Next Step: State Funding for the Parties?

The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 marked the most comprehensive and radical overhaul of British party finance for over 100 years. It instituted reforms in many areas, with the notable exception of the comprehensive extension of state funding for political parties. However, despite the radicalism of the Act, questions have already arisen as to whether further state funding should occur. This article argues that in order to examine the case for more comprehensive state funding, policy–makers need to look beyond the current calls and make a decision by evaluating several criteria on the basis of empirical evidence rather than assumptions. First, however, it is worth outlining the stage we are at presently by summarising the new Act, looking at its impact to date and examining the claims made in recent episodes which have led to calls for more comprehensive state funding of political parties.     

Development Ballot Measures, Interest Group Endorsements, and the Political Geography of Growth Preferences

In response to rapid population and economic growth, many communities have turned to voter initiatives to resolve their land use disputes. We find that despite strong public concern about growth, voters often support measures that allow or encourage new development. We consider the sources of this support by analyzing patterns of voting on a range of prodevelopment ballot initiatives. These initiatives provide a valuable opportunity to understand how economic self-interest, geography, interest group endorsements, and public goods affect citizen support for development policies. We find that interest group endorsements significantly increase public support for new development. These endorsements help voters evaluate the personal impact of complex development proposals and allow voters to behave in ways that reflect a high degree of sophistication .     

The Politics of Enforcement: Eliot Spitzer, State-Federal Relations, and the Redesign of Financial Regulation

The dynamics of financial regulation in the United States havebeen transformed by a series of investigations mounted by EliotSpitzer, the state attorney general of New York. Through thestrategic use of his office, Spitzer has become one of the country'smost successful policy entrepreneurs. His success is linkedto the serendipitous confluence of three key factors: the diffusednature of regulatory authority in a federal system; the locationof the state as the preeminent global financial centre; andthe particularity of the New York State constitution, whichoffers little resistance to the vagaries of political ambition.The paper concludes that although Spitzer has highlighted seriousstructural problems and caused severe embarrassment, fundamentalchanges to market governance itself have been less evident.     

Hofferbert in Transit: A Dynamic Stages Model of the Urban Policy Process

This article presents a reformulation and empirical test of Hofferbert's (1974 ) “stages” heuristic, a model that fell largely out of favor due to criticisms that it does not effectively account for (1) feedback loops, or the possibility that policymakers learn from past experiences, and (2) the importance of intergovernmental relations. We update this model and apply it in the context of urban transit policymaking, using revenue flows to and from the government as an indicator of both recursive behavior and intergovernmental influence. The results suggest that these modifications reestablish the explanatory power of the stages model.     

Is Temperature Exogenous? The Impact of Civil Conflict on the Instrumental Climate Record in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Research into the effects of climate on political and economic outcomes assumes that short‐term variation in weather is exogenous to the phenomena being studied. However, weather data are derived from stations operated by national governments, whose political capacity and stability affect the quality and continuity of coverage. We show that civil conflict risk in sub‐Saharan Africa is negatively correlated with the number and density of weather stations contributing to a country's temperature record. This effect is both cross‐sectional—countries with higher average conflict risk tend to have poorer coverage—and cross‐temporal—civil conflict leads to loss of weather stations. Poor coverage induces a small downward bias in one widely used temperature data set, due to its interpolation method, and increases measurement error, potentially attenuating estimates of the temperature–conflict relationship. Combining multiple observational data sets to reduce measurement error almost doubles the estimated effect of temperature anomalies on civil conflict risk.     

The Influence of Public Sentiment on Supreme Court Opinion Clarity

We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an individual‐level sample of Supreme Court cases paired with issue‐specific public opinion polls. The empirical results from both models show that justices write clearer opinions when their rulings contradict popular sentiment. These results suggest public opinion influences the Court, and suggest that future scholarship should analyze how public opinion influences the written content of decision makers’ policies.