So Close,but so Far? The Davies Commission and the Contested Politics of UK Airport Expansion

Aviation expansion and the construction of a third runway at Heathrow airport is firmly back on the political agenda. Yet, the stark fact remains that a growing list of British governments has been unable to engineer a partial or temporary policy settlement in aviation. In exploring the challenges of reaching such a settlement, this article characterises the shifting and contested political and policy contexts of UK aviation. It begins by exploring the ‘wicked issue’ of aviation expansion before foregrounding how the politics of air travel is riven by competing policy frames, fragmented governance and the absence of gatekeepers. It argues that the Davies Commission and its efforts to remove aviation from the domain of partisan politics provided little more than a temporary respite for government. It thus concludes by questioning whether the May government's expansion proposals will succeed this time around, outlining how the contributions in this collection address the themes and issues of this overriding policy puzzle.     

Government Communication Effectiveness and Satisfaction with Police Performance: A Large‐Scale Survey Study

For the last two decades, performance management theories and practices have focused on outcome‐oriented management but have paid little attention to the role of public communication. Using multiple large data sets from Kansas City, Missouri, for 2009–14, this research suggests that the perceived effectiveness of public communication has a more substantial impact on public satisfaction with police protection and crime prevention than neighborhood crime rates and broken windows factors and that perceived effectiveness moderates the negative impact of crime rates. After controlling for residents’ demographic characteristics, the authors find that the perceived effectiveness of communication is associated with public satisfaction with the content and quality of the city website and the government television channel. The implications for public safety management and police–citizen relations as well as directions for future research on public communication strategies and public performance management are presented.     

Scotland's Progressive Dilemma

Since the 1980s the Scottish National Party has presented its political project in progressive terms, but this created a twin dilemma: in order to achieve independence, the SNP needed to win political power, and in order to achieve political power it had to win an election, and orthodoxy dictated that winning elections in Scotland involved a centre‐left platform. But the two have often been in conflict, as is clear as the SNP approaches its tenth anniversary in devolved government and agitates for another referendum.     

Progressivism in British Politics: Some Revisionist Themes

This article argues that a return to the history of progressive political thought can help us to think afresh about what a renewed centre‐left politics might look like today. The article identifies some significant aspects of this history that attracted little attention in earlier debates over the British progressive tradition—in particular, debates about social ownership, nationalism and distributism. This revisionist history of British progressivism points the way towards some common ideological ground that could provide a starting point for a new dialogue between different ‘progressive’ political parties and interests.     

Ideologically Sophisticated Donors: Which Candidates Do Individual Contributors Finance?

Individuals are the single largest source of campaign contributions, yet we know little about their motivations. For instance, the existing literature questions whether individual contributors sophisticatedly differentiate among candidates according to policy positions, particularly among same‐party candidates. We analyze this issue by combining data from a new survey of over 2,800 in‐ and out‐of‐state donors associated with the 2012 Senate elections, FEC data on contributors’ professions, and legislative records. Three major findings emerge. First, policy agreement between a donor's positions and a senator's roll calls significantly influences the likelihood of giving, even for same‐party contributors. Second, there is a significant effect of committee membership corresponding to a donor's occupation; this holds even for donors who claim that other motivations dominate, but it does not appear to be motivated by an expectation of access. Third, conditional upon a donation occurring, its size is determined by factors outside a legislator's control.     

Gone with the Wind: Federalism and the Strategic Location of Air Polluters

In federal systems, both state governments and firms have incentives to strategically locate polluting facilities where the environmental and health consequences will be borne as much as possible by residents of other jurisdictions. We analyze air polluter location in the United States using a spatial point pattern model, which models where events occur in latitude and longitude. Our analyses indicate that major air polluters are significantly more likely to be located near a state's downwind border than a control group of other industrial facilities, results that are robust to a wide variety of model specifications and measurement strategies. This effect is particularly pronounced for facilities with toxic air emissions. The observed pattern of polluter location varies systematically across states and time in ways that suggest it is responsive to public policy at both the national and state levels.     

Child Health in Elementary School Following California's Paid Family Leave Program

We evaluate changes in elementary school children health outcomes following the introduction of California's Paid Family Leave (PFL) program, which provided parents with paid time off following the birth of a child. Our health outcomes—overweight, ADHD, and hearing‐related problems—are characterized by diagnosis rates that only pick up during early elementary school. Moreover, our health outcomes have been found to be negatively linked with many potential implications of extended maternity leave—increased breastfeeding, prompt medical checkups at infancy, reduced prenatal stress, and reduced non‐parental care during infancy. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS) within a difference‐in‐differences framework, our results suggest improvements in health outcomes among California elementary school children following PFL's introduction. Furthermore, the improvements are driven by children from less advantaged backgrounds, which is consistent with the notion that California's PFL had the greatest effect on leave‐taking duration after childbirth mostly for less advantaged mothers who previously could not afford to take unpaid leave.