Progress toward Pay Equity in State Governments?

Are state governments fulfilling their responsibilities to be model employers of women and minorities? Using U.S. Census Bureau data on individual employees from 1980 to 2015, this article looks at how much progress state governments have made toward eliminating racial and gender pay differences. It examines whether differences in education, age/experience, citizenship, English ability, hours worked, and occupation explain the pay differences. Patterns and explanations vary substantially by group, but state governments are doing a better job than private firms of closing pay gaps on almost every measure .     

Leaders,Tenure, and the Politics of Sovereign Credit

Sovereign creditworthiness is as much a function of politics as economic fundamentals. Previous research has focused on the relationship between creditworthiness and political factors such as regime type, regional effects, and international organization membership. These factors, while important, often change slowly and do not always capture the more dynamic political determinants of creditworthiness. As an alternative, this study focuses on the role of leaders. We argue that leaders’ tenure reduces uncertainty in the sovereign credit market. Time in power allows leaders to better manage expectations related to sovereign credit policy of both domestic supporters and market actors. As a result, we expect that creditworthiness improves as a leader’s tenure increases. We find supporting evidence for our argument using two distinct empirical approaches: panel data analysis and a natural experiment. Our findings provide a better understanding of the relationship between leaders, politics, and sovereign credit.     

Give them toys? Military allocations and regime stability in transitional democracies

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that democratization reduces coups, 46% of coups targeted democracies from 2000–2009, twice the rate seen in the prior half-century. Efforts to explain coups have arrived at wildly varied conclusions regarding the vulnerability of democracies. We argue that this is attributable to regime type acting as a conditional influence. We theorize that democratization incentivizes old elites to veto the process, and these vetoes are more likely to occur when the new regime cannot credibly commit to the military’s corporate interests. Using cross-national data for 172 states for the years 1952–2009, we find that though young democracies are more vulnerable to coups than either civilian authoritarian regimes or older democracies, this vulnerability is mitigated when military expenditures are near or above the sample mean. We also find that commonly argued determinants of coups appear to be driven by their influence in democracies, suggesting the need for scholars to revisit commonly held assumptions regarding autocratic survival.     

Institutional Framework for the Province of all Mankind: Lessons from the International Seabed Authority for the Governance of Commercial Space Mining

This article addresses the current lack of a legal framework for the use of space resources found on asteroids and other celestial bodies. In a world of growing inequality and in face of the increasing commercialization of space, governance structures are needed to ensure that the benefits of the “province of all mankind” are not solely reaped by those industrialized nations that have the technological and financial capabilities. Drawing upon the practical achievements of the International Seabed Authority governing the extraction of natural resources from the seabed in areas beyond national jurisdiction, a discursive policy framework for the equitable development of the global commons of space is proposed. Acknowledging the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach, the normative structure is complemented by the insight gained from stakeholders from across sectors, in a critical effort to unite political, ethical, and commercial considerations.     

Democracy and the depth of intelligence sharing: why regime type hardly matters*

What explains variation in the depth of intelligence sharing? Realism provides the standard answer: shared threat motivates deeper cooperation. In a recent article, Ryan Bock offers a liberal antidote to this conventional view, leveraging insights on domestic regime type to explain why Anglo-Soviet sharing remained shallow despite the German threat during 1941–5. Several shortcomings in Bock’s innovative study undermine his main arguments and findings. A reevaluation of the Anglo-Soviet case and a cursory examination of nine other intelligence-sharing relationships during the Second World War reveal a spread of variation in the depth of cooperation that cannot be explained by a liberal regime-type argument, a realist threat perspective, or other prevailing International Relations paradigms. Marrying insights from interdisciplinary scholarship on gossip and embedded exchange, we propose a novel alternative framework that suggests plausible solutions to puzzles left behind by other accounts, thus opening a new line of inquiry for future research on intelligence cooperation.     

College Enrollment and Completion Among Nationally Recognized High‐Achieving Hispanic Students

Hispanic high school graduates have lower college completion rates than academically similar white students. As Hispanic students have been theorized to be more constrained in the college search and selection process, one potential policy lever is to increase the set of colleges to which these students apply and attend. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the College Board's National Hispanic Recognition Program (NHRP), which recognizes the highest‐scoring 11th‐grade Hispanic students on the PSAT/NMSQT, as a mechanism of improving college choice and completion. The program not only informs students about their relative ability, but it also enables colleges to identify, recruit, and offer enrollment incentives. Overall, we find that the program has strong effects on college attendance patterns, shifting students from two‐year to four‐year institutions, as well as to colleges that are out‐of‐state and public flagships, all areas where Hispanic attendance has lagged. NHRP shifts the geographic distribution of where students earn their degree, and increases overall bachelor's completion among Hispanic students who traditionally have had lower rates of success. These results demonstrate that college outreach can have significant impacts on the enrollment choices of Hispanic students and can serve as a policy lever for colleges looking to draw academically talented students.     

Explaining the content of impact assessment in the United Kingdom: Learning across time,sectors, and departments

While several studies have documented how evidence‐based policy instruments affect public policy, less research has focused on what causes changes over time in the analyses mandated by the instruments, especially in Britain. Thus, we take the analytical content of a pivotal regulatory reform instrument (impact assessment) as a dependent variable, draw on learning as a conceptual framework, and explain the dynamics of learning processes across departments, policy sectors, and time. Empirically, our study draws on a sample of 517 impact assessments produced in Britain (2005–2011). Experience and capacity in different departments matter in learning processes. Guidelines also matter, but moderately so. Departments specialize in their core policy sectors when performing regulatory analysis, but some have greater analytical capacity overall. Peripheral departments invest more in impact assessment than core executive departments. The presence of a regulatory oversight body enhances the learning process. Elections have different effects, depending on the context in which they are contested. These findings contribute to the literature on regulation, policy learning, and policy instruments.     

Energy policy under austerity localism: what role for local authorities?

In the UK, local authorities (LAs) have been placed at the forefront of domestic energy-reduction strategies as the responsible actors for coordinating policy in this sector. Yet, there has been little research regarding the role of LAs in this policy agenda, and their abilities to bring together stakeholders in the successful design and implementation of strategies to reduce energy demands. The paper aims to fill this gap by highlighting the relevance and importance of the energy policy sphere to local government studies, building on the idea of resilient LAs within the context of tensions between the localism agenda and the actual implementation of energy efficiency polices. This is achieved through multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews with LA officers. Our findings reveal that LAs, operating under a localism agenda, lack the freedoms and resources from central government to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, resorting to short-term policies.