Policy Appeals Research Articles

Health Care Organizations and Policy Leadership: Perspectives on Nonsmoker-Only Hiring Policies.

To explore employers' decisions to base hiring policies on tobacco or nicotine use and community perspectives on such policies, and analyze the implications for organizational identity, community engagement, and health promotion. From 2013 to 2016, 11 executives from six health care organizations and one non-health-care organization with nonsmoker-only hiring policies were interviewed about why and how their policies were created and implemented, concerns about the policies, and perceptions of employee and public reactions. Focus groups were conducted with community members (n = 51) who lived in or near cities where participating employers were based, exploring participants' opinions about why an employer would stop hiring smokers and their support (or not) for such a policy. Most employers excluded from employment those using all forms of nicotine. Several explained their adoption of the policy as a natural extension of a smoke-free campus and as consistent with their identity as health care organizations. They regarded the policy as promoting health. No employer mentioned engaging in a community dialogue before adopting the policy or reported efforts to track the policy's impact on rejected applicants. Community members understood the cost-saving appeal of such policies, but most opposed them. They made few exceptions for health care organizations. Policy decisions undertaken by health care organizations have influence beyond their immediate setting and may establish precedents that others follow. Nonsmoker-only hiring policies may fit with a health care organization's institutional identity but may not be congruent with community values or promote public health.

Right On? The LDP’s Drift to the Right and the Persistence of Particularism

Since Prime Minister Abe’s return to power in 2012, there has been an ongoing discussion about whether and if so to what extent the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had drifted to the ‘right’. This article argues that it is important to distinguish between conservative and neoliberal policy appeals, as those two ideologies often clash with each other, despite being united under the casual ‘right’ banner. Using a newly coded, comprehensive database of LDP election platforms dating back to the 1950s, the analysis presented here shows that electoral reform alone cannot explain the development of these policy appeals since the 1990s. By comparing the LDP to its center-right counterparts in Western countries, I show that external shocks such as the Oil Crisis and the end of the Cold War have influenced neoliberal and conservative policy pledges in Japan and elsewhere. While these trends are similar, the LDP has placed a comparatively lower priority on conservative, and even more so neoliberal policy appeals. The article argues that this is due to the continued relevance of particularistic policy appeals, which are less important in the US, Germany or Great Britain.

Shopping Fast and Returning Plenty: How Returns Policies Affect Online Product Choices

Free-return policies are a critical aspect of online retailing, since they encourage consumers to purchase even when product fit (e.g., regarding size and taste) is not certain. Scholars usually explain the appeal of such policies in terms of increasing consumers’ net utility. In contrast, we argue that free-return policies actually discourage deliberate thinking by making the reversal of shopping decisions (i.e., product returns) less consequential. This paper takes the dual-process theory of thinking and knowing as a starting point and examines the effect of free returns on purchase decisions. We posit that free-return policies reduce shoppers’ motivation to deliberate; thus consumers are led to economize on analytical information processing and to rely more on another driver of preferences: affect. A series of four controlled experiments supports our related hypotheses and yields several implications for product choice. As compared with costly returns policies, a policy of free returns results in consumers selecting more quickly, recalling less information, shifting their preferences to affect-laden products, and ordering more of the same product. These findings offer insight — on the current debate over the usefulness of providing prepurchase information — that retailers can leverage to improve supplied information and thereby minimize the volume of product returns.

Animal Welfare Cognition and Food Safety

Farm animal welfare is not only an ethical issue, but also is related to food safety. This paper incorporates farm animal welfare into food safety issues, and analyzes the impact of animal welfare cognition on consumers' willingness to pay for animal welfare and the policy appeal. The results show that although consumers' cognition of farm animal welfare is not sufficient in China, there are still 81.42% of consumers who are willing to pay for farm animal welfare, and the average payment premium is 19.24%. Animal welfare cognition variables have significant impacts on the willingness of payment and consumer policy attitudes towards farm animal welfare. This conclusion indicates that that China already has the basic conditions to improve farm animal welfare and thereby enhance food safety level through market incentives or government regulation.

