U.S. Treaty Making with American Indians: Institutional Change and Relative Power, 1784–1911

Native Americans are unique among domestic actors in that their relations with the U.S. government involve treaty making, with almost 600 such documents signed between the Revolutionary War and the turn of the twentieth century. We investigate the effect of constitutional changes to the treating process in 1871, by which Congress stripped the president of his ability to negotiate directly with tribes. We construct a comprehensive new data set by digitizing all of the treaties for systematic textual analysis. Employing scaling techniques validated with word‐use information, we show that a single dimension characterizes the treaties as more or less “harsh” in land and resource cession terms. We find that specific institutional changes to treaty‐making mechanisms had little effect on agreement outcomes. Rather, it is the relative bargaining power of the United States economically and militarily that contributes to worsening terms for Indians over the nineteenth century.     

Cost‐Effectiveness of Early Childhood Interventions to Enhance Preschool: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Head Start Centers Enrolling Historically Underserved Populations

We evaluate the cost‐effectiveness of two early childhood interventions that use instructional coaching and parent coaching as levers for improvement. The study design allows us to compare the individual effects of each intervention as well as their combined effect on student outcomes. We find that teachers receiving instructional coaching improve their use of evidence‐based instructional practices, while families receiving parent coaching show increases in numerous responsive parenting behaviors associated with positive child outcomes. Both interventions demonstrate positive impacts on students, but only parent coaching shows statistically significant effects across a range of student outcomes. Instructional coaching alone is substantially less costly and may therefore be the most cost‐effective of the three treatment conditions; however, small sample sizes limit our ability to reach definitive conclusions. Policy simulations suggest that implementing these interventions could raise the overall cost‐effectiveness of Head Start by at least 16 percent.     

Governing Unconventional Oil and Gas Extraction: The Case of Pennsylvania

Over the past decade, directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing enabled an unconventional oil and gas extraction (UOGE) boom in many regions of the United States, including parts of Pennsylvania. This revolution has created serious concerns about the capability of existing institutions to govern important societal outcomes associated with UOGE. We present a conceptual framework for assessing key societal outcomes influenced by UOGE governance. In applying this framework to Pennsylvania, we discern certain institutional strengths that have allowed the Commonwealth to reap appreciable short‐term economic growth from rich resource endowments. We also find, however, that several institutional weaknesses have allowed costs externalized to the environment, public health, and community integrity to offset some proportion of those economic benefits. Likewise, we find that governance of UOGE in Pennsylvania has contributed to a bifurcated sociopolitical landscape wherein adversarial coalitions dispute the legitimacy of the industry and its governance.     

Do Job Corps performance measures track program impacts?

Since the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, performance measurement systems based on short‐term program outcomes have been increasingly used to assess the effectiveness of federal programs. This paper examines the association between program performance measures and long‐term program impacts, using nine‐year follow‐up data from a recent large‐scale, national experimental evaluation of Job Corps, the nation's largest federal job training program for disadvantaged youths. Job Corps is an important test case because it uses a comprehensive performance system that is widely emulated. We find that impacts on key outcomes are not associated with measured center performance levels. Participants in higherperforming centers had better outcomes; however, the same pattern holds for comparable controls. Thus, the performance measurement system is not achieving the goal of ranking and rewarding centers on the basis of their ability to improve participant outcomes relative to what these outcomes would have been otherwise. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

A supervisor like me: Race,representation, and the satisfaction and turnover decisions of public sector employees

Studies of race representation in public organizations illustrate the importance of bureaucrat race in determining client‐level outcomes. Building “upward” from this research, this study examines how supervisor race impacts outcomes for street‐level bureaucrats using data from a nationally representative sample of public schools. Employing multiple estimation methods, we find that, consistent with the predictions of representation theory, teachers report higher job satisfaction and turn over less often when supervised by an own‐race principal. We also find that race congruence impacts the tangible and intangible organizational benefits teachers receive, and, moreover, that race congruence impacts white and African American employees differently. Most troubling, we find evidence that black teachers earn substantially less in supplemental pay when they work for a white principal, even when compared to white teachers in the same school. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Performance measures in tax administration: Chile as a case study

The article proposes a set of tax administration performance measures and contrasts them with measures actually used by the Chilean tax administration agency. The goals assumed for the tax administration agency (TA) are to maximize tax revenue collection and provide quality services to taxpayers. Ideal performance measures (PMs) would measure the deviation of actual outcome from a best‐practice standard, given the value of all variables affecting organisation performance that are outside management control. The key challenge is to build and calculate these best‐practice outcomes. In Chile the PM in use, for the first goal, is the ratio of actual to potential tax revenue collection. This PM does adjust revenue collection for variations in the tax structure and rate, but it fails to control other variables that affect performance such as the TA budget and per capita income. The PM in use, for the second goal, is taxpayer satisfaction measured through sample surveys. This seems the appropriate PM, as quality of taxpayer services depends directly on the TA efforts to improve them. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The COVID Cash Transfer Study: The Impacts of a One-Time Unconditional Cash Transfer on the Well-Being of Families Receiving SNAP in Twelve States

