Public Policy Positions Research Articles

Taylor Swift as a Potential Celebrity Political Endorser

In this research note we examine the effect of Taylor Swift’s hypothetical endorsement of a Public policy position. We examine this in the context of the expanding literature on the effects of celebrity endorsements. Through a post-test only experimental survey design we test Swift’s hypothetical endorsement of a policy position. We begin and conclude with analysis of why Swift’s value as an endorser, as well as the value of other similarly situated endorsers may be particularly high.

The Role of Board of Directors: Delegation vs Involvement in the Strategic Decision-making

Nowadays it is widely accepted that one of the central responsibilities of any board is to set strategic direction for the firm and ensure its long-term survival. The board needs to assess the appropriate level of delegation to the firm’s top-management that allows the board to be sufficiently involved and to enable management to bring its specific expertise into the formulation and implementation of corporate strategies. Although most of the corporate governance literature has focused on the monitoring and control role of the board, this research complements that traditional line of inquiry by examining the other equally role of the board in its advising, counseling and service role. Non-executive directors are expected to be objective overseers of the executive team. However, that “objectivity” comes at a high price with respect to board involvement because it brings with goals that can sometimes be at odds with the executive team, yet the executive team will always have a knowledge advantage over the non-executive directors. There are some who argue that part-time non-executive directors are no longer feasible, particularly for large corporations, and that there needs to be a movement to full-time professional directors. Indeed, there is some empirical evidence suggesting that full-time professional directors are more effective than part-time non-executive directors are. While we are sympathetic to that public policy position, it highlights the practical and theoretical challenges associated with this research.

A Multi-Platform Collection of Social Media Posts about the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections

Social media are utilized by millions of citizens to discuss important political issues. Politicians use these platforms to connect with the public and broadcast policy positions. Therefore, data from social media has enabled many studies of political discussion. While most analyses are limited to data from individual platforms, people are embedded in a larger information ecosystem spanning multiple social networks. Here we describe and provide access to the Indiana University 2022 U.S. Midterms Multi-Platform Social Media Dataset (MEIU22), a collection of social media posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and 4chan. MEIU22 links to posts about the midterm elections based on a comprehensive list of keywords and tracks the social media accounts of 1,011 candidates from October 1 to December 25, 2022. We also publish the source code of our pipeline to enable similar multi-platform research projects.

Review of “Gendered Pluralism”

Are women united or divided in US politics? Is gender a “fault line” in Americans’ public opinion and policy attitudes? Sociologist Belinda Robnett and political scientist Katherine Tate explore these questions in Gendered Pluralism. Analyzing the 2012 Outlook on Life Survey dataset, the authors explore pluralism, intersectionality, and identity politics as relevant to the ways in which Americans respond to public policy issues. Investigating how socio-political and demographic factors, as well as gender, race, and sexuality, may influence public policy attitudes, the authors assert that gender is a consistent divider of opinions in US politics and yet, women’s attitudes still vary by their intersectional social locations and experiences. The book is organized to explore specific dimensions of gender, race, and sexuality and related factors that shape public opinion in each chapter. After establishing the theoretical framework and research problems in the first chapter, Robnett and Tate first explore gender as a fault line in US politics. In chapter 2, the authors examine potential gender and racial differences in the perceived attainability of the American Dream and how such perception may further vary by differing levels of feminist support, partisan affiliation, and political ideologies. Although they did not find meaningful gender differences in the American Dream outlook, political ideology and class were found to significantly shape this outlook. On the other hand, the second chapter explores the impact of marital status and outlook on American policy opinion and show contextual gender differences as well as a significant division among women. Though some policy agenda focusing on family and gender seem to bring women together regardless of their political orientation and marital status, the authors find that “married, white women belong to a different political tribe” (p.66).

Reproductive Health Policy in the United States: An American College of Physicians Policy Brief.

The legal landscape around access to reproductive health care services was substantially altered after the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization. In the aftermath of the decision, some state governments have begun to impose stringent restrictions and complete bans on the provision of abortion, whereas others have sought to protect and expand access. Some have gone as far as imposing criminal and civil penalties on physicians and other clinicians who provide evidence-based, clinically indicated reproductive health care services and information that is guided by biomedical ethics and provided in the best interest of the patient's health and well-being. In several states, lawmakers have attempted and successfully used new approaches to enforcing and achieving these prohibitions, including prohibitions on crossing state lines to obtain abortion care, prohibitions on the mailing of medication abortion, and the authorization of third-party civil lawsuits. In this policy brief, the American College of Physicians (ACP) updates and expands on its previous public policy positions on abortion from its 2018 policy paper, "Women's Health Policy in the United States," to reflect this new reality. The College also offers policymakers and payers recommendations to promote equitable access to reproductive health care services and safeguard maternal health. ACP reaffirms its opposition to undue and unnecessary governmental interference in the patient-physician relationship that criminalizes the provision of health care made in the physician's clinical judgment and based on clinical evidence and the standard of care.