Does Participation Reinforce Patronage? Policy Preferences, Turnout and Class in Urban Ghana

Political competition is expected to become less particularistic as prosperity rises and a middle class emerges. But particularistic linkages persist despite rising wealth in urban Ghana. Politicians are unable to commit to campaign promises with voters who want large-scale public policies, many of whom are in the middle class. This creates incentives to avoid mobilizing many of these voters and to ignore their preferences. As a result, voters who want major public policies rather than patronage differentially refrain from participation, allowing poorer voters to dominate the electorate and party organizations. This may only reinforce politicians’ disincentives to make policy appeals, and stall the emergence of more policy-based electoral competition even as the middle class grows.

The double transition of transitional justice in Peru: confronting the appeal of iron-fist policies

Peru is facing a crisis of citizen insecurity that stems in part from the rule of law deficits connected to judicial problems and corruption that transitional justice mechanisms sought to remedy but failed to accomplish. This insecurity has fuelled the appeal of Keiko Fujimori, daughter and political heir of the authoritarian regime that ruled Peru in the 1990s, who offers iron-fist policies to defeat crime. To understand how unresolved human security concerns – such as citizen security – are potentially threatening to the consolidation of transitional justice policies, transitional justice needs to be conceptualised as encompassing two related but distinct transitions. While the first phase addresses the injustices from the immediate aftermath of a conflict or fall of an authoritarian regime, the second transition must address the insecurities that can potentially threaten any progress the state and society have made towards establishing democracy and rule of law. It is argued here that the failure to address these insecurities risks the successful completion of the second transition in Peru, and can potentially cause authoritarian reversals by enhancing the appeal of politicians that peddle law-and-order policies to address them.

Ideological Flexibility and Electoral Success: An Analysis of Irish Party Competition

This article argues that Ireland's major party elites enjoy an unusual degree of ideological flexibility, which in turn provides the parties with an uncommon capacity to adjust programmatically when changing electoral opportunities, or challenges, present themselves. Evidence from two originally designed parliamentary surveys, conducted in sharply different contexts in the 2007 and 2011 elections, supports this finding. A closer examination of individual TDs’ policy positions reveals that TDs possess considerable flexibility to adapt their policy appeals. Although parties may appear programmatically similar at the aggregate level, the high degree of internal ideological heterogeneity reinforces that the autonomy individual TDs have to alter their positions within their local electoral context. These findings point to a conclusion that the presence of a high degree of ideological flexibility, especially at the level of individual TDs, not policy positions in themselves, is critical for understanding electoral politics in Ireland. This conclusion stands in contrast to the popular perspective that competition over policy may alter the nature of party competition in Ireland. The findings also provide a deeper appreciation of how Irish parliamentarians are able to assume policy positions among their constituents that often differ from the party line in legislative votes in parliament.

Issue Frames, Personality, and Political Persuasion

We argue that individuals’ personality dispositions influence the relative success of different rhetorical strategies of political persuasion on policy issues, and thus function to constrain the behavior of elite actors in their attempts to win support for favored policy outcomes. Drawing on the psychological concept of functional matching, we propose that policy persuasion can be understood in terms of the “fit” between the regulatory focus of the individual on prevention or promotion and the framing of policies in terms of losses or gains. Using an experimental research design, we find that the success of policy appeals is conditional on the interaction of the policy frame and citizens’ personality. These effects are especially pronounced among the less politically sophisticated. Implications for the role of personality in politics, scholarly work on persuasion and framing, and constraints on elite behavior are discussed.

