Does Institutional Structure Effect Public Health Expenditures?

This paper explores supply‐side costs and institutional structure in a shared authority state public health system. It is found that in a shared governance public health system, intermediary district structure influences the movement of limited resources to serve populations and persons most in need. This early empirical test suggests that policy making and public administration concerning public health expenditures in a shared governance system are in a practical sense local, but decisions made at the intermediary level by regional district administration are an important influence on local public health expenditures.     

Continuity,change, and priorities: The quality and use of regulatory analysis across US administrations

This paper compares the quality and use of regulatory analysis accompanying economically significant regulations proposed by US executive branch agencies in 2008, 2009, and 2010. We find that the quality of regulatory analysis is generally low, but varies widely. Budget regulations, which define how the federal government will spend money or collect revenues, have much lower‐quality analysis than other regulations. The Bush administration's “midnight” regulations finalized between Election Day and Inauguration Day, along with other regulations left for the Obama administration to finalize, tended to have lower‐quality analysis. Most differences between the Bush and Obama administrations depend on agencies' policy preferences. More conservative agencies tended to produce better analysis in the Obama administration, and more liberal agencies tended to do so in the Bush administration. This suggests that agencies more central to an administration's policy priorities do not have to produce as good an analysis to get their regulations promulgated.     

Candidate and Party Strategies in Two-Stage Elections Beginning with a Primary

In the United States and Latin America, candidates for national and state-level office frequently must win primary elections in order to advance to the general election. We model policy and valence issues for office-seeking candidates facing such two-stage elections. We determine a Nash equilibrium for the candidates' optimal strategies, and we find that holding a primary is likely to increase a party's chances of winning the general election, particularly in situations where valence issues that involve the candidates' campaigning skills and that are not known prior to the campaign are more salient than policy issues. Furthermore, we find that primary elections are especially likely to benefit parties that expect to be underdogs in the general election. Our conclusions are directly relevant to U.S. politics and by extension to the strategic decisions that many Latin American parties currently confront, about whether it is strategically desirable to hold primaries.     

The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Teen Childbearing

After 41 consecutive years of increase, out-of-wedlock teenchildbearing unexpectedly reversed course in 1991 and by 2002was 20% below its peak. Explanations for that reversal haveproven elusive. In this paper, we present evidence that exposureto legalized abortion in utero for the cohort of women thatbecame teenagers in the 1990s is one factor contributing tothis decline. We estimate that the legalization of abortionin the 1970s changed the composition of women at risk of bearingchildren out of wedlock some 15–24 years later. This compositioneffect reduced out-of-wedlock teen birth rates by 6%, whichaccounts for roughly 25% of the observed decline in unmarriedteen birth rates over this period. It also lowered rates ofunmarried births for women aged 20–24. At the same time,it increased the number of married births to women 20–24,so that there is only a small reduction in total fertility overthe ages 15–24. The detailed information available onbirth certificates enables a more direct identification of inutero abortion exposure than prior studies looking at otheroutcomes such as crime.     

Chinese Political Studies: Overview of the State of the Field

The range of questions of interest to scholars of Chinese politics has changed slowly over recent decades, but the depth of empirical probes to answer them has quickly improved. One reason is the rise of China-born and Chinese-American researchers. Another is greater access to local information in China after the start of reforms there. Future developments in this field are likely to enrich current American political science, which will require fresh methods for adequate study of the planet's most populous polity.     

Sex offender notification and fear of victimization

Research on sex offender notification statutes was limited, and what did exist suggested notification resulted in increasing fear of victimization (Phillips, D. M. (1998). Zevitz, R. G. & Farkas, M. A. (2000c). Nonetheless, existing research failed to provide a direct measure of fear of victimization, or a comparison group to determine whether community members receiving notification were more fearful of victimization than community members, residing in the same neighborhood, who had not received notification. Additionally, existing research did not differentiate between fear of victimization for self (personal fear) and fear of victimization for others (altruistic fear). Warr (Warr, M. (2000) argued that the “strongest indictment” of the fear-crime literature was the failure to consider altruistic fear. By comparing emotional responses to specific types of victimization between groups of notified and not-notified community members, at the multivariate level, notification was significantly related to personal fear, but not altruistic fear. At the bivariate level, however, notification was related to one type of altruistic fear—sexual victimization.