PARTISAN POLITICS,ELECTORAL COMPETITION AND IMPRISONMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF STATES OVER TIME*

The now well‐documented explosion in prison populations over the last 30 years has spurred significant attention in the literature. Early research focused primarily on economic explanations. More recently it has focused on political explanations of prison growth. Here we extend research on political explanations of imprisonment by drawing on the literature on state politics and public policy. We argue that the effect of partisan politics on punishment is conditional on how much electoral competition legislators face. We test this hypothesis using annual state level data on imprisonment from 1978 to 1996. Our findings show that the effect of Republican state legislative strength on prison admissions depends on time and the level of competition in state legislative elections. We argue that these findings suggest the need for a more nuanced understanding of the link between partisan U.S. politics and imprisonment.     

Naming Names: The Impact of Supreme Court Opinion Attribution on Citizen Assessment of Policy Outcomes

The manner in which political institutions convey their policy outcomes can have important implications for how the public views institutions' policy decisions. This paper explores whether the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court communicates its policy decrees affects how favorably members of the public assess its decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether attributing a decision to the nation's High Court or to an individual justice influences the public's agreement with the Court's rulings. Using an experimental design, we find that when a Supreme Court outcome is ascribed to the institution as a whole, rather than to a particular justice, people are more apt to agree with the policy decision. We also find that identifying the gender of the opinion author affects public agreement under certain conditions. Our findings have important implications for how public support for institutional policymaking operates, as well as the dynamics of how the Supreme Court manages to accumulate and maintain public goodwill.     

Hidden convergence: toward a historical comparison of U.S. and U.K. health policy

The social science literature on the comparative history of the welfare state offers conflicting accounts of the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. At first blush, the comparative history of health care policy in the United States and the United Kingdom seems to affirm the dominant view that the U.S. and U.K. welfare states have diverged substantially during the twentieth century. A comparison of U.S. and U.K. health policy, however, suggests that there are more parallels and points of tangency between the two systems than are readily apparent. The comparative history of health policy over the past century reveals common political and policy challenges and frequent interchanges of policy ideas, and helps uncover the political dynamics behind the development of health policy in the two countries, which can, in turn, help illuminate the contemporary politics of reform in both countries.     

Challenging custom: rethinking national population surveillance policy in a global public health age

This article examines the current state of disease surveillance and reporting in the United States and seeks to answer two central questions: first, whether the increasing emphasis on the global importance of public health policies compels a fundamental reexamination of the long-standing deferential approach to state power where matters of population health surveillance are concerned and, second, how the nation's long-standing deferential legal customs might be modified to address the growing emphasis on global public health policy that is undergirded by technological advances. We examine the International Health Regulations, or IHR (2005), and suggest that these regulations offer a powerful impetus for reevaluating U.S. legal custom concerning the policy and practice of population health surveillance, not only as a matter of U.S. law but also as a core dimension of U.S. legal obligations to other nations, as embodied in international agreements and treaties. We find that if the political will exists to change the domestic disease surveillance and reporting system, the federal government has the power to act. Questions remain, however, about whether the public health and legislative communities are willing to challenge current customs or even if they desire to do so.     

Congress and the political expansion of the U.S. districts courts

Expanding the number of U.S. district judgeships is often justifiedas a response to expanding caseloads. Increasing judgeshipsduring unified government, however, allows Congress and thePresident to engage in political (patronage and ideological)control of the federal district courts. This paper examinesempirically the relative importance of caseload pressure andpolitical motives for Congress to expand the number of federaldistrict judgeships. We demonstrate that politics dominatesthe timing of judgeship expansion in the U.S. District Courts.We also show that both politics and caseload affect the actualsize of those timed expansions. In particular, we find thatbefore 1970, Congress seemed to have strong political motivationsfor the size of an expansion. After 1970, Congress became muchmore attentive to caseload considerations.     

Dissent,Legitimacy, and Public Support for Court Decisions: Evidence from a Survey‐Based Experiment

Scholars often argue that whereas unanimous rulings should boost public support for court decisions, dissents should fuel public opposition. Previous studies on public responses to U.S. Supreme Court decisions suggest that unanimity does in fact bolster support. However, a recent study has also found that dissents may increase support among opponents of a court decision by suggesting evidence of procedural justice. By examining how individuals react to dissents from the Supreme Court of Norway, this article is the first study outside the U.S. context of the public's reaction to unanimity and dissent. Breaking with the common notion of the negative effects of dissent on public support, the article shows that when the Supreme Court handles cases of higher political salience, the formulation of dissenting opinions can be a meaningful way of securing greater support for its policy outputs by suggesting evidence of procedural justice. Contrary to recent studies, however, this positive influence of dissent is irrespective of individuals' ex ante policy views.     

