Exploring Explanations of State Agency Budgets: Institutional Budget Actors or Exogenous Environment?

Budgetary incrementalism argues that three institutional actors—agencies, executive budget offices, and legislative committees—dominate budget outcomes. The complexity and interdependency of public programs expands this expectation to include the influence of exogenous budget factors. Findings from a survey of state agency heads reveal that budget environments do influence state agency budget outcomes. However, the institutional budgetary participants, especially governors and legislatures, envisioned in classical incrementalism retain their principal and primary influence on state agency budgets. A significant departure from classical incrementalism is that agencies are not as influential as previously depicted.     

Social Context,Institutional Capacity,and Police Services: A Local Public Economies Perspective

This article examines levels of policing services, focusing on an assessment of resources and their measurement for municipalities. Two measures of policing levels assess the reliability of the findings across alternative measurements. Social and institutional characteristics are explored to evaluate alternative explanations in policing efforts. The article presents four decades of census data for municipalities in metropolitan areas. The central finding is that unequal levels of policing are prevalent across American municipalities. An additional finding is that social and institutional contexts affect policing, based on a pooled time‐series analysis of municipal governments. Although its main contribution is to local public economies research, the research also integrates the social and institutional literatures to identify factors in the allocation of resources to policing.     

Intermunicipal Cooperation in the Netherlands: The Costs and the Effectiveness of Polycentric Regional Governance

This article examines the effects of the structure of intermunicipal cooperatives (IMCs) on the perceived transaction costs and benefits of IMCs. Hypotheses based on a polycentric theory of regional governance are tested using data from Dutch municipalities. The findings are mixed. In line with polycentric theory, networks characterized by a multiplicity of territorial scales reduce IMC transaction costs. Contrary to polycentric theory, however, if IMCs are organized under a uniform legal regime, lower costs and higher benefits are reported. Structural factors that dominate the debate between polycentrism and monocentrism prove to be of limited importance. On the other hand, the results indicate support for the hypotheses that intermunicipal trust (as a cultural variable) contributes to perceptions of effective and efficient cooperation.     

Democracy without choice: Citizens’ perceptions of government autonomy during the Eurozone crisis

In this article it is argued that citizens take into account the degree of a government's political autonomy to implement particular policies when expressing their views on satisfaction with democracy (SWD) but, in order to do so, they need to perceive it. When citizens directly observe the external constraints that reduce their government's autonomy, then variations in levels of regime satisfaction may no longer be exclusively about government performance – as widely argued by political economists – but also about democratic choice. The argument develops after comparing the existing scenarios in the Eurozone before and after the Great Recession. Citizens only began to perceive their own lack of choice to decide between policy alternatives when the sovereign debt crisis broke out in May 2010, the date of the first Greek bail‐out. It is then when citizens started to update their beliefs about the functioning of democracy as a system in which alternative policies can be adopted as bail‐out deals were signed between national governments from the Euro periphery and the Troika. This updating process towards the way democracy works explains the increasing gap in the levels of SWD between bailed‐out economies and the rest of the countries in the Eurozone. Empirical confirmation for this claim is found after analysing Eurobarometer surveys from 2002 to 2014 and using a two‐step difference‐in‐difference analysis that combines individual and aggregate data.     

Factors Explaining Public Participation in the Central Government Budget Process

This paper attempts to examine which factors explain public participation in the budget process in an international comparative approach. In particular, we investigate which socioeconomic, institutional, and political factors promote public engagement in the central government budget process. Using a sample of 93 countries, our results indicate that Internet penetration, population diversity, governmental financial situation, and budget transparency determine opportunities for public engagement in the central government budget process. In addition, we show that not only budget transparency promotes public participation but also public participation is necessary to enhance budget transparency.     

Will More Black Cops Matter? Officer Race and Police‐Involved Homicides of Black Citizens

In response to police‐involved homicides of black citizens in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere, some have suggested that more black police officers could reduce the number of these events. The authors offer an empirical test of this assertion. The literature offers conflicting expectations: some studies suggest that increased representation reduces discrimination, while others suggest that it increases discrimination. The authors reconcile these perspectives using the concept of critical mass, which leads to the expectation that an increase in black officers will reduce the number of black citizens killed in encounters with police, but only once the proportion of black officers is sufficiently large. We test this expectation in analyses of recently compiled data on police‐involved homicides in 2014 and 2015 in large U.S. cities.     

Citizen Expectations and Satisfaction in a Young Democracy: A Test of the Expectancy‐Disconfirmation Model

Citizen satisfaction with public services has been shown to depend on citizens’ expectations and their perceptions of performance. If performance exceeds expectations, satisfaction is likely; if performance falls short of expectations, dissatisfaction is likely. The existing evidence on this process covers the United States and the United Kingdom. The authors generalize the idea of expectation‐driven citizen satisfaction (the “expectancy‐disconfirmation model”) theoretically and empirically to an institutional context of limited accountability and widespread citizen distrust. Using a survey of a broad cross‐section of the general adult population in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2014, this article finds support for the expectancy‐disconfirmation model in this very different context. The authors also test for an effect of the type of expectation using an embedded, randomized experiment but do not find evidence of a difference between normative and empirical expectations. Findings support the usefulness of the expectancy‐disconfirmation model in a wide range of contexts.     

Brokers and Entrepreneurs in Human Stem Cell Governance Networks in the United States

The policy debate over embryonic stem cell (ESC) research in the United States mainly focuses on the extent to which the government ought to provide resources for that research. This article addresses the strategic use of network positions to mobilize an effective coordination system for lifting the moratorium on funding of ESC under the Obama administration since March 2009. By identifying patterns of interactions between members in a network of embedded ties, we can explore the major actors who play the role of brokers or entrepreneurs in stem cell research funding policy under the Obama administration. For that, this article utilizes social network analysis and the G&F brokerage roles framework to identify key brokers in facilitating coordination among various members engaged in funding human stem cell research in the governance network.