Issue competition in the 1993 Norwegian national election

Public Choice - We investigate the role of issues in the 1993 Norwegian election. We are interested in comparing two spatial models of issue evaluation, the directional model and the familiar...     

Institutions and intellectual property: The influence of institutional forces on university patenting

Over the past 20 years, the number of patents assigned to universities has increased dramatically. This increase coincided with several policy initiatives, such as the Bayh‐Dole Act of 1980, designed to foster technology transfer between universities and the private sector. This paper examines the effect of such policies using an institutional framework, designed to illustrate how factors both from inside and outside of academia influence the decision to patent university research. We find passage of the Bayh‐Dole Act spurred university patenting, but did not induce additional applied research funding. Thus, Bayh‐Dole fostered technology transfer, but did not result in more applied research at universities. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Does the amount of participation matter? Public comments,agency responses and the time to finalize a regulation

The notice and comment rulemaking process is a fundamental part of how agencies write regulations. While this process is starting to receive more empirical attention, the question of how the number of comments that an agency receives affects its decision-making process has received little examination. This paper uses Boolean analysis to examine nine rules from two agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services and evaluates the impact of a high volume of comments on agency changes to proposed rules and the time an agency takes to finalize a proposed rule. These nine cases suggest that agencies are most likely to change their proposals when they receive a high volume of comments on highly complex rules that are not very politically salient. Highly complex rules are also likely to take a long time to finalize when there are many public comments however it is often other factors that cause a long delay between proposed and final rules.

Institutional Recalibration and Judicial Delimitation

Throughout American history, a peculiar and recurrent disjunction has often arisen between the substance of transformative reforms and the decidedly less‐radical governing arrangements that arise in the aftermath of reform. To account for this disjunction, this article puts forth a theory of postreform “recalibration.” Political processes of recalibration are the means by which vague, indeterminate principles of reform are given operational meaning and translated into new governing arrangements. This article illuminates recalibration processes by examining two case‐studies: African American rights in the post‐Reconstruction era of the 1870s and 1880s, and labor rights in the post–New Deal era of the late 1930s. Finally, the article also highlights the crucial role of the Supreme Court in recalibration processes and sets forth a theory of judicial behavior as driven by an institutional interest in stability.