State Politics and the Right to Counsel: A Comparative Analysis

One of the most significant recent developments in the study of crime and justice is the emergence of theoretical explanations for the dramatic changes in criminal justice policy over the past few decades. These theoretical accounts address not only highly visible developments, such as the meteoric rise in incarceration rates, but also less-conspicuous shifts in due process and civil liberties, and they do so by attributing more-repressive policies to the emergence of a political culture that has substantially redefined crime and justice. This article focuses on an important due process issue, the legal representation of indigent defendants in criminal courts. We describe the state of indigent defense policy, particularly structure and funding, across the states in 2002, and analyze variation on two dimensions where states may exercise discretion: the extent to which states assume responsibility for funding services (rather than relying on local governments), and the generosity with which these programs are funded overall. We test hypotheses that link funding for services with the ideology of state political leadership, public values about tolerance and race relations, and states' public welfare policy climates. We find little support for the prediction that a welfare climate shapes more progressive indigent defense policies. However, the results suggest that the racial threat hypothesis helps account for spending on indigent defense, and that Republican control of the statehouse results in the perpetuation of local responsibility for program funding. Normative literature on indigent defense suggests that the patterns we observe may have important consequences for the quality of indigent defense services across states. Further, the findings reported here suggest that the politics of the punitive turn, as it has played out across the states, may be responsible not only for shifts in crime control policy, but for due process policy as well.     

Stop,Collaborate, and Listen: Women's Collaboration in US State Legislatures

Collaboration plays a key role in crafting good public policy. We use a novel data set of over 140,000 pieces of legislation considered in US state legislatures in 2015 to examine the factors associated with women's collaboration with each other. We articulate a theory that women's collaboration arises from opportunity structures, dictated by an interaction of individual and institutional characteristics. Examining the effect of a combination of characteristics, we find support for an interactive view of institutions, where women's caucuses accelerate collaboration in Democratic‐controlled bodies and as the share of women increases. Collaboration between women also continues in the face of increased polarization in the presence of a caucus, but not absent one. Our findings speak to the long‐term consequences of electing women to political office, the importance of institutions and organizations in shaping legislative behavior, and the institutionalization of gender in politics.     

Public Expectations of State Legislators

When members of Congress neglect the needs of their districts or vote contrary to the wishes of their constituents, their public approval suffers. Does the same hold true for representatives at the state level? Using experiments, I explore whether people dole out similar rewards and penalties to state legislators and members of Congress for their successes and shortfalls in representing constituents. I find that a similar model of political accountability travels from national politics to state politics. People value policy representation, casework, and attention to the district as much from state legislators as they do from members of Congress.     

Lawyers,Justices, and Issue Salience: When and How Do Legal Arguments Affect the U.S. Supreme Court?

A good deal of scholarly evidence suggests that the decisionmaking of the U.S. Supreme Court is affected by legal argument. At the same time, it seems clear that in a great many cases the justices have enduring, strongly held views. In such cases, they should be impervious to the effects of advocacy. When are the justices apt to be influenced by the Court's legal community, and when will lawyers be less relevant? The answer, we think, has to do with the salience of the issue before the Court. We suspect that in nonsalient cases the justices have less‐intense preferences and therefore are open to the persuasion of lawyers. In salient cases, by contrast, the content of legal policy matters much more to the justices. As a result, they are less amenable to legal argument and adhere more strictly to their personal policy preferences. Our empirical tests support this orientation.     

Predicting Bureaucratic Control: Evidence from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments

The extent to which politicians control bureaucracies that are delegated authority over public policy involves fundamental positive and normative issues for the study of politics. Considerations related to such issues have stimulated a great deal of debate about whether the legislature exercises control over bureaucratic performance. However, establishing the measurable empirical conditions under which elected officials do and do not assure agency responsiveness remains unsettled.
In light of this state of affairs, we try to determine whether it is possible to develop a general means of predicting control, or at least of predicting what we term "intent to control," based on the assumption that legislators' preferences toward agency responsiveness reflect the nature of the policy environment. Our application to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 finds strong empirical evidence that statutory provisions vary predictably, depending upon whether legislators possess the requisite technical ability and are likely, or wish, to be held politically accountable. Our results indicate that control varies for reasons that fit well with our understanding of how elected officials deal with complexity and their own political situations. Our findings also imply that subtle, but measurable, differences in the specific policy environment are crucial for understanding control.     

Public opinion and the politics of obesity in America

Health policy experts have recently sounded the warning about the severe health and economic consequences of America's growing rates of obesity. Despite this fact, obesity has only begun to enter America's political consciousness and we have little information about what average Americans think of obesity or whether they support obesity-related policies. Using unique survey data collected by the authors, this essay examines public attitudes toward obesity and obesity policy. We find that, contrary to the views of health experts, most Americans are not seriously concerned with obesity, express relatively low support for obesity-targeted policies, and still view obesity as resulting from individual failure rather than environmental or genetic sources. Given the absence of elite discourse on this problem, we also find that typical determinants of policy preferences, such as ideology or partisanship, are not good predictors of attitudes on obesity policy. Rather, with a low-valence issue such as obesity, the public utilizes other attitudinal frameworks such as their opinions on smoking policy and the environmental culpability for obesity. The implications of these findings for obesity policy and research on health-related public opinion are discussed.     

