Evaluating the Effects of Universal Place‐Based Scholarships on Student Outcomes: The Buffalo “Say Yes to Education” Program

A growing number of cities and states have been providing large tuition subsidies for residents through initiatives often called “place‐based” or “Promise” scholarship programs. We examine the effects of a prominent last‐dollar, place‐based scholarship program, Say Yes to Education in Buffalo, NY, on college matriculation and persistence. Employing a difference‐in‐differences strategy comparing changes across cohorts of students eligible and ineligible for large college scholarships, we find that scholarship eligibility is associated with an increase of 20 percent in the likelihood of matriculating into college within one year of graduation, and an increase in the likelihood of persistence into a second year of college of nearly 16 percent. Increases in matriculation are largely at four‐year institutions, where most of the additional funding from Say Yes is concentrated, exclusively at in‐state institutions, both public and private, and are largest at colleges with more selective admission rates. Finally, we see the largest increases in matriculation and persistence among students who attend high schools in the middle third of the poverty distribution. These results suggest that the additional aid provided by Say Yes plays an important role in increasing college matriculation and encouraging students to attend more selective schools.     

The Georgia Lottery: Assessing Its Administrative, Economic, and Political Effects

This article examines the Georgia lottery as a “policy laboratory” and its potential effect on state‐level policy diffusion. The authors summarize an extensive research project they directed that included a survey of every state that offers a lottery, a general population survey of Georgia citizen attitudes toward the lottery, and results from an economic model summarizing the economic effects of the lottery. The analysis reveals that the Georgia lottery has been a significant source of revenue for the state's budget and operates in an administratively cost‐effective manner. The analysis also confirms the conventional wisdom that lower‐income households spend a greater proportionate share of their income on the lottery and that African Americans are more frequent players than whites. Furthermore, the Georgia lottery enjoys broad public support, the key to which appears to be the earmarking of lottery funds to specific, new, popular education programs. However, the data reveal that those educational programs promulgated by the Georgia lottery benefit citizens from both high and low socioeconomic status. Finally, the article suggests that lottery‐generated funds may reach a plateau or peak during the first decade of implementation and that state policymakers should design lottery‐funded programs accordingly.     

Universities and State Policy Formation: Rationalizing a Nanotechnology Strategy in Pennsylvania

Technology‐based economic development programs have become a salient feature of the state policy landscape since the 1980s. While much research exists on the topic, little attention has been given to the processes of policy formation. State programs have moved towards high technology areas emphasized at the federal level over the past decades, and nanotechnology became one of the latest targets. This paper examines the eight‐year process through which Pennsylvania adopted a “state‐wide strategy,” culminating in the Pennsylvania Initiative for Nanotechnology. In this process, programs that responded to the interests of multiple agents came first, and a state policy was formulated after the fact. This pattern of “rationalized policy formation,” as opposed to rational policy formation, may be more common than suspected. Its strengths and weaknesses in this Pennsylvania case are discussed.     

A Modest Defense of Politically Engaged Best Practices: The Case of Legislative Strengthening

Critics of donor‐funded democracy promotion claim that these programs are frequently designed to reproduce social and governmental models drawn from developed countries and imposed on the recipient country without regard to local conditions, with experts parachuted in to provide guidance based on international “best practices.” The critique focuses on first‐generation development with a neutral, technical focus, whereas democracy promotion has evolved toward a more politically engaged approach to programming—what we label as second‐generation and, more recently, third‐generation development practices. We apply this distinction to the area of legislative strengthening (LS) by describing its history from the post–World War II period to the present and provide examples of LS projects to support the argument. The challenge is to combine valuable insights from best practices from decades of experience while adapting them through political engagement with local partners and with bilateral donors.     

Clean Air Federalism: Do States Race to the Bottom?

Proponents of federal environmental standards argue that competition for industrial development creates a “race to the bottom” in which states relax their own environmental standards to avoid losing businesses to states with more “business‐friendly” regulations. This article presents results from a unique survey of state clean air programs that show—contrary to the race to the bottom—a substantial number of states exceed federal EPA standards in a broad variety of clean air programs. Multivariate analyses of these state policies indicate that states strengthen their environmental programs in response to citizen demands rather than weaken their programs in deference to economic pressures.     

Paradigms and Paradox: The Politics of Economic Ideas in Two Moments of Crisis

This article argues that there is a paradox at the heart of Hall's “Policy Paradigms” framework stemming from the desire to see both state and society as generative of social learning while employing two different logics to explain how such learning takes place: what I term the “Bayesian” and “constructivist” versions of the policy paradigms causal story. This creates a paradox as both logics cannot be simultaneously true. However, it is a generative paradox insofar as the power of the policy paradigms framework emerges, in part, from this attempt to straddle these distinct positions, producing an argument that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the second part of the article, I discuss the recent global financial crisis, an area where we should see third‐order change, but we do no not. That we do not strengthens the case for the constructivist causal story.     

Comment on Jill Khadduri's “should the housing voucher program become a state‐administered block grant?”