Donald Trump, Political Theology and the Religion of Power

In this article I discuss a dangerous subtext that lies beneath Trump’s visible lack of serious Christian witness. It provides the fuel to a heretical fire that is poised to engulf those Christians whom I will suggest have quite literally made a deal with the Devil without realizing it. My argument is not that Trump is just a radically imperfect vessel for what may be legitimate public policy positions, but rather that he represents a robustly idolatrous brand of political theology that threatens the shared faith of all Christians at an existential level. What Trump represents is not “religion becoming power”, but “power becomes religion.” Trumpism at its core leads to what Saul Newman and others would call “the religion of the state” (or at least the deification of its leader).

Gender Differences in Public Policy Attitudes

Persistent differences between men and women in regard to their public policy attitudes have been found by various researchers. In this article, a state-wide survey in Pennsylvania is used to compare attitudes of men and women in the state with those at the national level. Using these data, three hypotheses frequently offered to explain attitude differences are subjected to evaluation. The major finding is that the male-female differences in policy attitudes may be related both to the sex-role behaviors leamed by children and to economic conditions experienced in later life.

Party over pandemic: Polarized trust in political leaders and experts explains public support for COVID-19 policies

Two experiments examined the polarization of public support for COVID-19 policies due to people’s (lack of) trust in political leaders and nonpartisan experts. In diverse samples in the United States (Experiment 1; N = 1,802) and the United Kingdom (Experiment 2; N = 1,825), participants evaluated COVID-19 policies that were framed as proposed by ingroup political leaders, outgroup political leaders, nonpartisan experts, or, in the United States, a bipartisan group of political leaders. At the time of the study in April 2020, COVID-19 was an unfamiliar and shared threat. Therefore, there were theoretical reasons suggesting that attitudes toward COVID-19 policy may not have been politically polarized. Yet, our results demonstrated that even relatively early in the pandemic people supported policies from ingroup political leaders more than the same policies from outgroup leaders, extending prior research on how people align their policy stances to political elites from their own parties. People also trusted experts and ingroup political leaders more than they did outgroup political leaders. Partly because of this polarized trust, policies from experts and bipartisan groups were more widely supported than policies from ingroup political leaders. These results illustrate the potentially detrimental role political leaders may play and the potential for effective leadership by bipartisan groups and nonpartisan experts in shaping public policy attitudes during crises.

Economic Literacy and Public Policy Positions

Economic Literacy and Public Policy Positions

The power of procedural policy tools at the local level: Australian local governments contributing to policy change for major projects

ABSTRACT As local governments have limited formal powers and less substantive policy instruments at their disposal, they are a particularly rich area for the study of procedural policy tools. This paper examines the role played by procedural policy tools deployed by local governments in Australia around the policy formation for, and approval of, major projects. This research analyses two Australian case studies: the East West Link tunnel in Melbourne, and the Coal Seam Gas projects of Northern New South Wales. Both are examples of major turnarounds in the public policy position of state governments, due to the persistent opposition of potentially impacted communities and their local governments. This paper investigates what local governments did in these two high-profile cases to facilitate advocacy against the proposed projects. It found a rich mixture of procedural policy tools were deployed; from providing information and expertise and supporting community campaigns, to launching their own campaign, staging regular physical protests and forming an advocacy committee. Critical procedural tools that escalated the campaigns against the projects in Northern NSW included a community poll revealing the extent of community opposition to the industry, while in Melbourne, a joint legal action launched by impacted local governments proved decisive. These actions drew into question the legitimacy of the state government’s position in support of the projects, highlighting the power of procedural tools at this level of government.

Legitimacy challenges to the liberal world order: Evidence from United Nations speeches, 1970\u20132018

The liberal international economic order has been facing high-profile legitimacy challenges in recent years. This article puts these challenges in historical context through a systematic analysis of rhetorical challenges towards both the order per se and specific global economic institutions. Drawing on Albert Hirschman’s classic typology of exit, voice and loyalty, we coded leaders’ speeches in the General Debate at the UN General Assembly between 1970 and 2018 as articulating intentions to abandon elements of the order, challenges or calls for reform, unequivocal support, or factual mentions of cooperation. Surprisingly, we find that explicit criticisms towards the liberal order are at an all-time low and that exit threats remain rare. An analysis of the historical evolution of criticisms to global economic institutions reveals a move away from the Cold War insider-outsider conflict towards insider contestation. For example, we find that as countries’ economies become more open, their leaders expressed more support for global economic institutions during the Cold War but less support since. Finally, we demonstrate consistency between the public policy positions leaders announce in UNGA General Debate speeches and their government positions on consequential reform debates on debt relief.

