues will pose challenges for those charged with implementing the policy.     

Has the Shift to Managed Care Reduced Medicaid Expenditures? Evidence from State and Local‐Level Mandates

From 1991 to 2009, the fraction of Medicaid recipients enrolled in HMOs and other forms of Medicaid managed care (MMC) increased from 11 percent to 71 percent. This increase was largely driven by state and local mandates that required most Medicaid recipients to enroll in an MMC plan. Theoretically, it is ambiguous whether the shift from fee‐for‐service into managed care would lead to an increase or a reduction in Medicaid spending. This paper investigates this effect using a data set on state‐ and local‐level MMC mandates and detailed data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on state Medicaid expenditures. The findings suggest that shifting Medicaid recipients from fee‐for‐service into MMC did not on average reduce Medicaid spending. If anything, our results suggest that the shift to MMC increased Medicaid spending and that this effect was especially present for risk‐based HMOs. However, the effects of the shift to MMC on Medicaid spending varied significantly across states as a function of the generosity of the state's baseline Medicaid provider reimbursement rates.     

Does Compliance Pay? Social Standards and Firm‐Level Trade

What is the relationship between trade and social institutions in the developing world? The research literature is conflicted: Importing firms may demand that trading partners observe higher labor and environmental standards, or they may penalize higher standards that raise costs. This study uses new data on retailers and manufacturers to analyze how firm‐level trade responds to information about social standards. Contrary to the “race to the bottom” hypothesis, it finds that retail importers reward exporters for complying with social standards. In difference‐in‐differences estimates from over 2,000 manufacturing establishments in 36 countries, achieving compliance is associated with a 4% [1%, 7%] average increase in annual purchasing. The effect is driven largely by the apparel industry—a long‐term target of anti‐sweatshop social movements—suggesting that activist campaigns can shape patterns of global trade.     

Different Processes,Different Outcomes? Assessing the Individual‐Level Impacts of Public Participation

This article empirically investigates the relative efficacy of different direct participation processes. Specifically, it compares the effects of three types of participatory processes (public meetings, focus groups, and citizen juries) on participants' issue awareness, competence, empowerment, and trust in service professionals. The authors hypothesize that all three participatory processes will positively affect these individual outcomes but that the magnitudes of effects will differ across the three processes. Using data from field experiments, the authors test and find general support for the hypotheses. This study contributes to understanding of public participation, particularly in terms of the relationship between participatory design and outcomes.     

What Do Right‐to‐Work Laws Do? Evidence from a Synthetic Control Method Analysis

Using the case study of Oklahoma and a recently developed econometric technique, we examine the impact of right‐to‐work (RTW) laws on state‐level labor market outcomes. Our results show that the passage of RTW laws in Oklahoma decreased private sector unionization rates. Several other state outcomes including total employment rate and private sector average wages, on the other hand, were not affected by RTW laws. The findings for the private sector generally carry over to the manufacturing sector.     

Is Temperature Exogenous? The Impact of Civil Conflict on the Instrumental Climate Record in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Research into the effects of climate on political and economic outcomes assumes that short‐term variation in weather is exogenous to the phenomena being studied. However, weather data are derived from stations operated by national governments, whose political capacity and stability affect the quality and continuity of coverage. We show that civil conflict risk in sub‐Saharan Africa is negatively correlated with the number and density of weather stations contributing to a country's temperature record. This effect is both cross‐sectional—countries with higher average conflict risk tend to have poorer coverage—and cross‐temporal—civil conflict leads to loss of weather stations. Poor coverage induces a small downward bias in one widely used temperature data set, due to its interpolation method, and increases measurement error, potentially attenuating estimates of the temperature–conflict relationship. Combining multiple observational data sets to reduce measurement error almost doubles the estimated effect of temperature anomalies on civil conflict risk.     

