The Power of Secrecy and the Secrecy of Power: FACA and the National Energy Policy Development Group

One of President George W. Bush's first official acts was to charter an advisory committee that would make recommendations for a new American energy policy. While the National Energy Policy Development Group was officially made up only of government employees, journalists and watchdogs suspected that the committee was inappropriately meeting with representatives of energy firms. Two citizens' groups brought suit under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) to unveil the secrecy surrounding the National Energy Policy Development Group and its policymaking processes. The ensuing court battle revealed the weaknesses of FACA and its paradoxical use by the Bush Administration in continuing the very same government secrecy that the act is intended to prevent. This article examines a particular case of secrecy in the Bush Administration—the formulation of energy policy by Dick Cheney's energy task force—with an analysis of the known activities of the group and the history of citizen challenges to its secrecy. The article then considers the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of the Federal Advisory Committee Act as a safeguard against government secrecy.     

Replication Studies of Development Impact Evaluations

Six years ago, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) launched a programme to promote and fund replication studies of impact evaluations in international development. We designed the programme with the objective of improving the quality of evidence for development policy-making, using replication research to both validate the results of published impact evaluations and build the incentives for more transparent and high quality research going forward. The programme’s focus is internal replication, which uses the original data from a study to address the same question as that study. This Journal of Development Studies special issue compiles the majority of completed 3ie-funded replication studies initiated in the first years of the programme. In all cases the pure replication components of these studies are generally able to reproduce the results published in the original article. Most of the measurement and estimation analyses confirm the robustness of the original articles or call into question just a subset of the original findings. These replication studies mostly focus on providing additional information about the impacts of the interventions – especially additional information that can be important for interpreting the articles for the purpose of policy-making.     

Regulation and regime: the comparative politics of adaptive regulation in synthetic biology

Policy Sciences - Regulation of rapidly developing changing policy areas is a well-known challenge for any government. It can involve balancing factors from elite factional politics to development...     

THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT'S EFFECTS ON PATIENTS,PROVIDERS, AND THE ECONOMY: WHAT WE'VE LEARNED SO FAR

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, it is important to reflect on what has been learned about the impacts of this major reform. In this paper, we review the literature on the impacts of the ACA on patients, providers, and the economy. We find strong evidence that the ACA's provisions have increased insurance coverage. There is also a clearly positive effect on access to and consumption of health care, with suggestive but more limited evidence on improved health outcomes. There is no evidence of significant reductions in provider access, changes in labor supply, or increased budgetary pressures on state governments, and the law's total federal cost through 2018 has been less than predicted. We conclude by describing key policy implications and future areas for research.     

Religion and the Extension of Trust

Political Behavior - The ability to cooperate with others, both individuals and institutions, is an essential social function built on trust. We explore the competing religious logics that shape...     

Durable Democracy? Economic Inequality and Democratic Accountability in the New Gilded Age

Political Behavior - Scholarship in the U.S. provides mounting evidence of a linkage between economic inequality and inequality in representation and policymaking. In response, this article...     

Influences and conflicts of federal policies in academic–industrial scientific collaboration

This paper examines the role of the federal government in shaping the relationship between academics scientists and industry. There exists a potential conflict between government policies encouraging collaboration within academia and the policies encouraging collaboration between academia and industry. To test and model these potential conflicts, this paper uses data collected in a 2004–2005 survey by the Research Valuing Mapping Project (a project based at Georgia Tech and led by Barry Bozeman) of more than 2000 academically based research scientists and engineers. The major finding in this paper shows that academic scientists working with industry collaborate more (with all types of collaborators) than those that do not collaborate with industry. However, when examining only those scientist that collaborate with industry, the results reveal a negative relationship between the amount of time spent collaborating with industry and the number of collaborators; implying that increasing collaboration with industry leads to less academic–academic collaboration.