Abstract

The stated goal of the Housing Act of 1949 is “a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family.” It is time that we delivered on that commitment. Contrary to popular opinion, this does not require spending more money on housing assistance. It can be achieved without additional funds by shifting all funds from less cost‐effective methods for delivering housing assistance to choice‐based vouchers as soon as current contractual commitments permit and by gradually reducing the large subsidies to current voucher recipients. The proposal to replace the Housing Choice Voucher Program with a block grant to states can contribute to this goal by precluding the use of the block grant funds for project‐based assistance, increasing the targeting of assistance to the poorest families, and including the fraction of recipients with extremely low incomes in the formula for determining the performance rating of state programs.     

Trajectories of Arts and Culture Policy in New Zealand

This article examines how arts and culture policy has been discussed since the 1960s in New Zealand, showing how it has increasingly been coupled with the construction of national identity. It also suggests that the rhetoric of the current Labour government marks a significant change. Against the traditional understanding of arts and culture as public and cultural goods, whose vital ‐ if intangible ‐ benefits justify the inevitable economic cost, since 1999 they have been fundamentally re‐imagined as contributing to a cohesive society ‐ through the fostering of “national identity” ‐ and also to a dynamic economy ‐ through the creation of jobs. This change is seen as an element of “third‐way” politics, and is argued to limit dangerously the sort of art that can be funded and valued.     

The Future of Leadership in Public Universities: Is Shared Leadership the Answer?

Leadership of public universities has come under fire—from scandals, from funding, from students, from every direction. Top‐down leadership of institutions of higher education has been described as a “disease.” Shared governance—a mechanism of faculty representation in the leadership and decision‐making processes—a seeming alternative, has been described as “a recipe for paralysis.” In this article, the authors proffer shared leadership as a potential elixir for leading public institutions of higher learning, unleashing creative potential, focusing on pressing strategic imperatives, and enabling sustainable systems that leverage true talent to maximum effect. It is time to move beyond the moribund myth of top‐down heroic leadership and beyond the bureaucratic, political quagmire of the current state of affairs in shared governance. Is shared leadership the answer?      

Assessing the Effects of Immigration and Diversity in Europe: Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces the special issue on “Assessing the Effects of Immigration and Diversity in Europe” to the JEPOP readers. The article starts with a summary of the controversy generated by Putnam's 2007 article “E pluribus unum”. Next, it provides a brief account of the state of the art in the scholarship analysing the link between diversity, trust, social capital and social cohesion. The article continues with a discussion of a number of key problems that affect the existing scholarship, and highlights how the contributions to this special issue overcome some of these limitations. After this, the article considers the implications of this debate for the study of elections and public opinion. It concludes with a succinct overview of the contributions to the special issue and a discussion of how they help move forward the scholarship in this area.     

A research context for welfare reform

Responsibility for the social safety net continues to “devolve” from the federal to state governments, and many states are now confronting the dilemmas inherent in redesigning welfare—dilemmas that faced Congress, too, as it sought to impose new conditions on receipt of public assistance. This article argues that reforming AFDC is difficult because the public has conflicting goals: putting welfare recipients to work; protecting their children from severe poverty; and controlling costs. For 25 years, reformers have viewed requiring welfare recipients to participate in work-promoting programs as uniquely able to balance these goals. Numerous studies have shown that this approach modestly increased employment and reduced welfare costs. More substantial gains have been achieved by some “mixed-strategy” programs, which stress immediate job entry for some recipients and employment-directed education or training for others. Many people remain on the rolls, however, prompting some policymakers to argue for substituting work-for-benefits or community service work (“workfare”) for welfare after a certain period of time, and others for ending all support. The limited knowledge about work-for-benefits programs suggests that, in contrast to work-promoting activities, this approach ultimately costs money. The research record confirms that there are no easy answers in welfare reform, and that states will have to weigh the trade-offs in considering alternative strategies.     

“Editorials at a Glance”: Cultural Policy,Gender, and Modernity in the World War I Bureau of Cartoons

Cultural policy during the Great War, rather than radiating from the central government, evolved from contemporary culture—propaganda, movies, and mass media. The state was a player, but quasi‐public organizations such as propaganda agencies, non‐state actors like the YMCA, and “public opinion” played important roles. The Committee on Public Information (CPI)—the government's propaganda committee—influenced Americans through books, advertisements, posters, and cartoons. This essay examines two of the CPI's efforts: the Bureau of Cartoons and the Division of Pictorial Publicity. In these materials, we can see the intersection of class‐based notions of gendered idealism and a developing media state's use of a sentimental culture of the Victorian middle‐class to represent and motivate the nation. With staff drawn primarily from advertising agencies and newspapers, the Committee's work shows how the formulation of cultural policy is the result of complex negotiated processes involving state interests, cultural liaisons, and ideological assumptions.     

