Welcome to PSJ’s second issue of 2020. We hope that you are all healthy, safe, and finding ways to thrive in what has so far proven to be a tumultuous and difficult year. Despite the exponential spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the resultant tragedies befalling our communities, we here at the PSJ have been fortunate to be able to maintain our usual publication schedules and timelines. For our readers, that means 12 first-rate peer-reviewed articles. We hope they offer a reprieve from the uncertainties and trying circumstances that many of you are facing. Before discussing these articles in detail, however, we would like to take this moment to first share our sincerest gratitude for your continued support and assistance. In 2019, more than 6,600 institutions worldwide subscribed to PSJ’s content and nearly 300,000 full-text PSJ articles were downloaded and read. During the year, we processed more than 500 manuscripts, including nearly 300 new submissions. Our overall manuscript acceptance rate in 2019 was 13 percent. Typically, we were able to make desk decisions within two weeks. For those manuscripts sent out for review, our reviewers were generally able to provide feedback within three weeks. Here we owe a special thanks to our editorial board, which we aspire to have involved with every manuscript that moves through the PSJ’s review process. We interpret these data as indicators of PSJ’s continued recognition by the policy community as the premier venue for policy theory, where researchers send their best work and have justified expectations of timely reviews that set the standards of quality in the field. These expectations are only possible because of you—your generous donations of time and expertise, and your willingness to submit your best work. For that, we are humbled, grateful, and honored to play a role in what is inevitably a community endeavor. Your continued support is both deeply appreciated and essential. Now, we would like to turn to the subtleties of this issue lineup. By our read, the 12 original research articles published in this issue can be categorized into three general themes, with the first seven articles focusing on issues of governance. The articles falling within this theme include the analysis of policy innovations by both public agencies and officials, the benefits of delegating policy implementation to non-governmental agencies, and exploring some of the unique successes of cross-agency collaborations. Our second theme then takes on the perspective of the citizen, where the three included articles span the topics of policy perception formation, the mediating role of an individual’s social capital on the effect of community-wide economic shocks, and public responsiveness to governmental policy changes. Finally, the remaining two articles focus on policy diffusion, offering new data sources and methodological approaches to testing important aspects of the diffusion of public policy. Within the first theme, two articles focus on approaches to governance taken by public agencies at varying levels. Hughes, Yordi, and Besco’s (2020) work builds upon the sustainability transitions literature (as summarized by Armstrong & Kamieniecki, 2019) by creating a theoretical framework for urban policy innovation that analyzes how experimental pilot projects emerge and help cities overcome challenges to climate change mitigation, specifically focusing on how and when these projects scale up and out to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The authors use this framework to evaluate the Canadian city of Toronto’s energy efficiency retrofitting of social housing buildings and determine three important features of pilot scaling processes. The first two features emphasize how pilot projects emerge and scale in response to fluctuating policy innovation challenges (e.g., financial, technical, political), where they find these challenges to play a central role in every stage of the scaling process. Even more important for future analyses, however, is that their findings indicate an additive nature of policy innovation, where the emergence of, changes to, and translations involved in scaling pilot projects have encouraging implications for cities with fewer resources. Moving from the local to the federal/central level, Xue and Zhao (2020) utilize observations from China’s policy practices to propose a new research perspective for understanding how its central government has been able to address policy challenges in an era of rapid and continual transition. Modeling China’s behavioral pattern as involving truncated decision making and deliberative implementation, the authors analyze the case of coal-mining reforms in the Shanxi province in China. The authors find these two core elements to be complementary and inseparable, where rapid policy response allows key government leaders to make important decisions based on political instinct, rather than calculated rational analysis that is often hindered by divergences among experts and government leaders, and various other components found in more complex forms of governance (e.g., see Hamilton & Lubell, 2018; Mewhirter, Coleman, & Berardo, 2019). Further, the truncated decision process creates flexibility within decision-making procedures, which thereby provides lower-level governments more power to mediate among various interests, address unresolved conflicts and unattended interests, and modify policy goals as necessary. As such, the authors’ findings have broader implications