Voting competitions with interested politicians: Platforms do not converge to the preferences of the median voter

We examine equilibrium voting strategies for elections with interested politicians facing uncertainty about voter pReferences. If politicians' utilities are defined over the set of strategies that voters select (instead of being dependent only on the probability of winning an election), equilibrium strategies will diverge (instead of converging to the median voter's pReferences) as long as politicians have different pReferences. We present conditions (i) for political compromise, and (ii) for politicians with different utility functions to merge into parties with complete strategic agreement.     

Federal health care policy and the geographic diffusion of physicians: A macro-scale analysis

The federal government passed legislation in the 1960's and 70's to increase physician supplies and reduce spatial inequalities in access to physicians. A major policy was to aggressively continue increasing the overall supply of physicians on the assumption that market forces would eventually divert physicians from areas of high physician density to those of low density. Using state-level, annual data collected over a 21-year period, this paper investigates the macro-scale spatial diffusion of physicians as an essential element in evaluating this policy. The results provide evidence of the policy impacting locational trends relating to primary care physicians, but not specialists. They also indicate that the Medicaid/Medicare programs may have adversely affected the maldistribution problem.     

Reviews

Lyndall Ryan (ed.), ‘Secret Women's Business: The Hindmarsh Island Affair’, Special issue of Journal of Australian Studies (University of Queensland Press) Brisbane, no. 48, May 1996.

Gisela Kaplan, The Meagre Harvest: The Australian Women's Movement 1950s～1990s (Allen & Unwin) St Leonards, 1996.

R. Emerson Dobash, Russell P. Dobash and Lesley Noaks (eds), Gender and Crime (University of Wales Press) Cardiff, 1995.

Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cambridge University Press) Melbourne, 1996.

Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (eds),’ Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism (Routledge), London and New York, 1995.     

Institutional Change and Embeddedness: Caste and Gender in Financial Cooperatives in Rural India

ABSTRACT

This article examines the interaction between institutional change and caste and gender embeddedness. It develops a framework for understanding how this interaction takes place. The article presents data on the results of an effort by a non-profit development organization, the Cooperative Development Foundation (CDF), to promote women's cooperatives, grounded in the ideas of mutual self-help and equitable access to services, in rural Andhra Pradesh in India. Using a simple theoretical framework that highlights the multi-level nature of institutional change, and the potential for interactions with embeddedness at one level to affect interactions at other levels, the article presents data showing how particular institutional rules of the cooperatives interacted with caste and gender to shape the overall governance and service delivery practices of these new organizations. In particular, after failed attempts to integrate existing, male-dominated cooperatives with women, the CDF created gender-segregated cooperatives. Data from the women's cooperatives show the creation of mixed-caste organizations, with boards of directors that were fairly representative of their membership, but with presidents that were more likely to be from the higher-castes. Access to financial services shows little caste bias, though lending is through caste-based peer groups. The data suggest that the interaction of embeddedness and institutional change is a process contingent on: a) the strategy taken by the development organization towards embeddedness; b) the nature of the institutional change itself relative to the existing social structure; and c) the effects the interactions between institutional change and embeddedness at different levels have on each other.     

Using the Results from Rigorous Multisite Evaluations to Inform Local Policy Decisions

Evidence‐based policy at the local level requires predicting the impact of an intervention to inform whether it should be adopted. Increasingly, local policymakers have access to published research evaluating the effectiveness of policy interventions from national research clearinghouses that review and disseminate evidence from program evaluations. Through these evaluations, local policymakers have a wealth of evidence describing what works, but not necessarily where. Multisite evaluations may produce unbiased estimates of the average impact of an intervention in the study sample and still produce inaccurate predictions of the impact for localities outside the sample for two reasons: (1) the impact of the intervention may vary across localities, and (2) the evaluation estimate is subject to sampling error. Unfortunately, there is relatively little evidence on how much the impacts of policy interventions vary from one locality to another and almost no evidence on the implications of this variation for the accuracy with which the local impact of adopting an intervention can be predicted using findings from an evaluation in other localities. In this paper, we present a set of methods for quantifying the accuracy of the local predictions that can be obtained using the results of multisite randomized trials and for assessing the likelihood that prediction errors will lead to errors in local policy decisions. We demonstrate these methods using three evaluations of educational interventions, providing the first empirical evidence of the ability to use multisite evaluations to predict impacts in individual localities—i.e., the ability of “evidence‐based policy” to improve local policy.