The Effect of Medical Marijuana Laws on the Health and Labor Supply of Older Adults: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

Older adults are at elevated risk of reducing labor supply due to poor health, partly because of high rates of symptoms that may be alleviated by medical marijuana. Yet, surprisingly little is known about how this group responds to medical marijuana laws (MMLs). We quantify the effects of state medical marijuana laws on the health and labor supply of adults age 51 and older, focusing on the 55 percent with one or more medical conditions with symptoms that may respond to medical marijuana. We use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to estimate event study and differences‐in‐differences regression models. Three principle findings emerge from our analysis. First, active state medical marijuana laws lead to lower pain and better self‐assessed health among older adults. Second, state medical marijuana laws lead to increases in older adult labor supply, with effects concentrated on the intensive margin. Third, the effects of MMLs are largest among older adults with a health condition that would qualify for legal medical marijuana use under current state laws. Findings highlight the role of health policy in supporting work among older adults and the importance of including older adults in assessments of state medical marijuana laws.     

Persistently Biased: The Devil Shift in Water Privatization in Jakarta

This article operationalizes an underinvestigated element of the Advocacy Coalition Framework—the “devil shift”—on the controversial issue of water privatization. In doing so, it offers a methodological premise for investigating intractable opposition to policies that are politically salient and high in technical content. It uses the Q methodology on the case of Jakarta, Indonesia to uncover seven discourse coalitions within the anti‐privatization groups. They confirm two key hypotheses within the devil shift, namely the underestimation of a coalition's resources compared with their opponents and the exaggeration of opponents’ unreasonableness. Intriguingly, it finds that the “devil” is constructed in three different ways by this coalition—the profiteer, the Goliath, and the ineffectual governor. The narrative strength of the combination of these beliefs answers an apparent paradox in the devil shift viz that of rational actors persisting in unreasonable beliefs concerning their opponents. It also offers some specific solutions on how to deal with public hostility in water privatization in Jakarta.     

The Effect of Mandatory Seat Belt Laws on Seat Belt Use by Socioeconomic Position

We investigated the differential effect of mandatory seat belt laws on seat belt use among socioeconomic subgroups. We identified the differential effect of legislation across higher versus lower education individuals using a difference‐in‐differences model based on state variations in the timing of the passage of laws. We find strong effects of mandatory seat belt laws for all education groups, but the effect is stronger for those with fewer years of education. In addition, we find that the differential effect by education is larger for mandatory seat belt laws with primary rather than secondary enforcement. Our results imply that existing socioeconomic differences in seat belt use would be further mitigated if all states upgraded to primary enforcement.     

Assessing the Effects of Public Participation

This article presents the results of research designed to test participatory democracy assertions that high-quality public participation can affect participants' beliefs in desirable ways. It examines the relationships between exposure to quality participation and participant beliefs about the trustworthiness and responsiveness of a public agency and the value of including different viewpoints in public meetings. After participation in quality project meetings, participants were significantly more likely to believe the agency was responsive to public concerns. The results indicate that some specific aspects of quality participation are positively associated with expectations about the agency's responsiveness and performance. Positive associations were also found with tolerance for differences of opinion. These results have important implications for public administrators and theorists of participatory democracy.     

Police Information Technology: Assessing the Effects of Computerization on Urban Police Functions

Municipal police agencies are major users of information technology, and much remains to be learned about the effects of computerization on police operations. This article examines computerization in 188 municipal police agencies in 1993 in cities with populations of 100,000 or more. Relationships among computer hardware, police-file computerization, and police functions are examined. Cities are categorized as low, medium, and high levels of computerization to uncover differences in expenditures and police-officer allocation. Personal computers and mainframes supported file computerization of management and administration, throughput, and crime evidence. Management and administration files influenced computerization of police functions, particularly for management and crime solutions. Highly computerized cities reported larger shares of employees in technical positions, spent more per capita, and reported fewer officers per capita than cities with lower computerization levels. These relationships held after controlling for independent influences such as density, fiscal capacity, crime levels, and population.     

Compact,Walkable, Diverse Neighborhoods:Assessing Effects on Residents

What research supports the view that compact, walkable, diverse (CWD) neighborhoods are beneficial for urban residents? To make this assessment, we searched the literature to try to understand the current status of evidence regarding claims about the CWD neighborhood. We find that research linking CWD neighborhoods to effects on residents coalesces around three main topics: social relations, health, and safety. We conclude that on the basis of the literature reviewed, most of the intended benefits of the CWD neighborhood have been researched and found to have significant, positive effects for urban dwellers. While physical factors are but one element affecting behavior and outcomes, and the issues of self-selection and causality remain, overall, key dimensions of the CWD neighborhood have been found to positively affect social interaction, health, and safety.     

The Progressive Ratcheting of Environmental Laws: Impact on Public Management

One of the problem-making tendencies in environmental policymaking has been an incremental approach to regulation and control. Either because the full dimensions of an environmental problem are not perceived or because political resistance compels step-by-step action, environmental controls tend to be applied progressively, beginning with nominal, largely ineffectual, retroactive declarations. Failing to meet objectives, laws are toughened and extended year by year until the severty of sanctions begins to defeat their intended effects. The fractionized state of environmental law, focusing on specific problems of pollution and subject to changes in interpretation, makes observance and enforcement difficult. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 could have facilitated the unification of environmental policy; unfortunately presidents and congresses have not chosen to use it for this purpose. Meanwhile, because environmental protection per se is relatively new to public law and policy and has few roots in the common law, private citizens aggrieved by political obstruction of their expectations have appealed to the courts for relief and compensation. Conservative courts have granted this relief under the "taking" clause of the Constitution. Extraordinary measures in constitutional law may be necessary to resolve an impasse in public policy resulting from conflict between public interests and private rights as interpreted by the judiciary.     

