Termination Theory and National Climate Change Mitigation Programs: The Case of New Zealand

In 2008 New Zealand (NZ) changed from a Labour‐led to a National‐led government, and this resulted in a shift to government's carbon emission mitigation strategy, including the abandonment of the Communities for Climate Protection (CCP) and the Carbon Neutral Public Service (CNPS) programs. Using deLeon's seminal model for program termination, the objective of this research is to determine why NZ's newly elected government discontinued these initiatives. This empirical research is investigative and probing, and comprises a series of semi‐structured interviews with senior managers responsible for the delivery of the respective program within their organization. The architects of each program are also investigated. In the end, this study finds that while economic constraints and programmatic inefficiencies may have played a contributing role, political ideology is the primary rationale for the termination of the CNPS and the CCP‐NZ programs.     

Social preferences for the inclusion of indirect benefits in the evaluation of publicly funded health services: results from an Australian survey

The inclusion of both monetary and non-monetary indirect benefits in economic evaluations of public health programmes and services can have significant distributive effects between patient groups. As a result, some patients may be advantaged and others disadvantaged for reasons not directly related to health outcomes or (direct) treatment costs. In pluralistic democracies, there is a case for consulting the community on the fairness of policies that have such distributive implications. This paper reports the results of two pilot studies aimed at uncovering the preferences of the Australian public for the inclusion of indirect benefits in the evaluation of services for its national health scheme, Medicare. The initial survey found some support for taking account of non-monetary indirect benefits - for example, the social contribution made by parents of young children and carers of elderly relatives. By contrast, there was little support for giving high taxpayers priority access to general Medicare services, to life-saving organ transplants, or to very costly drugs, despite the indirect social benefits of doing so. However, such support increased significantly in the follow-up study when the outcomes were characterised as certain, identifiable and health related, and the opportunity costs of failing to take account of indirect benefits were made very clear. The follow-up survey provided evidence of public scepticism about the willingness or ability of government to use additional tax receipts for socially beneficial purposes, and/or a preference for programmes and services that focus on health rather than welfare more generally.     

Judges,Litigants, and the Design of Courts

Two important perspectives on courts highlight fundamentally different elements of adjudication and yield distinct predictions about judicial outcomes. The Attitudinal Model of judicial voting posits judge ideology as a strong predictor of court outcomes. Alternatively, the Law and Economics perspective focuses on the settlement behavior of litigants and reasons that while judges may vote ideologically, litigants adapt to these ideological proclivities, nullifying the effect of judge ideology. This analysis focuses on reconciling expectations about the effects of judge ideology and litigant strategies by examining their contingent nature and the conditioning effects of institutional design. The analysis examines state supreme courts from 1995–1998 to identify empirical evidence supporting both perspectives. While some state supreme courts have discretionary dockets allowing judges greater opportunities to exercise their ideology, others lack discretionary docket control, making dockets and outcomes largely litigant driven. Support for each perspective largely hinges on this fundamental feature of institutional design.