Costs of taxation and the size of government

Existing theory on the form of government suggests that a parliamentary system promotes a larger size of government than does a presidential system. This paper extends the existing theory by allowing for distortionary taxation. A main result is that if taxation is sufficiently distortionary, the parliamentary system may promote a smaller size of government than the presidential system. The proposed mechanism appears consistent with several empirical patterns in the data that cannot be explained by other theories.     

Adulthood animal abuse among women court-referred to batterer intervention programs

The substantial increase in the enrollment of women in batterer intervention programs (BIPs) over the past 30 years has greatly outpaced research on women who perpetrate intimate partner violence (IPV). As a result, it is unknown whether existing programs, which were originally designed to treat male perpetrators, are effective at preventing recidivism among women. Recent research shows that men who perpetrate IPV may also aggress against nonintimate partners, children, and animals, and that the reach of their aggressive tendencies has implications for treatment. Conducting similar investigations on women who perpetrate IPV may help to inform treatment delivery in BIPs. This study examined the prevalence of adulthood animal abuse perpetration and its association with psychological and physical IPV perpetration in a sample of women arrested for domestic violence (N = 87). Seventeen percent (n = 15) of the women committed at least one act of animal abuse since the age of 18, in contrast to the 0.28% prevalence rate reported in the general population. The overrepresentation of animal abuse in this sample was consistent with that of men arrested for domestic violence. Furthermore, women who reported committing animal abuse as an adult showed moderately higher rates of psychological aggression and physical assault perpetration against their partners, relative to women who did not report animal abuse. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Perceptions of Public and Private Performance: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Media, politicians, and reform proponents frequently assert that public sector organizations are inefficient and burdened by administrative procedures. But are negative stereotypes of the public sector reflected in people's perceptions of public service provision? Given the methodological challenges of isolating the perception of publicness from other factors related to public organizations, little is known about whether public organizations have a negative image. The authors use a survey experimental design to isolate the effect of publicness on perceptions of the performance of hospitals. The results suggest that public sector organizations have a negative image on productivity‐related aspects of performance but not on normative aspects of performance. As this article is a randomized experiment, it provides strong evidence regarding the causal nature of the relationship between publicness and perceptions of performance. Implications for researchers aiming to understand these mechanisms and for public managers concerned about the image of their organization are discussed.     

Institutional Change and Professional Norms: A Study of Grading Behavior in Higher Education

This study investigates how an institutional exogenous change interacts with professional norms in relation to behavior in public organizations. We test how a new grading scale introduced in 2007 changed grade point averages and pass rates at two university departments. Data consist of register data on grading between 2004 and 2010. We find that the new grading scale both increased grade point averages and pass rates and halted the negative time trend in these variables. These effects are even greater for exams with an external examiner. The main conclusion is that grading systems affect grading both immediately and over time.     

Democratization and Violent Conflict: Is There A Scandinavian Exception?

The notion that the paths to democracy in Scandinavia were exceptionally peaceful remains a popular argument, but an equally large number of studies opposes this view. This research note provides the first systematic attempt to compare records of violence during democratization in Scandinavia with other regions and countries. By using Varieties of Democracy data, I construct novel measures of democratization and violent conflict that align with extant propositions on Scandinavian exceptionalism and conflict‐democratization research while appreciating multiple dimensions of democratization for a global sample of countries from 1789 to 2018. The results show stable support for a substantial Scandinavian exception of peaceful democratization, but only evidently so for moves toward greater executive constraints and civil and political liberties. The exception is less clear for democratization considering competitive elections and suffrage. On this basis, I propose that we may improve the understanding of the causes of Scandinavian democratic exceptionalism and democratic sustainability more generally by studying the origins of peaceful democratization in Scandinavia compared with Western Europe in the ‘age of liberalization’ from approx. the mid‐eighteenth to the mid‐nineteenth century.     

