COVID-19 and American Attitudes toward U.S.-China Disputes

The COVID-19 outbreak has fueled tension between the U.S. and China. Existing literature in international relations rarely focuses on virus outbreaks as factors affecting international relations between superpower countries, nor does research examine an outbreak’s potential influence on the public’s opinion about their country’s foreign policy. To bridge this research gap, this study explores the extent to which the American public may be prone to favor policies that “punish” China via existing U.S.-China disputes, such as the South China Sea dispute and the U.S.-China trade war. I conducted an online survey using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and ran multinomial and ordered logit models to estimate the association between an individual’s preferred policies and the country or government an individual blame for the impact of the pandemic. After controlling several essential confounding factors, such as one’s levels of nationalism and hawkishness, I found strong evidence that there is a positive association between people’s attribution of blame to the Chinese government and the likelihood of supporting aggressive policy options in the two disputes with China. That is to say, U.S. citizens who believe that the Chinese government is solely culpable for the outbreak in the U.S., compared to those who think otherwise, are more likely to support hawkish policy options, such as confrontational military actions, economic sanctions, or higher tariff rates. The research provides a glimpse into where Americans may stand in these disputes with China and the potential development of U.S.-China relations in the post-pandemic era.

     

在分散与统一之间——美国食品安全监管事权划分探析

美国食品安全事权划分,在形式上呈现分散特征,联邦层面有十多个机构参与食品监管事务,州、地方、部落、领地有3000多个独立的监管机构来保障本地食品安全,这种分散特征主要是由美国的宪政体制、权力结构的分散性和政策输出的不确定性造成的。但在实际运行过程中,各监管机构之间通过正式的和非正式的协调活动,彼此之间分享了权力,共享了食品安全监管标准,达到了一定的统一性。我国食品安全事权划分可在明晰监管机构间的责任、保持事权划分稳定性以培养专业能力、建立倒金字塔式的监管任务结构方面借鉴美国的经验。     

Reducing traffic fatalities in the American States by upgrading seat belt use laws to primary enforcement

A key component of crime deterrence is the certainty of detection, but in 2005 seat belt laws in 27 states prohibited law enforcement officers from ticketing an observed violation unless the driver is stopped for another offense, which is referred to as secondary enforcement. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have upgraded from secondary to primary enforcement, which authorizes police to stop a motor vehicle if a driver or occupant covered by the law is observed not using a seat belt. To test the impact of seat belt enforcement provisions, cross‐sectional time series regressions are estimated for annual driver and occupant fatality rates in the American states from 1990 to 2002. Using several control variables for other traffic policies and state demographics, the results indicate primary enforcement is more effective in saving lives than secondary enforcement. Furthermore, upgrading to a primary law enhances the effectiveness of an existing state mandatory use law. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

False advertising and experience goods: the case of political services in the U.S. senate

This study uses the voter-shopping construct to analyze signaling of moderateness in the U.S. Senate. We compare legislator-provided signals (advertising)—such as membership in the U.S. Senate’s Centrist Coalition—with actual voting histories in order to characterize these types of advertising cues as sincere or insincere. Following recent research indicating that moderate legislators receive greater financial support, we test whether or not Political Action Committees (PACs) are willing to support financially those who send false signals of moderateness. Our results show that the mean level of real PAC contributions garnered by non-moderate Democrats who send false signals exceeds that of the non-moderate Democrats who do not do so by $182,078. This figure is about 74% of mean level of real PAC contributions for those non-moderate Democrats who do not send false signals.     

How regulations undervalue occupational fatalities

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration establishes incentives for safety by setting and enforcing regulatory standards. Using four and a half decades of inspection data, this article provides a comprehensive analysis of the factors underpinning penalties following fatalities. The “fatality premium” for regulatory violations following a worker death is quite modest and is several orders of magnitude below the value-of-a-statistical-life figure needed to establish efficient levels of deterrence in the absence of all other financial incentives. Although there are low statutory caps on penalties, only 8% of the penalties for violations involving fatalities are constrained by the cap, suggesting that current statutes establish norms for reasonable penalty amounts. In situations involving a fatality at firms with union representation during the inspection, the enforcement sanctions are more stringent. Fatalities involving migrant laborers are less heavily penalized.     