Adjudicating Executive Privilege: Federal Administrative Agencies and Deliberative Process Privilege Claims in U.S. District Courts

Government transparency is a key component of democratic accountability. The U.S. Congress and the president have created multiple legislative avenues to facilitate executive branch transparency with the public. However, when the executive branch withholds requested information from the public, the federal judiciary has the power to determine whether agencies must release documents and information to requestors. When enforcing standards of executive branch transparency, judges must balance concerns of executive autonomy and judicial intrusion into administrative decisionmaking. While much judicial scholarship focuses on the decisionmaking on high courts, in the U.S. context, federal district courts play a key role in adjudicating transparency disputes. In this article, I examine case outcomes in disputes involving agency claims of deliberative process privilege over internal agency documents litigated between 1994 and 2004. I find that U.S. federal district courts largely defer to administrative agencies in transparency disputes. However, factors such as agency structure and the congruence between judicial and administrative agency policy preferences influence whether federal judges require executive branch officials to release requested information.     

Introduction

The eruption of the "culture wars" in 1989 pushed U.S. arts policy to the forefront of the public agenda, leading to extreme political scrutiny of and controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its funding activities. As the premier national-level public agency charged with supporting the arts in the United States, the NEA stood at the heart of debates on related arts policy. With an empirical focus on the NEA in the 1990s, we delineate and examine the broader effects and implications of the surrounding debates and related policy outcomes. In general, in keeping with the conservative political agenda of the 1990s in the United States, the result was the development of policies ostensibly aimed at promoting access to the arts that demoted concerns over artistic excellence, along with direct attacks on the NEA's overall administrative philosophy and decision-making practices. Employing insights from critical theory and reflexive sociology, we analyze the dramatic organizational shifts and programmatic restructuring initiated by the NEA in response to this situation and its ultimate effect on the relationships between art, artist, and audience in U.S. arts policy and society today.     

A God of Vengeance and of Reward? Voters and Accountability

Theories of democratic politics prize congruence between citizens’ preferences and their elected representatives’ actions in office. Elections are a critical means for achieving such policy congruence, providing voters the opportunity to chasten representatives who are out of step with constituent preferences and to reward the faithful. Do voters act this way? Recent studies based on observational data find they do, but these data are somewhat limited. We employ a survey experiment to estimate the extent to which information about policy congruence affects voters’ evaluations of representatives. We informed some subjects how often their member of Congress’s voting decisions match their own stated preferences on the same policies. We find that information about congruence enhances accountability by affecting constituent evaluations of representatives and may also affect citizens’ propensity to participate in upcoming elections.     

Peculiar Institutions: Slavery,Sectionalism, and Minority Obstruction in the Antebellum Senate

This article examines obstruction in the U.S. Senate, focusing on political conflict in the antebellum period. I consider different theories that predict when obstruction should occur and conduct individual‐level analysis of the use of and support for dilatory tactics. The analysis investigates how the costs of obstruction, the probability that obstruction succeeds, the policy preferences of the senator, and the salience of legislation relate to decisions to obstruct. I find that both sectional and partisan factors influence obstruction, with the former being especially important for legislation related to slavery. In particular, Southern senators' concerns about being in the minority led them to obstruct to protect their interests in slavery.     

Legitimating war by victimization: state-corporate crime and public opinion

This article argues that the ideological use of victimization helps legitimate the state-corporate crime of aggressive war. This contributes to the emerging criminology of war by offering a theoretical framework to better understand how state and corporate actors legitimate criminal military action. We argue that politicians and other elite figures promote a sense of national victimization that is amplified by the news media. We partially test our theory by measuring the association between the incidence of terror victimization ideas in the news and public support for the U.S. ??war on terror.?? We find some evidence of relationships between our Terrorism Victimization Index and both victimization worry and aggressive war support.     

Assisting altruism: evaluating legally binding consent in organ donation policy

The growing need for organ and tissue transplants has led a number of states to enforce a policy that views a donor's declared intent to be an organ donor as legally binding. This allows health officials to harvest organs without the permission of the next of kin. Legally binding consent is controversial because of concerns that it may anger family members, lead to negative publicity, and discourage potential donors. We use interviews and a pooled time-series data set of cadaveric donation rates in U.S. states to evaluate the effectiveness of this policy. Our research indicates that enforcement of legally binding consent has marginally increased cadaveric donations while not significantly affecting donor registration. We also find evidence that the effect of the policy might be greater if it were more fully implemented and coordinated with efforts to improve public acceptance and awareness.