Race, Region, and Representative Bureaucracy

Scholars of representative bureaucracy have long been interested in the linkage between passive representation in public agencies and the pursuit of specific policies designed to benefit minority groups. Research in this area suggests that the structural characteristics of those organizations, the external political environment, and the perceptions of individual bureaucrats each help to facilitate that relationship. Work to date has not, however, sufficiently investigated the impact of region on representation behavior, which is surprising given the emphasis that it receives in the broader literature on race and politics. Drawing on that literature, this study argues that, for black bureaucrats, region of residence is an important moderator of active representation because it helps to determine the salience of race as an issue and the degree of identification with racial group interests. It tests hypotheses related to that general argument in a nationally representative sample of more than 3,000 public schools. The results suggest that black teachers produce greater benefits for black students in the South, relative to other regions. A supplementary analysis also confirms the theoretical supposition that race is a more salient issue for Southern black bureaucrats, when compared with their non-Southern counterparts.     

The impact of surplus sharing on the portfolio mix of public sector defined benefit pension plans: a public choice approach

The riskiness of state employee pension plan portfolios varies across states. We investigate whether this variation is related to how public employees and taxpayers share actuarial surpluses of pension accounts. We focus on two determinants of a plan’s asset mix: the relative influence of public employees to taxpayers; and whether a surplus-sharing contract is specified. Our theoretical model demonstrates that the effect of public employee influence on the asset mix is ambiguous. Our empirical results corroborate this complex theoretical result. In our theoretical and empirical analyses, if a surplus sharing rule is specified, plans adopt a more aggressive investment allocation.     

Bad for Men,Better for Women: The Impact of Stereotypes During Negative Campaigns

In this paper, we examine whether the impact of negative advertising on citizens’ evaluations of candidates depends on the gender of the candidates. Given common gender stereotypes, we expect negative campaigning aimed at women candidates will affect citizens differently than negative campaigning against male candidates. The results of our study, derived from a survey experiment conducted on a nationwide sample of more than 700 citizens, demonstrate that negative commercials are less effective at depressing evaluations of woman candidates, compared to male candidates. The findings are consistent and strong, across a range of forces that people use to assess competing candidates (i.e., affect and trait evaluations, people’s beliefs about issues, anticipated vote choice). The tight control of the experimental design, including randomization of respondents into different conditions that vary in only one way, demonstrates that the gender of the candidate influences people’s reactions to different types of negative commercials.

Terrorist Threat,Leadership, and the Vote: Evidence from Three Experiments

From 9/11 in the U.S. to train, subway, and airport bombings elsewhere, individuals frequently must make political decisions in the shadow of terrorist attacks. To date, few studies have examined how times of terror threat influence voters’ decision-making processes. Using data generated from three experiments we show that, in times of terrorist threat (compared to good times), individuals weight leadership more heavily in the voting booth. Our results also shed light on how much weight is given to other determinants of the vote (issues and partisanship) across these two conditions.     

Dynamic Representation(s): Federal Criminal Justice Policy and an Alternative Dimension of Public Mood

Does public policy respond to public opinion? Previous research suggests dynamic representation occurs in the aggregate. Yet, most of the evidence for policy response is limited to the policy intentions of elected officials on issues related to more or less government spending. We examine policy response to an alternative dimension of public mood, public preferences for more or less punitive criminal justice policies, using multiple indicators of policy from various stages of the policy-making process. Criminal justice policy should be responsive to public preferences given the public’s concern about crime and the negative social construction of criminals. Thus, there is an electoral incentive for public officials to respond to public preferences along this alternative dimension of public sentiment regarding criminal justice policy. We estimate a DYMIMIC model of federal criminal justice policy as a function of the multiple dimensions of public policy mood using Kalman filtering. The results indicate that criminal justice policy responds to the second, not the first, dimension of public mood. We find evidence that policy-makers at multiple stages of the policy process are able to differentiate among multiple signals from the public and respond appropriately. The results present a more sophisticated portrait of democratic responsiveness.     

Participatory Budgeting in Midwestern States: Democratic Connection or Citizen Disconnection?

What participation mechanisms connect citizens and city officials? Do they produce valued outcomes? Surveys of elected officials suggest that microlevel mechanisms such as direct citizen contact are more valuable in meeting participation goals than are mechanisms focusing on macrolevel concerns. However, there is a disconnect between perceptions about value and the use of mechanisms. State‐level participation requirements and a city manager have little effect on the value of a mechanism. These findings raise some questions: why are microlevel participation mechanisms favored, why do some mechanisms have value even though respondents have little experience with them, and why is there a misalignment between participatory goals and the mechanisms used?     

Collusion in auctions for emission permits: An experimental analysis

Environmental markets have several institutional features that provide a new context for the use of auctions and that have not been studied previously. This paper reports on laboratory experiments testing three auction forms—uniform and discriminatory price sealed‐bid auctions and an ascending clock auction. We test the ability of subjects to tacitly or explicitly collude in order to maximize profits. Our main result is that the discriminatory and uniform price auctions produce greater revenues than the clock auction, both with and without explicit communication. The clock appears to facilitate successful collusion, both because of its sequential structure and because it allows bidders to focus on one dimension of cooperation (quantity) rather than two (price and quantity).© 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

首都市民职业价值观状况研究报告

2008年,北京市社会科学院对首都市民职业价值取向状况进行了专题调研,结果表明:首都市民珍视工作稳定性,职业理想倾向于个人经济利益和自我价值实现,崇尚不断创新、乐于敬业的职业精神和职业态度,体现了新时期积极向上、忠于职守的从业价值观,形成了由物质实现、自我实现向社会实现逐层递进的事业成功观,认同通过个人努力获取成功的事业进取现.     

Why Do States Commission the Truth? Political Considerations in the Establishment of African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

Although the use of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) has grown considerably over the last 3 decades, there is still much that we do not know concerning the choice and the structuring of TRCs. While the literature has focused primarily on the effects of TRCs, we examine the domestic and the international factors influencing the choice of a commission in sub-Saharan Africa from 1974 to 2003 using pooled cross-sectional time series. We find that states which adopted a TRC prior to South Africa were generally repressive centralized regimes which used the truth commission as political cover. However, since South Africa’s TRC, democratizing states have been more likely to adopt a truth commission as a form of transitional justice.

Five Challenges to Legalizing Economic and Social Rights

In recent years, dozens of human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across the globe have begun to advocate for economic and social rights, which represents a significant expansion of the human rights movement. This article investigates a central strategy that NGOs have pursued to realize these rights: legalization. Legalization involves specifying rights as valid legal rules and enforcing them through judicial or quasi-judicial processes. After documenting some of the progress made toward legalization, the article analyzes five unique challenges involved in legalizing economic and social rights. It is important to identify these challenges because they must be overcome if the human rights movement wishes to refute the notion that economic and social rights are inherently non-justiciable (and therefore, to some, invalid as rights). These challenges also point to the possibility that legalization is not the only, or even the best, strategic pathway to realize economic and social rights effectively.