Addiction in Europe, 1860s–1960s

Concepts play a central part in the formulation of problems and proposed solutions to the use of substances. This article reports the initial results from a cross European historical study, carried out to a common methodology, of the language of addiction and policy responses in two key periods, 1860–1930 and the 1950s and 1960s. It concludes that the language of addiction was varied and nonstandard in the first period. The Anglo-American model of inebriety did not apply across Europe but there was a common focus on theories of heredity and national degeneration. After World War II, there was a more homogenous language but still distinct national differences in emphasis and national interests and policy responses to different substances. More research will be needed to deepen understanding of the conditions under which these changes took place and the social and policy appeal of disease theories.

(Re)appraising place-based economic development strategies

The place-based approach to local and regional development is a potentially significant emergent paradigm, which is finding favour across different supranational institutions, national-legal contexts, regional jurisdictions, as well as numerous other socio-spatial formations. With some strong affiliations to European policy discourse, place-based narratives have also permeated, mutated and circulated around other places and policy spaces throughout the globe. Consequently, it has been the subject of academic, policy and even popular debate. It is therefore timely to (re)appraise the thinking and practice of place-based approaches. This editorial introduces and outlines the body of empirical and conceptual work in the 19 contributions from across the world in this special issue of Local Economy. The articles, individually and collectively, indicate some of the potentialities of contextually distinct place-based approaches, although different (supposedly) place-based variants do not escape critique. This provokes a stark warning that the policy appeal of place-based thinking and place-based narratives could inadvertently nullify its emancipatory feature: that context of place matters.

Advancing the experiment to reality: Perspectives on Shanghai pilot carbon emissions trading scheme

Shanghai, as the most advanced mega city in China, has launched a pilot carbon emission trading scheme (SH-ETS) that is designed to achieve a compromise between the domestic context in Shanghai, and a need for national policy appeal. This paper gives an overview of the latest progress of the SH-ETS and sheds some light on the features of key design components, such as the threshold for inclusion, sector coverage, cap setting, allowance allocation and the Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system. Based on a concern that manipulative principles and economic dynamics may lead to uncertainties and ultimately influence the emission reduction effect of the scheme, this paper conducts an evaluation of potential uncertainties, such as those caused by changes in patterns of economic growth, strategic trading activities related to the bankable allowances, carbon leakage risks and insufficient MRV capabilities. To advance the experiment to reality, this paper suggests some changes are made to the pilot, which include adjusting the allowance allocation principles to facilitate change in the domestic energy structure, improving the disclosure of emission data to guarantee information symmetry, gauging the carbon leakage risks to strengthen compliance, and introducing risk management for non-regulated players and derivatives products.

Policy Deliberation as a Goal: The Case of Chinese ENGO Activism

Since it was first introduced in the late 1990s, the concept of deliberative democracy has had policy appeal for both Chinese policymakers and scholars. The Chinese government has recently introduced various deliberative institutions in a top-down manner to address diverse governance challenges. Deliberation at the level of civil society, however, has remained largely limited under the Chinese authoritarian regime setting. This paper illustrates how Chinese civil society actors have increasingly exerted bottom-up pressure to attain a greater degree of deliberation, transparency, and accountability in policymaking, by using the case of a series of anti-dam campaigns conducted by environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) over the past decade. Throughout their campaigns, ENGOs have urged both the central and local governments to adopt more participatory and transparent policymaking and examine the potential social and environmental impacts of large dams. They have done so particularly by invoking the very laws and policies that the government has recently introduced. This study suggests that future research on deliberative democracy in China should pay greater attention to non-state actors and their roles in practicing and promoting bottom-up deliberation.

Beyond ‘kawaii’ pop culture: Japan’s normative soft power as global trouble-shooter