There is growing interest in the use of unconditional cash transfers as a means to alleviate poverty, yet little is known about the effects of such transfers in the U.S. This paper reports on the results of a randomized controlled study of a one-time $1,000 unconditional cash transfer in May 2020 to families with low incomes in 12 U.S. states. The families were receiving, or had recently received, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. We examine the impact of the cash transfer on five pre-registered outcomes (material hardship, mental health, parenting, child behavior, partner relationships) and several secondary outcomes (hardship avoidance, consumption, employment, benefit use). We find no statistically significant effects (powered to detect effects of 0.09 standard deviations) of the cash transfer on any outcomes for the full sample. In pre-specified exploratory analyses, we find significant reductions in material hardship (-0.17 standard deviations) among families with less than $500 of earnings in the previous month, roughly the bottom 50 percent of monthly earnings for the study sample.     

Administrative (de)centralization,performance equity,and outcome achievement in rural contexts: An empirical study of U.S. child welfare systems

Whether public services are better delivered through centralized or decentralized administrative systems is one of the most enduring debates in public administration. This article contributes to the debate with a study of program outcome achievement in U.S. child welfare services. We examine whether centralized state‐administered or decentralized county‐administered systems are more successful at realizing desired outcomes, which exhibit greater performance equity, and which are more successful at securing program outcomes in rural settings. Using a coarsened exact matching approach to quasi‐experimental research, we find that centralized child welfare systems exhibit greater success at achieving desired outcomes—in both rural contexts and overall. No discernible difference is found in centralized and decentralized systems' performance equity; outcome disparities exist under both structures. The study thus lends credence to centralization arguments, but at the same time cautions that centralized administration is not a structural panacea.     

Divided Government and the Fragmentation of American Law

We investigate institutional explanations for Congress's choice to fragment statutory frameworks for policy implementation. We argue that divided party government, which fuels legislative‐executive conflict over control of the bureaucracy, motivates Congress to fragment implementation power as a strategy to enhance its control over implementation. We develop a novel measure of fragmentation in policy implementation, collect data on it over the period 1947–2008, and test hypotheses linking separation‐of‐powers structures to legislative design of fragmented implementation power. We find that divided party government is powerfully associated with fragmentation in policy implementation, and that this association contributed to the long‐run growth of fragmentation in the postwar United States. We further find that legislative coalitions are more likely to fragment implementation power in the face of greater uncertainty about remaining in the majority.     

The Value of Vagueness: Delegation, Defiance, and Judicial Opinions

An established line of research demonstrates that vague judicial opinions are less likely to be implemented than clear opinions. Vague opinions thus present a puzzle. Why would judges craft opinions that risk noncompliance? We argue that the relationships between judges and other policy makers in separation‐of‐powers systems are central to understanding this puzzle. Opinion vagueness can reflect efforts to resolve core tradeoffs associated with judicial policymaking that bear some resemblance to standard accounts of political delegation. Vagueness offers judges the ability to manage their uncertainty over policy outcomes and to hide likely defiance from public view. At the same time, vagueness removes a central source of pressure for compliance that judges can place on other policy makers. Using a game‐theoretic model, we identify conditions under which judges use vagueness precisely as legislatures use statutory discretion. We also demonstrate conditions under which judges use vagueness in ways unanticipated by standard delegation accounts.     

The many uses of regulatory impact assessment: A meta‐analysis of EU and UK cases

Research on regulation has crossed paths with the literature on policy instruments, showing that regulatory policy instruments contain cognitive and normative beliefs about policy. Thus, their usage stacks the deck in favor of one type of actor or one type of regulatory solution. In this article, we challenge the assumption that there is a predetermined relationship between ideas, regulatory policy instruments, and outcomes. We argue that different combinations of conditions lead to different outcomes, depending on how actors use the instrument. Empirically, we analyze 31 EU and UK case studies of regulatory impact assessment (RIA) – a regulatory policy instrument that has been pivotal in the so‐called better regulation movement. We distinguish four main usages of RIA, that is, political, instrumental, communicative, and perfunctory. We find that in our sample instrumental usage is not so rare and that the contrast between communicative and political usages is less stark than is commonly thought. In terms of policy recommendations, our analysis suggests that there may be different paths to desirable outcomes. Policymakers should therefore explore different combinations of conditions leading to the usages they deem desirable rather than arguing for a fixed menu of variables.     

Regulatory harmonization and agricultural biotechnology in Argentina and China: Critical assessment of state‐centered and decentered approaches

The international harmonization of technology‐related regulations seeks certain norms across diverse contexts. Harmonization efforts are based primarily on the promulgation of state‐centered command and control forms of regulation, though they may also be accompanied by the diffusion of more plural approaches that are decentered from the state. We contrast the ways in which the “proper” use of transgenic cotton seed technologies is understood in harmonizing regulations with the way this technology is used in practice in regions of Argentina and China. We find divergence that poses challenges for both state‐centered and decentered approaches to harmonization. While state‐centered approaches are blind to some critical processes on the ground, decentered strategies are found wanting in situations where norms remain deeply contested amongst actors situated in very uneven power relations. In both cases, we find that establishing and securing norms that are socially just and environmentally sustainable means attending much more explicitly to the political economies in which technological practices actually take root.     

