State Debt Limits: How Many Are Enough?

There is a growing concern among state policy makers that unrestrained debt may exceed politically acceptable or financially sustainable levels of debt. Many states have established limits to restrict debt, but many of these limits are circumvented through issuing more complex and specialized bonds. In this article, we focus on the use of debt limits as an instrument to manage a state's debt in context of two key questions: (1) under what circumstances should a state consider multiple debt limits and (2) if multiple limits are established, what factors should be considered in setting such multiple limits. In addressing these issues, we consider the theoretical and conceptual issues associated with setting debt limits, we highlight current state debt limit policies, and discuss factors that appear to be influencing decisions to establish and set multiple limits.     

Learning from Second‐Hand Experience: Methodology for Extrapolation‐Oriented Case Research

Critics of public management reform complain that governments copy legitimated foreign practices. Recent work by Eugene Bardach helps to explain why: neither government analysts nor academic researchers possess an adequate methodology to examine practices in source sites, with a view toward adaptation in target sites. Rather than complain, Bardach takes steps to develop such a methodology, drawing analogies with reverse engineering. This article offers specific guidance about how researchers can effectively investigate practices in source sites to prepare the ground for disciplined and ingenious extrapolation of practices from source to target sites. The resulting translation is illustrated by an extrapolation‐oriented case study.     

Inside Moves and Outside Views: An Australian Case Study of Elite and Public Perceptions of Political Corruption

The search for a definition of political corruption that adequately captures the nuances of governmental activity has been a long one. This article defends social or attitudinal definitions of corruption against some recent criticisms. It examines the value of Arnold Heidenheimer's widely cited distinctions among "black,""gray," and "white" corruption using empirical evidence from an interview study of over 100 Australian politicians and 500 voters. The results show that the broad dimensions of corruption — the official, the donor, the payoff, and the favor — identified by John Peters and Susan Welch affect the views of both politicians and voters alike.
Nonetheless, elites and the public come to judgments from different perspectives, and they judge some acts differently. Put another way, some corruption is gray. Politicians judge actions more subtly than do voters, who are more likely to see corruption in all acts. As Michael Johnston has suggested, the different experiences of political insiders and outsiders explain this disparity in their moral outlooks. Insiders are socialized to see at least some actions as functional and therefore not corrupt. Outsiders, unaware of the insiders' rules, tend to judge political action by moral absolutes. Thus the structure of liberal democratic government contributes to conflicting elite and public views of political right and wrong.     

DOES UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRATION INCREASE VIOLENT CRIME?*

Despite substantial public, political, and scholarly attention to the issue of immigration and crime, we know little about the criminological consequences of undocumented immigration. As a result, fundamental questions about whether undocumented immigration increases violent crime remain unanswered. In an attempt to address this gap, we combine newly developed estimates of the unauthorized population with multiple data sources to capture the criminal, socioeconomic, and demographic context of all 50 states and Washington, DC, from 1990 to 2014 to provide the first longitudinal analysis of the macro‐level relationship between undocumented immigration and violence. The results from fixed‐effects regression models reveal that undocumented immigration does not increase violence. Rather, the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime is generally negative, although not significant in all specifications. Using supplemental models of victimization data and instrumental variable methods, we find little evidence that these results are due to decreased reporting or selective migration to avoid crime. We consider the theoretical and policy implications of these findings against the backdrop of the dramatic increase in immigration enforcement in recent decades.     

EXPLAINING RADICAL POLICY CHANGE: THE CASE OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENERGY POLICY UNDER THE BRITISH LABOUR GOVERNMENT 2006–10

An innovative framework combining the ‘multiple streams’ (MS) and ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (PE) models of agenda‐setting is used to explain the transformation of UK climate change and energy policy under the Labour Government between 2006 and 2010. The coupling of the problem, politics and policy streams by policy entrepreneurs (MS), and changes in policy image and institutional venues (PE), were critical in opening a policy window, disrupting the existing policy monopoly and enabling radical policy initiatives. The case study suggests two revisions to the models: (1) policy windows can remain open far longer than either model typically predicts; and (2) party politics, especially where party competition generates a ‘competitive consensus’, can be important for both initiating and prolonging policy change in parliamentary systems. An important factor typically overlooked by both models is the significant policy entrepreneurship role that government ministers can play, particularly when an issue becomes part of their ‘narrative identity’.     

Higher Education Policies in Central and Eastern Europe: Convergence toward a Common Model?

Contrary to many other areas, international and, in particular, European influences on national policymaking in higher education (HE) have remained limited. This picture, however, changed fundamentally from the late 1990s onward. In 1999, 29 countries signed the Bologna Declaration, denoting the start of the so-called Bologna Process. Thus, a collective supranational platform was developed to confront problem pressure, which has in turn fostered considerable domestic reforms. However, we still have limited knowledge on whether the Bologna Process has actually led to the convergence of national HE policies toward a common model. This article analyzes these questions by focusing on Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Because of its tumultuous and inconsistent path of development and the sheer magnitude of the current reform processes, CEE HE stands out as a particularly worthwhile object of analysis for scholars interested in policy convergence as well as policy legacies and path dependencies.     

School Vouchers and the New Politics of the Welfare State

School vouchers might seem a natural feature of the liberal welfare model of the U.S. and American society generally. However, for social democratic welfare states in Scandinavia, school vouchers would seem to be a contradiction. Nevertheless, school vouchers have faced severe resistance in the USA, and the program has so far not been adopted as a national educational reform, although sporadic and limited state‐level developments can be observed. In Sweden, however, the social democratic welfare state adopted a national, universal public voucher scheme in the early 1990s. The goal of this article is to explain this counter‐theoretical empirical puzzle. It is argued that the varying output from political processes on school vouchers in the USA and Sweden is to be explained by the different ways in which political institutions affect political decision making in the two countries.     

Minority Status,Ideology, or Opportunity: Explaining the Greater Retirement of House Republicans

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives tend to retire at a higher rate than Democrats—a fact with potentially important electoral and policy ramifications—but research on the possible explanations for this partisan disparity has been scarce. I test various explanatory hypotheses using multilevel statistical analyses and find that Republicans are more likely to retire—not because they have been the predominant minority party, had more political opportunities, or had different private‐sector experiences, but because they harbor more conservative ideologies than their Democratic colleagues.     

Hung Parliaments and the Challenges for Westminster and Whitehall: How to Make Minority and Multiparty Governance Work (with Commentaries by Turnbull,Beith, Evans and Crick)

The return of a hung parliament at the 2010 general election is a serious possibility. But due to Westminster's limited recent experience of parliaments under ‘no overall control’ there is little institutional memory in Whitehall or Westminster, and even less public understanding, of what the implications would be. This article sets out to analyse the principal challenges that would be faced by government, opposition, parliament and the media in the event of a hung parliament. Drawing on experience from Canada, New Zealand and Scotland, we discuss the difficulties that may arise during the immediate government formation process and in the course of making minority or multiparty governance work on an ongoing basis. We conclude that a hung parliament need not undermine political stability or effective governance, but that all actors would need to adapt their behaviour and should therefore prepare carefully for this eventuality.