Highway to the Danger Zone: United States Legislative Framework Regulating the Commercial Space Sector

The last decade has been witness to a rapid rise of the commercial space sectors of many countries. This development offers myriad prospects for the development and exploration of outer space, but simultaneously poses threats to the international community if not regulated properly. The potential dangers of outer space activity were recognized by both the United States and the former Soviet Union in the midst of the Cold War, which led to the concretization of the international legal regime regulating outer space activities. However, without the enforcement of these legal standards at the municipal level of the state, this regime is ineffective. Therefore, it is an imperative that all states with a commercial space presence develop national space legislation that appropriately incorporates international standards. The U.S. space legislation is, at present, the most robust legal framework which addresses many of the necessary concerns. At the same time, in attempts to promote the growth of its space sector, the U.S. regime regulating commercial space ignores some of the standards developed in the international regime. The critical evaluation of the salient features of the U.S. legislation undertaken by this article serves as a guide for many states seeking to develop their own legislation regulating the commercial space industry. It serves as a guide to adopting comprehensive standards of protections provided for in the U.S. legislation and the International Law Association’s “Model Law on National Space Legislation,” but also cautions against the dangers of weaponization, poor environmental protection, and exposure to international liability. A thorough legislative framework that adequately balances economic, strategic, and political concerns with accepted legal principles of international law is essential to prevent commercial space activities from becoming a “highway to the danger zone.”     

Evaluating the effects of automobile safety regulation

Automobile safety standards adopted because of federal legislation have, according to many researchers, failed to save lives; safer cars, they infer, induce more dangerous driving. Results from the major study suggesting this conclusion are shown, however, to be quite sensitive to reasonable changes in the empirical model. An alternative statistical analysis of death rates supports a very different conclusion: Safety standards have saved tens of thousands of lives during the 1970s. More broadly, the article illustrates some general pitfalls in using statistical results in policy analysis, and how they can be avoided.     

Determinants of the U.S. wheat producer support price: Do presidential elections matter?

The paper's focus is on the determinants of the U.S. wheat producer support price. The results of the time-series analysis suggest that this price is largely determined by the previous price, the expected U.S. share in world exports, and expected program costs. Presidential elections also influence U.S. wheat price policies. All other things being equal, the support price tends to be lower in election years than in other years. This suggests that small interest groups' relative political economic power may be less pronounced in election years if they do not succeed in positioning themselves on the political economic market such that they contain the potentially decisive voter.     

Assessing OSHA Performance: New Evidence from the Construction Industry

The determinants of OSHA performance can be examined by breaking the regulatory process into three elements relating to enforcement, compliance behavior, and the adequacy of standards in addressing safety outcomes. This paper develops and applies this framework to the U.S. construction industry during the period 1987 to 1993. Enforcement activity among the firms in the sample was substantial, with firms facing a high probability of annual inspection. But, despite this significant enforcement effort, inspections have a modest effect on firm compliance with OSHA standards. Finally, the health and safety standards cited most frequently diverge from the major sources of fatalities and injuries on construction projects. These results suggest that historic enforcement policies toward construction make less sense as OSHA moves into its fourth decade of operation. More generally, the paper illustrates the problem of focusing enforcement resources on large, high‐profile companies even though they often are not the major source of regulatory problems in an established area of public policy intervention. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The container security initiative costs,implications and relevance to developing countries

Following 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security established the Container Security Initiative (CSI) programme in 2002 in response to the threat from terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction transported by cargo containers. This project establishes the tracking and targeting of ‘high risk’ containers and their subsequent scanning with X‐ray machines before loading onto the U.S. bound ships. To date, 44 of the world's largest ports have agreed to become CSI‐compliant, the majority of which are located in industrialised countries, while developing and least developed countries are under‐represented. CSI‐eligibility requires that ports represent a considerable volume of U.S. bound container traffic and invest in container scanning devices. Every non‐intrusive inspecting device (NII) costs several million dollars while investments in IT and existing infrastructure often triple the compliance costs. Containers originating in a CSI port are expedited through U.S. customs, representing a comparative trade barrier for exporters from non‐CSI ports. Thus, CSI acts as a tool for the U.S. to improve security, while representing a challenge to exporting countries' market access. This article provides an evaluation of the impacts this plan will have on the export competitiveness of developing countries. It reviews the potential benefits this programme offers in terms of improved trade facilitation, as well as proposing recommendations for its expansion to include developing countries. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political Science and Prediction: What's Next for U.S. Climate Change Policy?