for policy process research in general, especially for that which focuses on state development in transitional or developing countries. Continuing under the theme of governance, two of the articles shift to focus on the perspectives of public leaders, analyzing how they determine policy agendas and control major policy decisions. Yildirim (2020) elucidates male–female differences in information processing by examining issue attention among members of parliament serving in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 2002 and 2011. Drawing from cognitive psychology, political agenda-setting, and gender studies literature, Yildirim argues that females, when compared to males, process social cues and information more comprehensively and are relatively more empathetic which, in turn, leads them to pay attention to a broader range of issues. These findings point to more female representation in legislatures potentially increasing issue diversity, perhaps in electoral campaigns and party platforms as well. Breunig and Koski (2020) examine how the institutional power of state governors affects spending on specific budget items. Examining American state budgets between 1985 and 2009, the authors argue that governors with more institutional strength both bottom out and top off budgets, with topping off occurring to a greater degree than bottoming out. Further, they argue that there are partisan differences in topping off and bottoming out, as well as differences in the specific types of expenditures that are topped off in the process. Utilizing quantile regression, the researchers find that institutionally strong governors are more successful in topping off their state’s budget, that Democratic governors are more effective at topping off budgets (though more ineffective in bottoming out budgets), and that attempts to top off budget categories are largely moderated by budget rules. Overall, however, they determine that governors are well positioned to influence public policy through the budgetary process. Two articles in this issue analyze the benefits of outsourcing responsibilities to outside agencies when public agencies are facing implementation challenges. Di Mascio, Maggett, and Nataini (2020) examine anti-corruption agencies in Italy to determine how governments attempt to balance the risk of losing credibility when delegating regulatory authority to independent regulators. Specifically, the authors conduct a qualitative longitudinal analysis of organizational change, arguing that the literature’s focus on quantitative analysis has failed to capture procedural or structural changes that influence agency independence. They conclude that more delegation occurs when the government does not anticipate a threat from independent regulators, indicating that independent regulatory power is driven not by a need to increase credibility, but instead by whether there is a perceived risk of losing credibility. Another important thread within the governance literature deals with financial decoupling, or the private provision of public services that not only allow governments to separate public policy decisions and their implementation from their political costs, but also makes possible the separation of a private firm’s pursuit of resource efficiency from potential financial risks. Teodoro, Zhang, and Switzer (2020) test this theory within the realm of environmental policy, using both ordinary least squares (OLS) and logistic regression to determine whether potentially unpopular conservation policies are more likely to be adopted and later succeed, when they are implemented through private firms. Analyzing California water utilities’ responses to the state’s drought from 2015 to 2017, the authors find that, compared to those served by local government utilities, private utilities adopted more aggressive conservation measures, were more likely to meet state conservation standards, and conserved more water overall. As a result, they argue that the idea of political decoupling recasts the private implementation of public policy not only as a matter of efficiency, but also as a matter of policy effectiveness, where private firms may be more effective than public agencies in implementing controversial public policies. As the final article within our governance theme, Horndeski and Koontz (2020) examine collaborations across agencies, showcasing an innovative approach to Cultural Theory (CT) by mapping it onto the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD). Using a comparative case study of four collaborative watershed organizations in Ohio, the authors examine the connection between the group and grid dimensions of CT worldviews and decision rules. Results indicate correlations between certain rules defined by the IAD framework and the group and grid dimensions posited by CT, suggesting that CT worldviews can offer important theoretical insights into collective decision-making rules. The three articles representing our second theme of citizen policy perceptions and policy-based effects include the analysis of the relationship between public opinion and public policy. Unlike previous research published in this journal (e.g., see Beyer & Hänni, 2018; Burstein, 2020), these articles move away from attempting to answer the age-old question of whether public opinion influences policy, instead analyzing perception formation as well as individual experiences of policy outcomes. Maestas, Chattopadhyay, Leland, and Piatak (2020) examine the influence of risk perceptions on