Political Pressure,Conformity Pressure,and Performance Information as Drivers of Public Sector Innovation Adoption

Why public organizations adopt and abandon organizational innovations is a key question for any endeavor to explain large-scale developments in the public sector. Supplementing research within public administration on innovation with the related literature on policy diffusion, this article examines how external factors such as conformity pressure from institutionalized models, performance information from other organizations, and political pressure affect innovation adoption. By the use of two survey experiments in very different political contexts—Texas and Denmark—and a difference-in-differences analysis exploiting a reform of the political governance of public schools in Denmark, we find that public managers respond to political pressure. We find no indications that they emulate institutionalized models or learn from performance information from other organizations when they adopt organizational innovations. The results thereby point to political pressure as an important factor behind large-scale adoptions of organizational innovations in the public sector.     

Long-term consequences of being placed in disciplinary segregation†

Being placed in restrictive housing is considered one of the most devastating experiences a human can endure, yet a scant amount of research has been conducted to test how this experience affects core indicators of prisoner reentry such as employment and recidivism. In this article, we use Danish registry data, which allow for us to link penal conditions to postrelease outcomes, to show how the reentry outcomes of individuals placed in disciplinary segregation, which is placement in restrictive housing because of disciplinary infractions, compare with those sanctioned for in-prison offenses but not placed in segregation. The results from matched difference-in-differences analyses show that Danish inmates placed in disciplinary segregation experience larger drops in employment and larger increases in the risk of being convicted of a new crime in the 3 years after release from a correctional facility than do Danish inmates who were sanctioned for a serious offense but not placed in disciplinary segregation as a result. Because being placed in disciplinary segregation, and restrictive housing more broadly, is so common, these results indicate that restrictive housing placement may be a key moderator of the effects of incarceration that merits more attention from criminologists, provided the associations shown here represent causal effects and generalize.     

Policy Positions of Bureaucrats at the Front Lines: Are They Susceptible to Strategic Communication?

It is well established that bureaucrats’ implementation of policies is influenced by their own policy positions, that is, their attitudes toward the given policies. However, what affects the policy positions of bureaucrats? This article focuses on whether the policy positions of bureaucrats at the front lines of government are susceptible to frames and cues embedded in communication. Based on the notion that bureaucrats often adhere to certain professional norms when developing their attitudes toward policies, the authors hypothesize that communication frames and cues that align policies with such norms move bureaucrats’ policy positions in favor of the policy. Results of four studies in European and American settings among mid‐ and street‐level bureaucrats show support for the hypothesized effect. They also show that aligning policies with dimensions outside professional norms is ineffective, possibly even producing opposite effects.     

Explaining the Consequences of Imprisonment for Union Formation and Dissolution in Denmark

Crime and subsequent imprisonment reduces men's chances on the marriage market and increases their divorce risk, but existing research, with a few notable exceptions, is silent about the underlying mechanisms driving these effects. This article studies the effect of home confinement under electronic monitoring as a noncustodial alternative to imprisonment on the risk of relationship dissolution and being single, thereby distinguishing between effects of incarceration and of committing crime. We study a policy that expanded the use of electronic monitoring to address nonrandom selection into electronic monitoring instead of in prison. Results from a sample of 4,522 men show that home confinement under electronic monitoring significantly and persistently lowers the risk both of being single and of becoming single during the first five years following conviction. The results show that one of the tools that could promote decarceration trends also secures better relationship outcomes of convicted men.     

Does Ownership Matter for the Delivery of Professionalized Public Services? Cost‐efficiency and Effectiveness in Private and Public Dental Care for Children in Denmark

Recent decades have witnessed considerable interest in the cost‐efficiency and effectiveness of public services. Private provision is often claimed to be more cost‐efficient than public provision, but these efficiency gains are accused of being at the expense of effectiveness. Most of the evidence comes from relatively simple, technical services, because effectiveness is often difficult to define and measure for services produced by professionals. In addition, type of ownership might very well affect services produced by professionals differently as a result of professional standards and other regulation. The case in question, child dental care in Denmark, is a professionalized service which is remarkable for its clear and quantifiable measure of effectiveness. The findings show that neither cost‐efficiency nor effectiveness of public and private producers differs. The data represent cost and outcome measures controlled for structural variables for the 275 Danish municipalities between 1996 and 2002.