This article analyzes how U.S. climate change politics and policy making are changing in the public, private and civil society sectors, and how such changes are likely to influence U.S. federal policies. It outlines the current status of U.S. climate change action and explores four overlapping pathways of policy change: (1) the strategic demonstration of the feasibility of climate change action; (2) the creation and expansion of markets; (3) policy diffusion and learning; and (4) the creation and promulgation of norms about the need for more aggressive climate change action. These four pathways seek to fruitfully draw from rationalist and constructivist approaches to policy analysis, without collapsing or confusing the different logics. Building on this analysis, it predicts that future federal U.S. climate policy will include six major components: (1) A national cap on GHG emissions; (2) A national market based cap‐and‐trade GHG emissions trading scheme; (3) Mandatory renewable energy portfolio standards; (4) Increased national product standards for energy efficiency; (5) Increased vehicle fleet energy efficiency standards; and (6) Increased federal incentives for research and development on energy efficiency issues and renewable energy development. In addition, expanding federal climate policy may bring about significant changes in U.S. foreign policy as U.S. international re‐engagement on climate change is likely to occur only after the development of more significant federal policy.     

For Safety or Profit? How Science Serves the Strategic Interests of Private Actors

Science is central to the regulation of risk. But who provides the science on which risk regulations are based? Through an in-depth empirical analysis of domestic health and safety standards, this article shows how private actors use scientific information to acquire preferential outcomes. I develop a formal model delineating conditions under which firms will seek stricter standards on their own products, and I reveal how companies can acquire these outcomes through the strategic provision of information. To test the theory, I track changes to U.S. agrochemical standards over a two-decade period. I also introduce firm-level petition data and historical evidence to test the mechanism directly. My findings provide new insight into the strategies companies use to benefit from regulations, while also forcing us to reevaluate what it means for regulations to be based on science.     

Women’s Rights to Property in Marriage,Divorce, and Widowhood in Uganda: The Problematic Aspects

This article examines women’s rights to property in marriage, upon divorce, and upon the death of a spouse in Uganda, highlighting the problematic aspects in both the state-made (statutory) and non-state-made (customary and religious) laws. It argues that, with the exception of the 1995 Constitution, the subordinate laws that regulate the distribution, management, and ownership of property during marriage, upon divorce, and death of a spouse are discriminatory of women. It is shown that even where the relevant statutory laws are protective of women’s rights to property, their implementation is hindered by customary law practices, socialization, and the generally weak economic capacity of many women in the country. The article delves into the even weaker position of women’s rights to matrimonial property at customary and religious laws. In many homes, wives provide labor to support their husbands without having a stake in the use or monetary benefit from it. Under Islamic law regulating intestate succession to property, the entitlements for widows fall short of the constitutional standards on equality and non-discrimination. Polygyny is widely practiced by Muslims implying that the widows share the one eighth whenever there are children or one fourth in cases when there are no children. Radical reforms such as adopting an immediate community property regime instead of the present separate property regime are inevitable if women’s rights to property are to advance.     

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CHILD SAFETY SEAT LAWS IN THE FIFTY STATES

This study evaluates the effectiveness of state child safety seat laws in the United States. Data for all fifty states for the period 1975 to 1994 are used. Pooled time series analysis is employed to estimate a model of the rate of fatalities suffered by children ages 0–5 years as occupants in automobile crashes. The occupant fatality rate for children 6–11 years of age is used as a comparison group to control for other trends not introduced in the estimated models. The results show that child safety seat policies have significantly reduced fatality rates among children 0–5 years of age. For each additional year of age covered by a state statute, this fatality rate drops 4.8%. A similar reduction in the fatality rate of the older age cohort (6–11 years old) was not observed.     

