Revisiting renewable portfolio standard effectiveness: policy design and outcome specification matter

Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) differ widely across US states. Prior research findings on the effectiveness of these policies to stimulate renewable electricity deployment are equally wide ranging. This study investigates patterns of RPS policy design and analyzes the effects on policy outcomes measured at the level of utility compliance. Measuring organizational outcomes of RPS corrects for the first time the challenges of prior research focused on state-level renewable capacity or generation outcomes. The quantitative analysis also takes into account the complexity of RPS design, by making use of a state-by-state database of RPS design characteristics developed for this study. Patterns of RPS design across states are compared, including the compliance schedule, scope, eligibility of resources, quotas and subsidies, renewable energy credit provisions, as well as enforcement and penalties. Together, the map of state RPS design and the new approach to RPS outcome analysis illuminate the diversity of RPS policy practice across the United States. They suggest the need to both account for the variety of design characteristics and accurately specify the policy outcomes in evaluations of these policies.     

Representative Bureaucracy and Partisanship: The Implementation of Election Law

Studies of representative bureaucracy argue that public administrators hold attitudes that are generally representative of the public and will implement policy in accordance with those attitudes. However, studies of representative bureaucracy generally have not considered the partisanship of local administrators. Many local election officials affiliate with a political party, and there is concern that partisan officials will manipulate election procedures to help their party. The authors analyze a survey of local election officials about their attitudes toward provisional voting. Findings show that Democratic local election officials have significantly more positive attitudes toward provisional voting programs in highly Democratic jurisdictions and significantly less positive attitudes in highly Republican jurisdictions. No such relationship occurs for Republican administrators. In addition, positive attitudes toward provisional voting are associated with more provisional votes being cast and counted in the 2004 presidential election. This work questions whether representative bureaucracy—when it concerns partisanship—is always a desirable outcome.     

Signals intelligence and Pearl Harbor: The state of the question

In recent times, Pearl Harbor historiography has shifted towards the question of whether or not the Pearl Harbor attack could have been predicted through intercepted signals. The recent prodigious output of books and articles on this subject makes it necessary to reflect upon how the debate has developed. Some traditionalists (who believe that the Pearl Harbor attack surprised US and Allied authorities) continue to criticize revisionists (who believe that intercepted signals may have provided foreknowledge of the attack) using a blend of polemics and ad hominem criticism. That adversarial template began long ago with the first sharp criticisms of the work of revisionist historian Charles Beard. Similar criticisms of revisionists continue to the present day, but such criticisms are unfounded as relevant evidence concerning pre-Pearl Harbor signals intelligence, drawn from both archival and anecdotal sources, suggests that the revisionist thesis merits further scholarly attention.     

Development in the Commonwealth Caribbeans after a half-century of independence: insights from transnational and regional perspectives

After 50 years of formal independence in the anglophone Caribbean, this article suggests gains for both analysis and policy may be made by something of a paradigm shift towards a focus on transnational and regional relations. This is especially so for the myriad small, particularly island, states which have always been relatively ‘open’ especially as contemporary governance demands proliferate as indicated in the first section below. And it holds potential for island communities in the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, especially for those associated with inter- and non-state Commonwealth networks; these now include not only the original established ‘Dominions’ of Australia, Britain and Canada but also 2/5 BRICS, or 25% of the G20. A focus on the transnational and regional helps to transcend the old binary of ‘vulnerability’ versus ‘resilience’.     

Is Putin’s popularity real?

Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve strikingly high public approval ratings throughout his time as president and prime minister of Russia. But is his popularity real, or are respondents lying to pollsters? We conducted a series of list experiments in early 2015 to estimate support for Putin while allowing respondents to maintain ambiguity about whether they personally do so. Our estimates suggest support for Putin of approximately 80%, which is within 10 percentage points of that implied by direct questioning. We find little evidence that these estimates are positively biased due to the presence of floor effects. In contrast, our analysis of placebo experiments suggests that there may be a small negative bias due to artificial deflation. We conclude that Putin’s approval ratings largely reflect the attitudes of Russian citizens.     

The Mixed Temporalities of Transnationalism in Dreams of Speaking

This article explores the mixed temporalities inherent in Gail Jones’s treatment of transnational grief in Dreams of Speaking (2006). I examine the novel’s interests in modernity and temporality and show how the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, in the novel, creates grief that is shared across national boundaries. The novel explores the coexistence of the modern and the unmodern, and Jones exemplifies this in the spectral nature of grief; it haunts the two protagonists throughout Dreams of Speaking. This article reads the coexistence of modernity and the unmodern alongside the ways in which Japan unsettles Eurocentric notions of colonial modernity (with its insistence on shared temporalities of progress) by having been a colonial power as well as by undertaking substantial modernisation in the postwar period. I employ Harry Harootunian’s notion of “mixed temporalities” to show the transnational dimensions in the cross-cultural interaction this novel facilitates. I compare the novel’s treatment of the bomb, and of temporality, to Salvador Dalí’s The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954) and highlight the transnational sentiments in Jones’s treatments of the tropes of water and resonance.     

Preaching to the Choir: Americans Prefer Communicating to Copartisan Elected Officials

Past work suggests that partisan attachments isolate citizens from encountering elite messages contrary to their points of view. Here, we present evidence that partisan attachments not only serve to filter the information citizens receive from political elites; they also work in the other direction, isolating politicians from encountering potentially contrary perspectives from citizens. In particular, we hypothesized that Americans prefer expressing their opinions to politicians who share their party identification and avoid contacting outpartisan politicians. Three studies—drawing on a mixture of observational, field experimental, and natural experimental approaches—support this hypothesis: Citizens prefer to “preach to the choir,” contacting legislators of the same partisan stripe. In light of evidence that contact from citizens powerfully affects politicians’ stances and priorities, these findings suggest a feedback loop that might aggravate political polarization and help explain how politicians of different parties could develop different perceptions of the same constituencies.     

A policy mix experiment to promote start-up success: exploratory evaluation of the NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)/Industry University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) membership supplement

The Journal of Technology Transfer - This paper investigates the outcomes of a policy experiment, the NSF SBIR/IUCRC Membership Supplement, designed to promote the success of small high-tech...