Rivalry and superior dispatch: an?analysis of competing courts in medieval and early modern England

In most areas, economists look to competition to align incentives, but not so with courts. Many believe that competition enables plaintiff forum shopping, but Adam Smith praised rivalry among courts. This article describes the courts when the common law developed. In many areas of law, courts were monopolized and imposed decisions on unwilling participants. In other areas, however, large degrees of competition and consent were present. In many areas, local, hundred, manorial, county, ecclesiastical, law merchant, chancery, and common law courts competed for customers. When parties had a choice, courts needed to provide a forum that was ex ante value maximizing.     

Enhancing the Legitimacy of Local Government Pandemic Influenza Planning through Transparency and Public Engagement

Ethical issues in an influenza pandemic often require local government officials to make unprecedented, complex decisions. Effective planning with significant input from key community stakeholders is required well ahead of time in order to anticipate and mitigate a serious health crisis. The author evaluates the pandemic plans of 28 large cities across the United States using criteria derived from guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The analysis reveals that planning legitimacy can be enhanced by wider transparency and civic engagement, greater opportunities for the inclusion of all stakeholders in decision making, mock community‐wide exercises and drills, as well as more public access to comprehensive emergency planning information.     

The Enduring Effects of Competitive Elections

Research on U.S. congressional elections has placed great emphasis on the role of competitiveness, which is associated with high levels of campaign spending, media coverage, and interest group and party involvement. Competitive campaigns have been found to increase citizens' participation, engagement and learning. However, little is known about whether the effects of competitive campaigns have enduring consequences for citizens' attitudes and behavior. Analyzing a survey of citizens conducted one year after the 2006 congressional elections that includes an oversample of respondents from competitive House races, we examine whether exposure to a competitive House campaign affects voters' political knowledge and political interest as well as their consumption of political news. We find that competitive elections have positive effects that endure for at least a year beyond the campaign season, reinforcing the idea that political competition plays a robust role in American representative democracy.     

Divided we vote

Divided government is known to correlate with limited government, but less is understood about the empirical conditions that lead to divided government. This paper estimates the determinants of continuous and categorical measures of divided government in an empirical macro political economy model using 30 years of data from the American states. Voters support more divided government after increased government spending per dollar of tax revenues, but more unified government after worsening incomes and unemployment rates. Only conditional support is found for the strategic-moderating theory (Alesina and Rosenthal in Econometrica 64(6):1311–1341, 1996) that focuses purely on midterm cycles and split-ticket voting absent economic conditions.     

The evolution of an innovation: variations in medicaid managed care program extensiveness

This article utilizes a theoretical framework of policy innovation, diffusion, and reinvention to investigate the evolving nature of Medicaid managed care programs over time. By estimating two separate models, one for primary care case management (PCCM) and a second for risk-based program enrollment, this study seeks to disentangle two different paths of learning (internal and external), investigate the potential effects of vertical diffusion of policy, and examine the impact of internal state characteristics on the extent of Medicaid managed care. With respect to diffusion and learning, the data reveal that earlier adopters implement more extensive programs. The data fail to reveal much internal learning, although there is evidence of some. External impacts are clear: managed care enrollments in neighboring states and changes in the federal waiver process affect states' decisions. Other policy choices are important: states with more generous Medicaid eligibility rules implement more extensive managed care programs. Complementing other studies of Medicaid, we find that politics and economics make a difference for the extent of managed care programs; unlike other Medicaid studies, we find no effect of race and ethnicity.