Congress,the Supreme Court,and Judicial Review: Testing a Constitutional Separation of Powers Model

Recent scholarship suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court might be constrained by Congress in constitutional cases. We suggest two potential paths to Congressional influence on the Court's constitutional decisions: a rational‐anticipation model, in which the Court moves away from its preferences in order to avoid being overruled, and an institutional‐maintenance model, in which the Court protects itself against Congressional attacks to its institutional prerogatives by scaling back its striking of laws when the distance between the Court and Congress increases. We test these models by using Common Space scores and the original roll‐call votes to estimate support in the current Congress for the original legislation and the Court's preferences over that legislation. We find that the Court does not appear to consider the likelihood of override in constitutional cases, but it does back away from striking laws when it is ideologically distant from Congress.     

Emission Standards,Public Transit,and Infant Health

Transit buses are an integral part of urban life. They reduce externalities generated from private vehicles and increase geographic mobility. However, unlike most private vehicles in the United States, they use diesel fuel and emit higher amounts of toxic pollutants. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set emission standards for transit buses starting in 1988 that have been continually updated, but their public health and economic impacts are unclear due to scarce emissions data. I construct a novel panel dataset for the New York City (NYC) Transit bus fleet between 1990 and 2009 and examine the impact of bus pollution on infant health by using bus vintage as a proxy for emissions. I exploit the variation in vintage as older buses are retired and replaced with newer, lower‐emitting buses forced to adhere to stricter emission standards. I then assign maternal exposure to bus vintage at the census block level. Findings suggest that maternal exposure to the oldest, unregulated buses is associated with modest reductions in birth weight and gestational age relative to newer buses that abide by emissions policies. I then conduct a back‐of‐the‐envelope cost‐benefit calculation and find net economic benefits of $53.3 million resulting from improved emission standards for the 2009 birth cohort in NYC. Since the treatment in this study clearly maps to federal emissions policies, these results are the first to provide credible evidence that transit bus emission standards had a positive effect on infant health.     

Public Opinion and the Role of Government Arts Funding in Spain

While several studies have probed the determinants of public support for government funding of arts and culture in the United States, little work to date has addressed the question in Europe. Yet as private cultural funding increases in magnitude in most Western European countries, the answer to this question has policy implications. This article formalizes the theory of the determinants of this public support in a model, employs public opinion data from Spain to estimate this model, and compares the results with those from the U.S. I find that support in Spain increases strongly with age, but is insignificant in most other variables. The article's empirical results yield several lessons for cultural policy design.     

Immigration Policy and Hispanic Representation in National Elections

For the first time in U.S. history, after decades of unprecedented growth in interior immigration enforcement disproportionately impacting Latinos, ten percent of the U.S. House of Representatives is Hispanic. Using congressional district-level data on all candidates participating in general elections to the U.S. House of Representatives between 2008 and 2018, we show that intensified immigration enforcement suppressed Hispanics’ representation in congressional elections. The effect—nonexistent for other minorities, such as non-Hispanic Black candidates, as well as in primary elections—is driven by local police-based measures and diminished electoral support. Furthermore, it appears more harmful during midterm elections and in localities without a sanctuary policy.     

Are Public Service Nonprofit Boards Meeting Their Responsibilities?

Public service nonprofit organizations have long been "partners" in the delivery of public services. Such nonprofit organizations are governed by boards, typically composed of citizen volunteers, that are expected to meet substantial standards of accountability and performance. Previous research has raised questions about how well such boards are meeting their responsibilities. A 2007 Urban Institute study, based on the first large representative sample of U.S. public benefit nonprofits, provides important evidence about the extent to which nonprofit boards are meeting certain accountability and performance standards.     

美国食品安全监管的第三方审核机制研究

2010年美国通过了《FDA食品安全现代化法》,对进口食品安全监管首次引入第三方审核制度。这一规定背后反映的是美国在食品供应链全球化之后,传统的监管机制日益不敷现实之需而借鉴私人监管创新的结果。本文梳理了该法规定的第三方审核机制的适用范围和主要制度安排,同时考察了美国食品安全第三方审核机制的实践,深入分析了其存在的问题和面临的挑战。最后,作者探讨了美国这一机制对我国加强食品安全监管可能具有的启示。