Many studies of Japan’s soft power are premised on the ‘affective’ dimensions of its kawaii pop culture that generate liking or interest. While entirely warranted, emphasising cultural attraction does not do sufficient justice to the multi-faceted foundations of Japanese soft power. Neither does it recognise other components of Joseph Nye’s soft power framework stressing the ‘normative’ appeal of policies that reflect global norms. This article investigates the ‘normative’ dimensions of Japan’s soft power on climate change, and whether it translates into international influence, as Nye predicted. The first section examines the Cabinet’s 2010 New Growth Strategy, identifying a potential source of ‘normative’ soft power in its self-proclaimed desire to reinvent Japan as a ‘trouble-shooting nation on global issues’, specifically environmental challenges. Next, it analyses how Japanese entities (government, corporations, and NGOs) can transmit ‘normative’ soft power, and obstacles encountered. These transmission mechanisms include ‘Cool Earth Partnership’ programmes, the ‘Future City Initiative’ and the values-based Satoyama Initiative. The final section addresses conceptual implications that arise, and assesses whether Japan’s ‘normative’ soft power has paid dividends. Drawing from literature on pioneer states and external reviews of Japan’s alignment with key climate norms, the paper suggests that Japan’s normative soft power is lacking in driving agendas at global climate forums. At a pragmatic problem-solving level, however, Japan is increasingly perceived as an attractive source of transferable solutions, reflecting climate norms such as developing eco-friendly technologies and providing assistance to help vulnerable countries mitigate climate change

Rehabilitation: Beyond Nothing Works

AbstractBy 1975, the long-standing rehabilitative ideal had collapsed, a demise that was sudden and advocated by conservatives and liberals alike. Through the prism of the author's personal involvement in the issue of correctional rehabilitation, what occurred from this time to the present is recounted. This story includes identifying a period of pessimism in which a “nothing works” doctrine was widely embraced and a period of optimism in which knowledge has grown about the effectiveness of offender treatment. Given the current context, eight developments are likely to unfold in coming years: the continued policy appeal of rehabilitation, widening influence of the risk-need-responsivity paradigm, popularity of desistance-based treatment models, use of reentry programs as a conduit for rehabilitation, integration of early intervention with correctional intervention, use of financial incentives to fund effective programs, spread of rehabilitation ceremonies, and growth of specialty courts that target treatm...

Growing Up in Law and Society: The Pulls of Policy and Methods

This article begins by tracing the aspirations and training that led to Lempert's commitment to the field of law and social science and includes comments on prominent figures in the field, the emergence of empirical legal studies, and other matters. It may interest scholars who seek to understand the history of the field's revival, and those who were among the first generation of Law and Society Association members may see some of their own experience in Lempert's account. The article then discusses policy uses of law and social science research and cautions against the possibility that a study's policy appeal may exceed the weight that can fairly be put on it. Five studies are used as examples: Wilson and Kelling's essay on “broken windows,” Sherman and Berk's work on arrest for spouse abuse, Ehrlich's article on the deterrent effects of the death penalty, Lott and Mustard's work on right-to-carry laws, and Sander's mismatch critique of affirmative action. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance to policy of understanding mechanism and the need for sophistication in the soft methods of study design, along with a good understanding of formal statistics.

Are Religious People More Compassionate and Does This Matter Politically?

AbstractAnalyzing a unique module of the General Social Survey, we test hypotheses that three religion dimensions — affiliation with specific religious traditions (belonging), service attendance (behaving), and religious orthodoxy (believing) are associated with compassionate feelings, and that these feelings carry over into support for government efforts to help the poor, blacks, and the sick. The religiously orthodox report more compassionate feelings toward others than do modernists and, partly because of this, are more supportive of government intervention to help the poor. Yet attending religious services frequently does not increase compassionate feelings and makes people less supportive of government efforts to help the poor. There are no differences among religious traditions in compassionate feelings, and the only difference on economic policy preferences is for Black Protestants to support government assistance to blacks. Compassionate feelings have comparable effects to political ideology and party identification on support for government assistance to the disadvantaged and misfortunate. We conclude that people of faith, variously defined, do not constitute a monolithic “Religious Right” and are potentially open to policy appeals from both political parties.