Bridging the Gap between Evidence and Policy Makers: A Case Study of the Pew‐MacArthur Results First Initiative

Developing ways to bridge the long‐recognized gap between researchers and policy makers is increasingly important in this age of constrained public resources. As noted by recent scholarship, progress toward evidence‐informed policy making requires both improving the supply of research that is reliable, timely, and relevant to the policy process and promoting demand and support for this information among decision makers. This article presents a case study of the Pew‐MacArthur Results First Initiative, which is working in a growing number of state and local governments to build systems that bring rigorous evidence on “what works” into their budget processes and to support its use in resource allocation decisions. The initiative's experience to date is promising, although creating lasting and dynamic evidence‐based policy‐making systems requires a long‐term commitment by both researchers and policy makers.     

Comment on Scott A. Bollens's “In through the back door: Social equity and regional governance”

Abstract

The resurgence in regionalism is not coming about primarily because cities and suburbs see themselves as interdependent competitors in the global economy, as argued in Scott A. Bollens's “In Through the Back Door: Social Equity and Regional Governance.” Instead, enough communities are finding tax equity programs, land use measures, and cooperative governance in their own self‐interest to create gentle progress toward regional equity. However, regionalism lags in ending concentrated poverty and racial segregation because few civil rights organizations are raising these issues as fundamental to a regional agenda. The race issue is not being raised because of lack of understanding and because of competing visions on how to do it.     

Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Interstitial Transformation and the Cooperative Movement

In the past few decades, states across several disparate geographical contexts have adopted policies and initiatives aimed at institutionalizing their relationship with groups constituted as “their” diasporas. These practices, which range from creating new ministries for diaspora affairs and reserving seats in the national legislature to granting dual citizenship and allowing members of the diaspora to participate in domestic elections, seem to have a very specific purpose. They are aimed at integrating diasporas as part of a larger “global” nation that is connected to, and has claims on the institutional structure of the home state. This article argues that the best way to understand this phenomenon, conceptualized here as the “domestic abroad”, is to see it as the product of two simultaneous, ongoing processes: the diasporic imagining of the nation, and the neoliberal restructuring of the state. Furthermore, to make sense of the nature and relationship of these processes, we need to focus on the development of capitalist social relations on both global and national scales. This, it is contended, can be best done through the development of a theoretical framework based on the historical materialist concept of hegemony.     

Nonpoor children in head start: Explanations and implications

According to the Head Start Act (1998), children are income‐eligible for the program if their “families' incomes are below the poverty line.” There are a number of statutory exceptions to this general rule and, according to the Head Start Bureau, the result is that about 6 percent of the children in the program are not poor. But the major national surveys of Head Start families report that 30 percent or more of Head Start children are not “poor.” This paper confirms and explains the high proportion of nonpoor children in Head Start: at enrollment, at least 28 percent are not poor; at midyear, at least 32 percent are not poor; and by the end of the program year, at least 34 percent and perhaps more than 50 percent are not poor. Although the presence of some of these nonpoor children seems to be an appropriate or at least understandable aspect of running a national program with Head Start's current organizational structure, the presence of others seems much less warranted and raises substantial questions of horizontal equity. Moreover, taken together, the large number of nonpoor children suggests that the program is not well targeted to fulfill its mission of providing compensatory services to developmentally disadvantaged children—and reveals the essential ambiguity of Head Start's role in the wider world of early care and education. The income and program dynamics that have led to so many nonpoor children being in Head Start are also at work in many other programs, and, thus, our findings demonstrate the need to understand better how income eligibility is determined across various means‐tested programs.     

The Impact of Incentives to Recruit and Retain Teachers in “Hard‐to‐Staff” Subjects

We investigate the effects of a statewide program designed to increase the supply of teachers in designated “hard‐to‐staff” areas, such as special education, math, and science. Employing a difference‐in‐difference estimator we find that the loan forgiveness component of the program was effective, reducing mean attrition rates for middle and high school math and science teachers by 10.4 percent and 8.9 percent, respectively. We also find that the impact of loan forgiveness varied with the generosity of payments; when fully funded, the program reduced attrition of special education teachers by 12.3 percent, but did not have a statistically significant impact when funding was substantially reduced. A triple‐difference estimate indicates that a one‐time bonus program also had large effects, reducing the likelihood of teachers’ exit by as much as 32 percent in the short run. A back‐of‐the‐envelope cost‐benefit analysis suggests that both the loan forgiveness and the bonus program were cost effective.     

The Politics of “Entrepreneurial” Economic Development Policy of States in the U.S.

“Entrepreneurial” economic development strategies at the state level in the United States, which focus on nurturing home‐grown, high‐growth businesses, lack immediate payoffs for politically powerful constituencies, a condition that would seem likely to limit their appeal compared to the alternative “locational” strategy of attracting large investments from elsewhere. Nonetheless, many U.S. states have added programs with entrepreneurial attributes to their economic development portfolios in recent years. This paper explores how the political obstacles to such programs have been overcome. In a few cases, an institutional innovation in the policy‐making process drew in new participants who provided ideas for and support to programs with entrepreneurial attributes. More commonly, the preferences of executive branch officials, especially governors, appear to have been critical to the enactment and implementation of such programs. This finding suggests that economic development policy making may be more technocratic than is commonly believed.