Does inconvenience explain low take‐up? Evidence from unemployment insurance

Application inconvenience is one popular explanation for why many individuals do not receive the social benefits for which they are eligible. Applications take time and some individuals may decide that the financial benefits do not outweigh these time costs. This paper investigates this explanation using cross‐state variation in administrative changes that made applying for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits substantially more convenient over the past decade. We find that the introduction of phone‐ and Internet‐based claiming did not have an appreciable impact on overall UI take‐up, nor did it lead to a shift toward recipients that are higher income or likely to be receiving the maximum benefit amount. These findings are inconsistent with a time‐ and transaction‐cost explanation for low take‐up, since remote UI claiming is less time intensive. This suggests that reducing application barriers alone may not be an effective tool for increasing program participation. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

From Research Evidence to “Evidence by Proxy”? Organizational Enactment of Evidence‐Based Health Care in Four High‐Income Countries

Drawing on multiple qualitative case studies of evidence‐based health care conducted in Sweden, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, the authors systematically explore the composition, circulation, and role of codified knowledge deployed in the organizational enactment of evidence‐based practice. The article describes the “chain of codified knowledge,” which reflects the institutionalization of evidence‐based practice as organizational business as usual, and shows that it is dominated by performance standards, policies and procedures, and locally collected (improvement and audit) data. These interconnected forms of “evidence by proxy,” which are informed by research partly or indirectly, enable simplification, selective reinforcement, and contextualization of scientific knowledge. The analysis reveals the dual effects of this codification dynamic on evidence‐based practice and highlights the influence of macro‐level ideological, historical, and technological factors on the composition and circulation of codified knowledge in the organizational enactment of evidence‐based health care in different countries.     

Chains of Love? Global Production and the Firm‐Level Diffusion of Labor Standards

Under what conditions does the global economy serve as a means for the diffusion of labor standards and practices? We anticipate variation among internationally engaged firms in their propensity to improve labor standards. Upgrading is most likely when a firm's products exhibit significant cross‐market differences in markups, making accessing high‐standards overseas markets particularly profitable. Additionally, upgrading is more likely when lead firms attach a high salience to labor standards. Therefore, while participation in global production induces “trading up” behaviors among firms overall, the effect strength varies across industries. We test our expectations via a survey experiment, which queries foreign firms operating in Vietnam about their willingness to invest in labor‐related upgrading. We find strong evidence for the effect of markups on upgrading choices and suggestive evidence for the saliency mechanism.     

What is Issue Competition? Conflict,Consensus and Issue Ownership in Party Competition

Empirical assessments of issue competition lack both conceptual precision in the use of the concept of “policy issue”, and sufficient studies integrating both salience and positional perspectives. This article specifies an operational definition of a “policy issue” suited for the analysis of issue competition in the electoral arena and beyond, and proposes a typology of electoral issues that takes into account the two sides of issue competition – the decision to address an issue, and the adoption of a diverging or similar position on it. This typology allows distinguishing proprietal, consensual, blurred and conflictual issues. The framework is illustrated with an analysis of EU-related issues in the electoral manifestos of British, French and German parties. This source did not enable us to identify any blurred issue, but our exploratory study delivers several conclusions regarding the other issue types. Proprietal issues appear to be marginal, indicating that parties tend to devote attention to the same issues and that issue ownership is highly contested. We further observe a primacy of consensus in EU-related discourses, especially among governing parties.     

Can Political Inequalities Be Educated Away? Evidence from a Large‐Scale Reform

Over the years, many suggestions have been made on how to reduce the importance of family background in political recruitment. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of one such proposal: the expansion of mass education. We utilize a difference‐in‐difference strategy to analyze how a large school reform launched in Sweden in the 1950s, which lengthened schooling and postponed tracking, affected the likelihood of individuals with different family backgrounds to run for public office. The data come from public registers and pertain to the entire Swedish population born between 1943 and 1955. The empirical analysis provides strong support for the view that improved educational opportunities for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds can be an effective means to reduce the social bias of elected assemblies.     

Cheaper,better, and more accountable? Twenty‐five years of prisons privatisation in Victoria

Twenty‐five years after the Kennett government began privatising prisons, Victoria has the world's highest proportion of prisoners in private prisons. When the privatisation project began, it was confidently expected that privately managed prisons would be cheaper, better, and more accountable than traditional public sector provision. This paper examines whether those anticipated benefits have been realised. In doing so, we assess system‐wide operating costs, specific measures of performance, and accountability of the prison system between 1992 and 2017. Using publicly available data, we conclude temporary lower costs occurred but have not been sustained. Similarly, performance improvements are mixed, and enhanced accountability is contested. Although the performance information now available on Victoria's prisons is superior to what was available in the pre‐privatisation era, successive Victorian governments have also overseen arrangements that severely curtail dissemination of such data. This has restricted the capacity of Parliament and the public not only to hold government to account for the operations of the prison system, but also to evaluate the efficacy and impact of the prisons privatisation project. We conclude a more definitive assessment will only be possible when current limitations on accessing performance and other data are lifted enabling greater public scrutiny of Victoria's prison system.