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.     

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.     

Science Use in Regulatory Impact Analysis: The Effects of Political Attention and Controversy

Scholars, policy makers, and research sponsors have long sought to understand the conditions under which scientific research is used in the policy‐making process. Recent research has identified a resource that can be used to trace the use of science across time and many policy domains. U.S. federal agencies are mandated by executive order to justify all economically significant regulations by regulatory impact analyses (RIAs), in which they present evidence of the scientific underpinnings and consequences of the proposed rule. To gain new insight into when and how regulators invoke science in their policy justifications, we ask: does the political attention and controversy surrounding a regulation affect the extent to which science is utilized in RIAs? We examine scientific citation activity in all 101 economically significant RIAs from 2008 to 2012 and evaluate the effects of attention—from the public, policy elites, and the media—on the degree of science use in RIAs. Our main finding is that regulators draw more heavily on scientific research when justifying rules subject to a high degree of attention from outside actors. These findings suggest that scientific research plays an important role in the justification of regulations, especially those that are highly salient to the public and other policy actors.     

State LST Laws: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Laws Governing Local Sales Taxes

Local sales taxes (LSTs) have received growing attention over the past decade, but a fundamental aspect of LSTs has remained largely unexplored: How do state laws governing LSTs differ from one another? The literature acknowledges that state laws vary widely, but leaves the discussion at that. This research seeks to fill that void by presenting a comprehensive set of state LST laws and creating a resource that will enable researchers to consider these differences in their analyses. State LST laws are framed within the lenses of jurisdictional eligibility and discretionary authority.     

唐大明宫遗址的历史底蕴和保护的若干问题

大明官是盛唐时期的产物,是东亚乃至世界官城建设历史上具有里程碑意义的建筑群,它的建筑基本反映了<周礼>关于王官建制的理念.民国以来,尤其是新中国成立以来,该遗址的保护问题即被纳入西安城市规划,受到一定的重视.近年来,大明官遗址的保护出现了许多新的问题.解决这些问题,要立足遗址的历史内涵,以文物法为依据,以保护遗址为基础,造福当地,改善城市环境,发展文化旅游产业.     

Assessing swings in multi-party systems: The Indian experience

India has a single member, first-past-the-post system. Owing to the importance of wasted votes in a multi-party system, the relation between votes and seats cannot be explained by traditional swing analysis. In this paper a measure of vote-splitting¹ is developed and used to decompose changes in margins into the ‘swing’ and the ‘split’. This method of analysis is applied to the study of electoral change in India and its usefulness for prediction is examined.     

The concept of the level playing field: Assessing fairness in electoral competition

In 2019, the High Court of Australia used the term ‘level playing field’ no less than 18 times when considering limits on electoral campaign expenditure. This article examines the usefulness of this metaphor when assessing the opportunity to compete in elections on an equal basis. It shows that the metaphor is often used in electoral jurisprudence and by electoral monitoring bodies, but rarely subject to analysis. One place where it has been analysed is in the democratisation literature, where it is defined in terms of access to state resources, media, and the law. However, it needs further elaboration to make it useful in analysing the fairness of electoral competition in established democracies. The assumption of only two teams, incumbents and opposition, needs to be modified through considering the hierarchy of incumbency benefits. A case study of the 2019 Australian federal election illustrates the differential access to state resources of electoral contenders as well as the need to add the role of private money to the attributes of the playing field. It finds that although there has been some levelling of the playing field at the State and Territory level, at the federal level there has been further tilting.     

Assessing the Impact of Parliamentary Design: The Case of the Danish Committee on Gender Equality

This article contributes to the literature on parliamentary design in general and the pioneer literature on parliamentary bodies specialized in gender equality in particular. It does so by establishing a frame for the critical assessment of the impacts of such an institutional design. Moreover, by using interviews and data on the behavior of committee members, it demonstrates the advantages of applying a mixed method within a field that has mostly relied on participant interviews. A systematic analysis of the impact of the Danish Committee on Gender Equality shows that although this particular committee has not succeeded in adding the perspective of gender equality to legislation, it has increased parliamentary control with the government. Furthermore, it has enabled much better interaction between parliament and civil society organizations.     

刍议科学发展观的人学理论底蕴

党的十七大报告全面而系统地阐述了科学发展观,这不仅是马克思主义在当代中国发展的最新理论成果,还拓清了当代中国社会发展的基本思路,具有很强的理论意义和实践意义。本文主要从马克思主义哲学的人学理论观点出发,深入细致地分析了科学观的实质与核心,即“以人为本”;并且在人学理论的框架内分析了科学观的内涵特征和精神实质,最后,概括了科学发展观的现实意义。     

The Feedback Effects of Controversial Police Use of Force

Political Behavior - Controversial cases of police use of force against minority civilians have become a ubiquitous feature of news headlines, and videos of these interactions between citizens and...