Direct Versus Indirect Federal Bond Subsidies: New Evidence on Cost of Capital

The longstanding debate surrounding the most effective way for the U.S. federal government to subsidize state and local government capital‐raising received renewed attention in recent years due to the passage and subsequent expiration of the taxable Build America Bond (BAB) program. Recent academic studies, as well as reports from the U.S. Treasury Department, claim that the direct subsidy approach as evidenced by the BAB program provides greater bond borrowing cost benefits to state and local governments compared to traditional tax‐exempt bonds. This research investigates the extent to which such borrowing cost benefits may be overstated since it appears previous studies did not adequately account for the early call optionality of tax‐exempt bonds.     

Using the Results from Rigorous Multisite Evaluations to Inform Local Policy Decisions

Evidence‐based policy at the local level requires predicting the impact of an intervention to inform whether it should be adopted. Increasingly, local policymakers have access to published research evaluating the effectiveness of policy interventions from national research clearinghouses that review and disseminate evidence from program evaluations. Through these evaluations, local policymakers have a wealth of evidence describing what works, but not necessarily where. Multisite evaluations may produce unbiased estimates of the average impact of an intervention in the study sample and still produce inaccurate predictions of the impact for localities outside the sample for two reasons: (1) the impact of the intervention may vary across localities, and (2) the evaluation estimate is subject to sampling error. Unfortunately, there is relatively little evidence on how much the impacts of policy interventions vary from one locality to another and almost no evidence on the implications of this variation for the accuracy with which the local impact of adopting an intervention can be predicted using findings from an evaluation in other localities. In this paper, we present a set of methods for quantifying the accuracy of the local predictions that can be obtained using the results of multisite randomized trials and for assessing the likelihood that prediction errors will lead to errors in local policy decisions. We demonstrate these methods using three evaluations of educational interventions, providing the first empirical evidence of the ability to use multisite evaluations to predict impacts in individual localities—i.e., the ability of “evidence‐based policy” to improve local policy.     

The Australian Experience of Electoral Bribery: Dealing in Electoral Support

This article explores state and federal Australian cases from the past thirty years — legal judgments, inquiries and political scandals — which implicate the law and concept of electoral bribery. Specifically it examines deals involving preferences and arrangements made between politicians and “third parties” such as lobby groups and the media. It shows that, defying assumptions that it died out a century ago, electoral bribery remains a thorny ethical and legal concept, particularly given evolving norms and electioneering practices. If bribery is to be a workable ethical or legal concept for judging contemporary electoral conduct then it needs to deal with horizontal relations between political actors rather than, as it traditionally has, to focus upon vertical relations between politicians and electors characterised by the former's efforts to buy the latter's votes.     

Three Versions of Stoker

This article offers an assessment of the writings of Professor Gerry Stoker of Manchester and examines the main themes and messages of his work as it has related to both academics and practitioners. It examines the controversial nature of Stoker's output which has provoked the charge of 'betraying' local government, and suggests that reading Stoker's work is a more complex task than perhaps his fiercest critics would allow. It argues that there is more than one way in which Stoker's contribution can be interpreted and that there are, in ways which mirror his own pluralistic approach to political science, a number of 'versions of Stoker' which can be advanced based on a close reading of his work. This article explores three of these.     

Suppressing Vote-Buying: the ‘War’ on Electoral Bribery from 1868

Electoral bribery is an ancient phenomenon, but its manifestations and pathologies can only be understood in the context of particular electoral norms and political practices. The spark for electoral bribery in the Westminster tradition was the shift from parliamentary service as a duty to a privilege, whilst its paradigm forms of treating and crude vote-buying are traceable to a shift from buying a seat to buying the voters. The gradual move from cultural acceptance to legislative and ethical condemnation of electoral bribery is attributable to a concern with the rising cost of elections and developing notions of fair electoral competition. This article focuses on the seminal period in the ‘war’ on electoral bribery from 1868 to the early twentieth century, giving a taxonomy of the various forms of bribery and judicial responses to them, as well as an explanation of the role played by statutory developments. The ultimate success of this war on corruption is shown to lie in a confluence of politico-legal techniques – election courts, tighter legislation, the secret ballot and the mass franchise – and institutional developments, in particular the rise of centralised, professional parties.     

The Policy Basis of Measured Partisan Animosity in the United States

Understanding and addressing the consequences of partisan animosity requires knowledge of its foundations. To what extent is animosity between partisan groups motivated by dislike for partisan outgroups per se, policy disagreement, or other social group conflicts? In many circumstances, including extant experimental research, these patterns are observationally equivalent. In a series of vignette evaluation experiments, we estimate effects of shared partisanship when additional information is or is not present, and we benchmark these effects against shared policy preference effects. Partisanship effects are about 71% as large as shared policy preference effects when each is presented in isolation. When an independently randomized party and policy position are presented together, partisanship effects decrease substantially, by about 52%, whereas policy effects remain large, decreasing by about 10%. These results suggest that common measures of partisan animosity may capture programmatic conflict more so than social identity–based partisan hostility.     

Why were So Many Social Scientists Wrong about the Green Revolution? Learning from Bangladesh

Most social scientists once took a negative view of the socio-economic consequences of the Green Revolution. Events have since proved them wrong. Using Bangladesh as an example, we offer three reasons why social scientists were mistaken. One is the focus on village studies at the expense of nationally representative surveys. Another is insufficient appreciation of the technical limits of the new rice technology. The third is a misleading model of agrarian change. The inability of village studies to validate generalisations, the reluctance to abandon the historical model of de-peasantisation, and opposing beliefs about how to evaluate socio-economic consequences created a Rashomon Effect that made the controversy hard to resolve.

Convictions are greater enemies of truth than lies. (Nietzsche)     

Private association and public brand: the dualistic conception of political parties in the common law world

This paper examines the legal conception of political parties. It does so by unearthing the history and ontology of the common law relating to political parties in international perspective. The flexibility of the unincorporated association, in which parties are understood through the private law of contract as networks of internal rules or agreements, rather than as legal entities, has proven to be a mask. In the common law’s imagination, the ideal party is a ground-up organization animated by its membership. But the law mandates no such thing, and in its statutory and constitutional conception intra-party democracy may be sublimated as parties need be no more than an electoral persona or brand.