The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936–2014

Applying a dynamic latent‐variable model to data on 148 policies collected over eight decades (1936–2014), we produce the first yearly measure of the policy liberalism of U.S. states. Our dynamic measure of state policy liberalism marks an important advance over existing measures, almost all of which are purely cross‐sectional and thus cannot be used to study policy change. We find that, in the aggregate, the policy liberalism of U.S. states steadily increased between the 1930s and 1970s and then largely plateaued. The policy liberalism of most states has remained stable in relative terms, though several states have shifted considerably over time. We also find surprisingly little evidence of multidimensionality in state policy outputs. Our new estimates of state policy liberalism have broad application to the study of political development, representation, accountability, and other important issues in political science.     

The Political Costs of Crisis Bargaining: Presidential Rhetoric and the Role of Party

We analyze the first large‐scale, randomized experiment to measure presidential approval levels at all outcomes of a canonical international crisis‐bargaining model, thereby avoiding problems of strategic selection in evaluating presidential incentives. We find support for several assumptions made in the crisis‐bargaining literature, including that a concession from a foreign state leads to higher approval levels than other outcomes, that the magnitudes of audience costs are under presidential control prior to the initiation of hostilities, and that these costs can be made so large that presidents have incentive to fight wars they will not win. Thus, the credibility of democratic threats can be made extremely high. We also find, however, that partisan cues strongly condition presidential incentives. Party elites have incentives to behave according to type in Congress and contrary to type in the Oval Office, and Democratic presidents sometimes have incentives to fight wars they will not win.     

Patrolling Public Schools: The Impact of Funding for School Police on Student Discipline and Long‐term Education Outcomes

As police officers have become increasingly common in U.S. public schools, their role in school discipline has often expanded. While there is growing public debate about the consequences of police presence in schools, there is scant evidence of the impact of police on student discipline and academic outcomes. This paper provides the first quasi‐experimental estimate of funding for school police on student outcomes, leveraging variation in federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants. Exploiting detailed data on over 2.5 million students in Texas, I find that federal grants for police in schools increase middle school discipline rates by 6 percent. The rise in discipline is driven by sanctions for low‐level offenses or school code of conduct violations. Further, I find that Black students experience the largest increases in discipline. I also find that exposure to a three‐year federal grant for school police is associated with a 2.5 percent decrease in high school graduation rates and a 4 percent decrease in college enrollment rates.     

Welfare,work experience,and economic self‐sufficiency

The potential of former AFDC recipients to earn a living wage is central to the success of welfare‐to‐work programs. Previous studies have found that welfare recipihyphen;ents see little increase in their wages over time. Low wage growth could arise from either low returns to work experience or low levels of experience. This distinction is important for designing effective welfare policy. In the following paper, we estimate how wages grew with work experience between 1978 and 1992 for a national sample of women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We compare women who never received welfare with both short‐ and long‐term recipients in order to see to what extent the rates of wage growth with work experience differ. We find that they differ very little. We use numerous specification checks to test the robustness of our results and find consistent evidence that the wages of AFDC recipients grew at a rate similar to those of nonrecipients once work experience is taken into account. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Decision Aiding,Not Dispute Resolution: Creating Insights through Structured Environmental Decisions

Public participation in environmental decisions has become commonplace. A favored model for public input is to use the tools of dispute resolution to seek consensus among members of a multi‐party stakeholder group. The authors believe that a focus on dispute resolution and consensus building can pose impediments to the creation of insights for decisionmakers and lead to the adoption of inferior policy choices. Instead, they advocate an alternative approach to stakeholder participation characterized as “decision aiding” through a structured process based on constructive, multi‐attribute techniques and value‐focused thinking. In this paper some of the major difficulties posed by a dispute‐resolution approach are articulated, the principles of a decision‐aiding process reviewed, and this alternative approach illustrated by describing a stakeholder consultation involving water‐use planning for a hydroelectric facility on the Alouette River in British Columbia, Canada. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Effects of Paid Family Leave in California on Labor Market Outcomes

Using data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY‐97), we examine the effects of California's paid family leave program (CA‐PFL) on mothers’ and fathers’ use of leave during the period surrounding child birth, and on the timing of mothers’ return to work, the probability of eventually returning to prechildbirth jobs, and subsequent labor market outcomes. We estimate multivariate difference‐in‐differences regression models that compare changes in the outcomes for new California parents before and after the enactment of CA‐PFL to those for corresponding parents in control states. Our results suggest that CA‐PFL raised leave use by almost five weeks for the average covered mother and two to three days for the corresponding father. Maternal leave‐taking appears to increase in the quarter before the birth and to extend through the two quarters after it. Paternal leave‐taking rises fairly quickly after the birth and is short‐lasting. Rights to paid leave are also associated with higher work and employment probabilities for mothers nine to 12 months after birth, probably because they increase job continuity among those with relatively weak labor force attachments. We also find positive effects of California's program on hours and weeks of work during their child's second year of life.