Romanticizing bureaucratic leadership? The politics of how elected officials attribute responsibility for performance

A core task for elected officials is to hold bureaucratic leaders responsible, but how do they determine if public managers actually influence outcomes? We propose that partisan and leadership heuristics affect how politicians apply a logic of individualized responsibility, that is, focus on individual bureaucrats rather than situational factors to explain organizational outcomes. We match survey data of local elected officials in Denmark with individual partisan variables and objective performance data about the schools they oversee. We provide evidence that partisan beliefs matter, with conservative elected officials more willing to pursue a logic of individualized responsibility. We also find that elected officials are more likely to assume that bureaucratic leaders determine organizational outcomes where performance is very high or low, a leadership attribution heuristic previously established in private sector studies. We argue that our findings have important implications for contemporary governance, given the growing reliance on performance metrics to assign responsibility.     

Radio Public Service Announcements and Voter Participation Among Native Americans: Evidence from Two Field Experiments

Although similar to other U.S. minorities in terms of socio-economic status and political interest, Native Americans are more dispersed geographically and much less likely to vote. This pattern suggests that at least part of the disparity in turnout might be due to Native Americans’ lower exposure to statewide and national mobilization campaigns. To test this idea, a randomized experiment was conducted in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a radio campaign that encouraged Native Americans to vote. In 2008 and 2010, experiments were conducted across a total of 85 radio markets spanning more than a dozen states. Results suggest that this nonpartisan radio campaign increased turnout among registered Native American voters in both elections, although the estimated effects fall short of conventional levels of statistical significance.     

Peasant struggle in Japan, 1590–1760

Peasant uprisings in the Tokugawa period have been studied by Japanese scholars since the Second World War as ‘manifestations of the struggle of the oppressed masses against the despotic power of the feudal system’, but Hugh Borton, the doyen of American scholars concerned with Japanese peasant studies, argues in the introduction to a reissue of his 1938 opus that there is little new evidence to support this prevailing interpretation. His somewhat cavalier dismissal of the thesis is based on the premise that only a concerted effort by peasants of many regions to overthrow the feudal system could be considered a revolutionary struggle. It will be the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that concerted efforts by peasants in many of the relatively autonomous domains, though often uncoordinated, mounted a serious challenge to the various feudal regimes, and moreover, that peasants often developed a keen political consciousness and effective, though impermanent, political organisation in the years before a new stratification within the peasant class disrupted the struggle in the latter half of the eighteenth century.     

Using Experiments to Estimate the Effects of Education on Voter Turnout

The powerful relationship between education and voter turnout is arguably the most well-documented and robust finding in American survey research. Yet the causal interpretation of this relationship remains controversial, with many authors suggesting that the apparent link between education and turnout is spurious. In contrast to previous work, which has relied on observational data to assess the effect of education on voter turnout, this article analyzes two randomized experiments and one quasi-experiment in which educational attainment was altered exogenously. We track the children in these experiments over the long term, examining their voting rates as adults. In all three studies, we find that exogenously induced changes in high school graduation rates have powerful effects on voter turnout rates. These results imply that the correlation between education and turnout is indeed causal. We discuss some of the pathways by which education may transmit its influence.     

An Experiment Testing the Relative Effectiveness of Encouraging Voter Participation by Inducing Feelings of Pride or Shame

Prior experimental research has demonstrated that voter turnout rises substantially when people receive mailings that indicate whether they voted in previous elections. This effect suggests that voters are sensitive to whether their compliance with the norm of voting is being monitored. The present study extends this line of research by investigating whether disclosure of past participation has a stronger effect on turnout when it calls attention to a past abstention or a past vote. A sample of 369,211 registered voters who voted in just one of two recent elections were randomly assigned to receive no mail, mail that encouraged them to vote, and mail that both encouraged them to vote and indicated their turnout in one previous election. The latter type of mailing randomly reported either the election in which they voted or the one in which they abstained. Results suggest that mailings disclosing past voting behavior had strong effects on voter turnout and that these effects were significantly enhanced when it disclosed an abstention in a recent election.     

Campaign fund-raising abuses and money laundering in recent U.S. elections: Criminal networks in action

This study describes some of the campaign fundraising abuses perpetuated by Republican and Democratic operatives in connection with recent U.S. elections. Efforts to conceal the source of campaign contributions or to evade contribution and spending limits involved a variety of money laundering techniques including the use of shell companies, straw donors, and the funnelling of money through political action committees and non profit tax-exempt organizations. In addition to the brazen sale of political access, some of the more serious infractions involved the infusion of foreign money into the Republican and Democratic National Committees as well as the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign. The author concludes the crimes that were committed are explained best as organized criminality manifested as complex networks of patron-client relationships.     

Administrative "health courts" for medical injury claims: the federal constitutional issues

Our article analyzes whether the federal government may constitutionally supplant a traditional system of common-law trials before state judges and juries with new federal institutions designed by statute for compensating victims of medical injuries. Specifically, this article examines the federal constitutional issues raised by various proposals to replace traditional medical malpractice litigation in state courts with a federal system of administrative "health courts." In doing so, we address the following constitutional issues: 1. Is there federal authority to preempt state law (the commerce clause and spending clause issues)? 2. May jurisdiction be created in non-article 3 tribunals, and may claims be decided without trial by jury (the separation of powers and Seventh Amendment issues)? 3. Would pilot programs that require some claims to be pursued in a federal administrative forum while other claimants are left to pursue traditional state tort law remedies be constitutional (the equal protection issue)? The article concludes that a federal compensation system through administrative health courts should be constitutional provided the statute is appropriately drafted and that appropriate factual findings are made concerning the benefits to patients and the public as well as to doctors and their insurers.     

INCARCERATION VS. COMMUNITY-BASED CORRECTIONS: MORE THAN JUST POLITICS*

Community-based corrections (CBC) is advocated as a solution to many of the problems of contemporary American corrections. Its smallscale, treatment-oriented approach, emphasis on employment and adjustment programs, and stress on greater accessibility are cited increasingly as reforms needed by a system now dominated by overcrowded and highly expensive prisons. Yet, the implementation of CBC programs has been slow and very often little actual reform is evident. This paper offers an explanation for the failure of CBC initiatives using Delaware's experience as a case in point. The domination of American correctional thinking by an ideology of incarceration and the stable-state requirements of prisons are identified as the crucial factors shaping the fate of CBC.