The Street‐Level Bureaucrats of Elections: Selection Methods for Local Election Officials

The 2000 presidential election and the recount battle in Florida focused attention on local election administration in the United States. The Help America Vote Act , passed by the federal government in 2002, requires wholesale changes in voting equipment and other election procedures. However, the law did not address the selection of individuals who manage elections: both state and local election officials play a great role implementing federal and state election laws. Recently, several election reform advocates have argued for shifting to nonpartisan election administrators in the United States. Others, particularly associations representing election officials, have not endorsed that position. To inform this debate, we provide data on the selection methods and party affiliations for all local election officials in the United States (more than 4,500 individuals or commissions). We find considerable variation in the methods used to select state and local election officials in the United States.     

‘Utterly Disgraceful’: Social Media and the Workplace

Social media use by Australian public servants has given rise to questions pertaining to their political rights, impartiality and privacy outside of work. Drawing on the recent case Starr v Department of Human Services these issues are explored. The findings suggest that social media use has heightened tensions around public servant's rights to comment on issues of the day, and its use by employees both inside and beyond the workplace remains contested terrain.     

Politics of Evidence: The Communication of Evidence by ‘Stakeholders’ when Advocating for Tobacco Point‐of‐sale Display Bans in Australia

There is a tension in the policy field about the way that the policy process should occur and the manner in which evidence should inform policy decisions. This article presents findings from a qualitative study on the introduction of point‐of‐sale tobacco display bans in Australia to provide an insight into the way this public policy was introduced and the way that evidence was used and communicated to influence the policy outcome. This study highlights that tobacco control policy does not merely consist of a series of segmented and unconnected decisions. It is an ongoing process, whereby the acceptability of forms of knowledge has shifted over time. This has enabled the introduction of tobacco control initiatives on the basis of good judgement when there is a paucity of specific evaluation information to support a policy's introduction.     

Avoiding Another ‘Squatter in Downing Street’ Controversy: The Need to Improve the Caretaker Conventions before the 2015 General Election

In the UK the rules governing caretaker situations have historically been underspecified. The UK's constitutional traditions, such as prime ministerial discretion to time elections and its two‐party system, have in the past limited the frequency and duration of caretaker periods. However, the recently lengthened election timetable, new constraints on the executive introduced by the Fixed‐term Parliaments Act (2011), and a decline in the dominance of the two largest parties are raising the risk that the UK will experience caretaker periods more often and for longer stretches of time. In this paper, we offer an analysis of the UK's current caretaker provisions and conclude that the existing conventions are insufficiently detailed and can render such periods problematic and controversy‐prone. Important lessons, we suggest, can be learned from reforms in other Westminster systems, and from the caretaker rules of other countries.     

The Productivity Consequences of Political Turnover: Firm‐Level Evidence from Ukraine's Orange Revolution

We examine the impact of political turnover on economic performance in a setting of largely unanticipated political change and profoundly weak institutions: the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Exploiting census‐type panel data on over 7,000 manufacturing enterprises, we find that the productivity of firms in the regions most supportive of Viktor Yushchenko increased by more than 15 percentage points in the three years following his election, relative to that in the most anti‐Yushchenko regions. We conclude that this effect is driven primarily by particularistic rather than general economic policies that disproportionately increased output among large enterprises, government suppliers, and private enterprises—three types of firms that had much to gain or lose from turnover at the national level. Our results demonstrate that political turnover in the context of weak institutions can have substantial distributional effects that are reflected in economic productivity.     

Civil War and Social Cohesion: Lab‐in‐the‐Field Evidence from Nepal

We study effects of wartime violence on social cohesion in the context of Nepal's 10‐year civil war. We begin with the observation that violence increased levels of collective action like voting and community organization—a finding consistent with other recent studies of postconflict societies. We use lab‐in‐the‐field techniques to tease apart such effects. Our causal‐identification strategy exploits communities' exogenous isolation from the unpredictable path of insurgency combined with matching. We find that violence‐affected communities exhibit higher levels of prosocial motivation, measured by altruistic giving, public good contributions, investment in trust‐based transactions, and willingness to reciprocate trust‐based investments. We find evidence to support two social transformation mechanisms: (1) a purging mechanism by which less social persons disproportionately flee communities plagued by war and (2) a collective coping mechanism by which individuals who have few options to flee band together to cope with threats.     

Determinants of Pay‐as‐You‐Go Financing of Capital Projects: Evidence from the States

Although states have long practiced pay‐as‐you‐go in financing their capital projects as a supplement to debt, academia has paid scarce attention to pay‐go financing. This study fills in the niche by providing empirical evidence on what determines the use of pay‐go in financing capital projects. It develops a model that considers the preferences of both voters and politicians when they make capital financing decisions in a given institutional setting. The empirical results suggest that the use of pay‐go is affected by a state's income level, its economic conditions, the presence of a divided government, as well as its budgetary institutions.     