Indirect Taxation of Monopolists: A Tax on Price

Abstract A digressive tax such as a variable rate sales tax or a tax on price gives firms an incentive for expanding output. Thus, unlike unit and ad valorem taxes which amplify the harm from monopoly, a digressive tax lessens the harm. We analyse a tax on price with respect to efficiency and practical policy appeal. In particular, we show how tax reforms based only on observation of price and quantity can make use of a tax on price in order to improve welfare. That is, it is practical to use a tax on price. The argument extends to fixed-number homogenous oligopoly.

Electricity, Uncertainty and the Good Life. A Comparison of French and Norwegian Household Responses to Policy Appeals for Sustainable Energy

Targeted by policies on sustainable energy, ordinary men and women are also engaged in the routines and concerns of everyday life. This paper asks to what extent French and Norwegian households link global warming to their own electricity use. Furthermore, we study people’s rationales for selecting renewable sources and reducing electricity consumption at home. Empirical material was collected in France and Norway. We draw on a practice theory framework. The purpose of the paper is to use a comparative analysis for highlighting important aspects of the electricity cultures in each country, thereby accounting for why the French and the Norwegians respond to appeals for sustainable energy in the ways they do. The results show that people in both countries tend to regard their own electricity use as disconnected from global warming. This is partly due to the high share of non-fossil power production in both countries, but we also suggest that certain denial mechanisms reinforce the idea that electricity consumption is disconnected from environmental challenges. The French respondents relate to the state-owned supplier EDF. They are preoccupied with physical and financial risks and regard electricity as a necessity. Conversely, the Norwegians value electricity in itself as a non-problematic good to which they think they have a claim as Norwegian citizens. Although the cost of electricity has an equal share of the household budget in both countries, the French practice a savings culture to a much greater extent than Norwegians do.

Growing Up in Law & Society: The Pulls of Policy and Methods

This article which will appear as the introductory essay in Volume 9 of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science begins, at the editor’s request, with a professional autobiography which traces the aspirations and training that led to Lempert’s commitment to the field of law and social science and allows him to comment on the emergence of Empirical Legal Studies and other development sin the field. Some of what is written may be of interest to those who seek to understand the history of the field’s revival, and those who were among the first generation of Law & Society Association members may see some of their own experience in Lempert’s account. But much of the article’s first portion may be of interest largely to the author’s friends and family. The second and larger portion of the article discusses uses of law and social science research in the policy arena and cautions against the possibility that a study’s policy appeal may exceed the weight that can fairly be put on it. Five studies are used as examples: James Q. Wilson and Kelling’s essay on Broken Windows, Lawrence Sherman and Richard Berk’s work on arrest for spouse abuse, Isaac Ehrlich’s article on the deterrent effects of the death penalty, John Lott and David Mustard’s work on right to carry laws and Richard Sander’s mismatch critique of affirmative action. The portion discussing Sander’s work presents previously unpublished data that not only refutes published claims by Professor Sander that Michigan Law School’s minority graduates fare poorly on the bar, but also indicates in 3 recent years affirmative action eligibility appears to have had little if any relationship to bar passage success. The article also emphasizes the importance to policy of understanding mechanism, and the need for sophistication in the soft methods of study design along with a good understanding of formal statistics.

Policy, citizenship and governance: the case of disability and employment policy in Australia

Current discussions regarding the relationship between welfare governance systems and employment promotion in disability policy appeal to a rejuvenated neo-liberal and paternalistic understanding of welfare governance. At the core of this rationality is the argument that people with disabilities not only have rights, but also duties, in relation to the State. In the Australia welfare system, policy tools are deployed to produce a form of self-discipline, whereby the State emphasises personal responsibility via assessment tools, ‘mutual obligation’ policy, and motivational strategies. Drawing on a two-year semi-longitudinal study with 80 people with a disability accessing welfare benefits, we examine how welfare governance subject recipients to strategies to produce productive citizens who are able to contribute to the national goal of maintaining competitiveness in the global economy. Participants’ interviews reveal the intended and unintended effects of this activation policy, including some acceptance of the logic of welfare-to-work and counter-hegemonic resistance to de-valued social identities.