Regulatory budgeting: A bad idea whose time has come?

Advocates of regulatory relief propose a budget that would annually cap regulatory costs. But emulating fiscal budgeting would be much more difficult than they envision. An arbitrary macrobudgetary constraint would have to be selected, and the potential scope of the regulatory budget would be vast. The process of regulatory budgeting would be very-time consuming, and could increase micromanagement by the Congress. Estimating regulatory costs would be challenging, and ignoring regulatory benefits would be unfair and inefficient. A preferable alternative to regulatory budgeting would be to expand the Government Performance and Results Act to include cost-effectiveness reviews for regulations.     

Parenting Style and Bullying and Victimization: Comparing Foreign-Born Asian,U.S.-Born Asian,and White American Adolescents

Journal of Family Violence - The purpose of the study is to explore whether the association between types of parenting styles and bullying and victimization are similar across White American,...     

Perceptions of Racism and Depressive Symptoms in African American Adolescents: The Role of Perceived Academic and Social Control

Experiences with racism are a common occurrence for African American youth and may result in negative self perceptions relevant for the experience of depressive symptoms. This study examined the longitudinal association between perceptions of racism and depressive symptoms, and whether perceived academic or social control mediated this association, in a community epidemiologically-defined sample of urban African American adolescents (N = 500; 46.4% female). Structural equation modeling revealed that experiences with racism were associated with low perceived academic control, which in turn was associated with increased depressive symptoms. Findings suggest that experiences with racism can have long lasting effects for African American youth’s depressive symptoms, and highlight the detrimental effects of experiences with racism for perceptions of control in the academic domain. Implications for intervention are discussed.

Is the U.S. Congress an Insurmountable Obstacle to Any “Far‐Sighted Conception of Budgeting”?

In recent years, Congress has recurrently failed to meet its minimum responsibilities in federal budgeting. This article analyzes whether it is possible to repair this problem, using concepts popularized by Allen Schick in his influential article “The Road to PPB.” His article compared the PPB reform effort to the history of budget process reforms that started with the design of the executive budget. It publicized a logical sequence of budget process improvements that started with control and then advanced through management and planning. The article did not substantially address the role of Congress, but eight years after it was published, Congress reasserted its constitutional role in the budget process. Its record of performance since then has ranged from mixed to dysfunctional. The Congress has been criticized for budgetary delays, micromanagement, myopia, procrastination, indiscipline, and an inability to prioritize intelligently. If these faults are set in stone, then an integrated system of budgeting, as described in “The Road to PPB” and related work, is unattainable. On the other hand, if reform of Congressional budgeting is politically feasible, improvements to that system can utilize the unique contributions that a legislature can make to a good system of budgeting.     

EU Simulations and Engagement: Motivating Greater Interest in European Union Politics

While the effects of simulation-based courses on the knowledge of participating students may be marginal in relation to standard lecture and discussion-based courses, this article argues that the greatest leverage is gained by increasing participating students’ level of interest in the subject of study and in politics more broadly. Participants tend to become increasingly absorbed in their roles and in the politics of the institutions at the center of the simulation. To better consider this possibility, we conducted a survey of students participating in the 2015 Mid-Atlantic European Union Simulation and of appropriate control populations. The survey results indeed suggest that, much more than simply acquiring knowledge about the EU, the simulation experience serves to generate more robust interest in the subject of study.     

Narrating Indigenous Boundaries: Postcolonial and Decolonial Storytelling in Northern Minnesota

This article examines two narrative case studies, one biography and one traditional indigenous story, as they inform the dynamics of community, politics, and nationhood for Anishinaabe indigenous people in northern Minnesota. The narratives both provide power and legitimacy to Anishinaabe national identity but inform different political projects of decolonial and postcolonial nationalism, respectively, complicating both settler and indigenous attempts to define indigenous nationhood in a way that is fixed and static. This finding is used to critique the dominant nation-state centric notions of nationhood and to propose alternative modes of understanding nationhood in the context of indigenous politics.     

Saying versus doing: a new donation method for measuring ideal points

Scaling methods pioneered by Poole and Rosenthal (Am J Polit Sci 29(2):357–384, 1985) redefined how scholars think about and estimate the ideologies of representatives seated in the US Congress. Those methods also have been used to estimate citizens’ ideologies. Whereas studies evaluating Congress typically use a behavioral measure, roll call votes, to estimate where representatives stand on the left-right ideological spectrum, those of the public most often have relied on survey data of stated, rather than revealed, preferences. However, measures of individuals’ preferences and, accordingly, estimates of their ideal points, may differ in important ways based on how preferences are elicited. In this paper, we elicit the same individuals’ preferences on the same 10 issues using two different methods: standard survey responses measured on a Likert scale and a donation exercise wherein individuals are forced to divide $1.50 between interest groups with diametrically opposed policy preferences. Importantly, expressing extreme views is costless under the former, but not the latter, method. We find that the type of elicitation method used is a significant predictor of individuals’ ideal points, and that the elicitation effect is driven primarily by Democratic respondents. Under the donation method, the ideal points of Democrats in the aggregate shift left, particularly for those Democrats who are politically engaged. In contrast, wealthy Democrats’ ideal points shift to the right. We also document effects for Republicans and Independents and find that overall polarization is similar under both elicitation methods. We conclude with a discussion of our results, and the consequences and tradeoffs of each elicitation method.