policy preference formation by drawing distinctions between preferences for uniformity and centralization in regulation. The authors argue that this distinction is important for federalism, namely because an essential emotional component of risk perception (e.g., anxiety or worry) is likely to motivate the public to seek uniformity in regulation as well as a centralized venue for policy issues that transcend state boundaries. Using food safety regulation to explore the importance of this distinction, the authors find that risk perceptions influence public preferences for centralized oversight, which has the potential to offer valuable insight into the management of the current coronavirus crisis. In our next article within this theme, Rönnerstrand and Oskarson (2020) offer an interesting addition to the policy feedback literature that examines the interplay between citizens and politicians in a modern democracy, specifically assessing public responsiveness to policy changes. Drawing on waiting times and hospital service satisfaction data before and after a specific waiting time guarantee reform in one region of Sweden, the researchers evaluate hypotheses addressing policy proximity and policy visibility. Findings confirm a positive public response, where decreases in waiting times resulted in substantial increases in hospital service satisfaction. However, a multivariate analysis of expected effects of proximity and visibility that controlled for potential interactions and confounders found that increases in satisfaction only applied to those already in good health. Daley, Goerdel, Pierce, and Dinsmore (2020) continue with the examination of citizen experiences by empirically testing the linkage of social capital theory to public health outcomes. The authors argue that structural social capital moderates the effect of economic shock (e.g., foreclosure risk) on indicators of public health and wellbeing. These theoretical expectations are tested using U.S. county-level data, with social capital indicators measured at two separate time periods. Using OLS regression, the model estimates overall self-rated health both with and without the interaction of social capital and foreclosure risk. Subsequent analyses support hypotheses that high levels of past and current structural social capital will be associated with better health, even in the presence of increased economic stress. Thus, the manuscript makes an important contribution to understanding the broader social determinants of health, which may prove to be useful in designing better health policy in the COVID-19 era. To close this issue, our final two articles provide new means and methodologies for policy diffusion research (e.g., see Collingwood, El-Khatib, and O’Brien, 2019; Hannah & Mallinson 2020; Mitchell, 2018). Boehmke et al. (2020) address the current issue within policy diffusion research regarding the heavy reliance on case studies confined to single-policy domains, an issue which confounds generalization. The authors introduce resources to support large-scale data-based research across policy domains. The State Policy Innovation and Diffusion database is the most comprehensive dataset of its kind, containing approximately 18,000 policies adopted across U.S. states since 1911, with more than 700 diffusion episodes. Policies within the database are coded by substantive topics, from which the authors calculate static and dynamic policy innovation scores for all 50 states as well as analyze policy diffusion pathways using network inference methods. The resources and tools they introduce support more precise empirical measures across unrelated policy areas, facilitating a better understanding of the general patterns of policy diffusion while still allowing researchers the precision of being able to target their specific policy interests. Linder, Desmarais, Burgess, and Giraudy (2020) examine policy similarity—conceptualized as the reuse or overlapping of legislative text—across 500,000 pieces of U.S. state legislation passed between 2008 and 2015. The authors apply a computer-assisted analytic method to extract textual similarities from policies across states by relying on the Smith–Waterman local alignment algorithm similar to those used to detect plagiarism in literature but that specifically allows authors to assign continuous policy alignment scores for similarity across legislative texts, while at the same time down-weighing less meaningful text such as legislative boilerplate. The authors claim that text reuse in legislation is positively associated with previously identified diffusion ties between states and find further evidence supporting the theory of asymmetric party politics’ influence over policy similarity across states. More importantly, however, they provide a novel means by which to analyze text, which benefits both policy diffusion research and policy studies more generally. In closing, we hope that you enjoy reading the newest additions of PSJ articles introduced in this issue. We also hope that you will do so while continuing to keep yourselves, your families, and our communities safe and healthy by engaging in social distancing and looking after one another. As we all weather the global COVID-19 crisis, the PSJ editorial team has tried to remain flexible and accommodating to both reviewers and authors. We retain that commitment and will also continue to do our very best to make sure that manuscripts are processed in the way PSJ contributors have come to expect. Thank you and take care!