The Impact of Elections on Cooperation: Evidence from a Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiment in Uganda

Communities often rely on sanctioning to induce public goods contributions. Past studies focus on how external agencies or peer sanctioning induce cooperation. In this article, we focus instead on the role played by centralized authorities, internal to the community. Combining “lab‐in‐the‐field” experiments with observational data on 1,541 Ugandan farmers from 50 communities, we demonstrate the positive effect of internal centralized sanctioning authorities on cooperative behavior. We also show that the size of this effect depends on the political process by which authority is granted: subjects electing leaders contribute more to public goods than subjects who were assigned leaders through a lottery. To test the ecological validity of our findings, we relate farmers’ behavior in the experiment to their level of cooperation in their community organization. We show that deference to authority in the controlled setting predicts cooperative behavior in the farmers’ natural environment, in which they face a similar social dilemma.     

Charter High Schools’ Effects on Long‐Term Attainment and Earnings

Since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,800 nationally, serving nearly three million students. Various studies have examined charter schools’ impacts on test scores, and a few have begun to examine longer‐term outcomes including graduation and college attendance. This paper is the first to estimate charter schools’ effects on earnings in adulthood, alongside effects on educational attainment. Using data from Florida, we first confirm previous research (Booker et al., 2011 ) that students attending charter high schools are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college. We then examine two longer‐term outcomes not previously studied in research on charter schools—college persistence and earnings. We find that students attending charter high schools are more likely to persist in college, and that in their mid‐20s they experience higher earnings.     

‘No‐one likes us; we don't care’: ‘Dissident’ Irish Republicans and Mandates

The episodic dissident republican activity evident in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement has been accompanied by regular assertions from the police, politicians and commentators that dissidents have no backing. This article examines the historic importance of mandates and support for previous and contemporary republican armed campaigns. It explores whether violent republicans have ever enjoyed widespread support in Ireland and assesses the extent to which a lack of backing has precluded violent campaigns. The piece analyses the evidence regarding the lack of sympathy for current dissident violence, assessing the degree to which armed republicanism has reached a new level of isolation.     

Environmental Tax,Polluting Plants’ Strategies and Effectiveness: Evidence from China

Although environmental taxes have become a popular policy tool, their effectiveness for pollution control and impact on the compliance strategies of agents remains questionable. This research uses a quasi‐experimental design to examine the effectiveness of the Pay for Permit policy, an environmental tax that has been imposed on water pollution emissions in Lake Tai Basin, Jiangsu, China, since 2009. A plant‐level panel dataset from 2007 to 2010 is used for both difference‐in‐differences and difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences analyses to compare the pollution discharge, pollution abatement, and pollution generation of policy participants and control groups. The results indicate that treated plants reduce their emissions by about 40 percent after two years of the policy implementation. Thus, the policy generated approximately a 7 percent decrease in the industrial chemical oxygen demand emission in the entire Lake Tai Basin based on the emission level of 2007. Pollution is primarily reduced via end‐of‐pipe abatement instead of cleaner production. Our results show the effectiveness of environmental taxes in controlling industrial pollution, and indicate that the tax may not motivate the adoption of innovative techniques in the short term.     

Inclusion and Public Policy: Evidence from Sweden’s Introduction of Noncitizen Suffrage

The largest disenfranchised group in modern democracies is international migrants who lack citizenship of their country of residence. Despite that noncitizen suffrage has been introduced in some countries and has been the subject of vigorous public debate in many others, there have been no systematic attempts to investigate its policy consequences. Drawing on standard models of political competition, I argue that there will be a selection bias inherent in estimating the impact of noncitizen suffrage on public policy and analyze data that are uniquely suitable to deal with this methodological problem, namely data on exogenous changes in the composition of the electorates of Swedish municipalities generated by the introduction of noncitizen suffrage. According to the results, the effect of enfranchising noncitizens on public policy was large, causing spending on education and social and family services to increase substantially in municipalities where noncitizens made up a nonnegligible share of the electorate.     

From Participatory Reform to Social Capital: Micro‐Motives and the Macro‐Structure of Civil Society Networks

Although a wide‐ranging literature explores the favorable effects of social capital, it is only relatively recently that systematic attention has been directed to the manner in which social networks emerge and the consequent implications for civic engagement and collaborative governance. This article employs advanced social network statistical models to examine civic network emergence following a participatory reform in Los Angeles. Findings suggest that the reform fostered a number of favorable network attributes supportive of democratic participation. At the same time, subtle but ubiquitous effects of socioeconomic sorting had the unintended and undesirable effect of elevating higher‐status actors within the emergent civic network. These findings suggest that macro‐level policy interventions are required to foster the development of ties that promote cross‐talk among socioeconomically distinct community groups.     

Pay‐as‐You‐Go Financing and Capital Outlay Volatility: Evidence from the States over Two Recent Economic Cycles

Pay‐as‐you‐go (pay‐go or cash) and pay‐as‐you‐use (pay‐use or debt) are two mechanisms to finance capital projects. While pay‐go faces multiple constraints, pay‐use smoothes outlays, stabilizes tax rates, and improves inter‐generational equity. Thus, pay‐use has dominated infrastructure financing for decades. In recent years, there has been revived academic interest in pay‐go as an alternate financing mechanism; however, there is a large gap in the literature and inadequate evidence on the effects of pay‐go, especially its effects on capital outlay volatility. This paper fills in the niche. Examining state experience over the two recent economic cycles, this paper finds evidence that suggests that pay‐go is associated with lower volatility in capital spending in the long run, but may increase short‐run variability. We recommend that states couple pay‐go in boom years with pay‐use in lean years. In unison, the two mechanisms can reduce aggregate volatility and increase long‐run stability of capital expenditures.