Why Are U.S. Parties So Polarized? A “Satisficing” Dynamical Model

Since the 1960s, Democrats and Republicans in U.S. Congress have taken increasingly polarized positions, while the public's policy positions have remained centrist and moderate. We explain this apparent contradiction by developing a dynamical model that predicts ideological positions of political parties. Our approach tackles the challenge of incorporating bounded rationality into mathematical models and integrates the empirical finding of satisficing decision making---voters settle for candidates who are "good enough" when deciding for whom to vote. We test the model using data from the U.S. Congress over the past 150 years, and find that our predictions are consistent with the two major political parties' historical trajectory. In particular, the model explains how polarization between the Democrats and Republicans since the 1960s could be a consequence of increasing ideological homogeneity within the parties.

Organizational structure, public policy, and technological change: the origins of the dominion steel industries

ABSTRACT This article provides a comparative study of the steel industry in Canada, Australia and South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century, in order to determine what key elements existed in these settler states that ensured the successful foundation of an industry seen as a symbols of industrial and national development. Although there is considerable literature containing comparisons of the overall long-term economic development of these settler nations, these comparisons are broad in approach, rather than focusing on the organizational structure and management of individual industries. The study finds that a combination of factors were in ensuring this success important including the development of local markets for steel, financial market development, public policy attitudes and natural resource availability. In doing so it finds that the three industries were similar in that they all had an abundance of raw materials, growing markets for steel and access to British and American capital markets and technical expertise.

Godless by association: Deficits in trust mediate antiatheist stigma-by-association.

In the United States, atheists elicit high levels of sociopolitical rejection that is primarily motivated by a lack of trust. Across three studies, we use evaluative conditioning (EC) as a theoretical framework to evaluate whether these deficits extended to candidates who are not atheists themselves but merely perceived to be associated with atheism. Study 1 found that implicit trust, explicit trust, and voting intentions toward target candidates were all negatively impacted by an EC procedure that paired a candidate's face with words related to atheism. Study 2 found that trust and political support for a Christian candidate was eroded when he expressed proatheist public policy position. In both experiments, trust mediated the effects of atheist associations on voting intentions for religiously affiliated participants. Study 3 found the same moderated-mediation pattern. Religiously affiliated participants who perceived Barack Obama as being more favorable toward atheists were less likely to vote for him, in large part due to a lack of trust. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The evolution of public policy attitudes: comparing the mechanisms of policy support across the stages of a policy cycle

AbstractWe analyse the importance of legitimacy on public policy support by comparing how drivers of public policy attitudes evolve across the policy process consisting of the input (the processes forgoing acquisition of power and the procedures permeating political decisionmaking), throughput (the inclusion of and interactions between actors in a governance system) and output (the substantive consequences of those decisions) stages. Using unique panel data through three phases of the implementation of a congestion tax in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, we find that legitimacy is indeed important in explaining policy support. Moreover, we find a lingering effect where support in one phase depends on legitimacy both in the present and in previous phases. Hence, our study takes us one step further on the road to understand the complicated dynamic mechanisms behind the interactions between policymaking, policy support, and the legitimacy and approval of politicians and political processes.

Separating Myth from Reality: An Analysis of Socially Acceptable Credence Attributes

There has been increasing interest in food characteristics that are broadly classified here as socially acceptable credence attributes. This review considers several demand-side issues associated with the economic analysis of these attributes. First, despite ample research and media discussion suggesting strong preference for these food attributes, market shares remain low. Hypothetical bias and social desirability bias likely play a prominent role in explaining this disconnect. There has also been an increase in government and food industry regulation aimed at socially acceptable credence attributes, and this article considers why public votes and policy positions appear discordant with retail shopping behavior. One set of policy proposals involves more information disclosure related to such attributes; however, the welfare economics associated with information provision is not straightforward. While much has been learned about consumers’ stated willingness-to-pay for socially acceptable credence attributes, this review suggests that more research is needed to understand the current environment surrounding these food characteristics.

CSR Needs CPR: Corporate Sustainability and Politics

Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental quality, they are ignored in most current sustainability metrics. It is time for these metrics to be expanded to critically assess firms based on the sustainability impacts of their public policy positions. To enable such assessments, firms must become as transparent about their corporate political responsibility (CPR) as their corporate social responsibility (CSR). For their part, rating systems must demand such information from firms and include evaluations of corporate political activity in their assessments of corporate environmental responsibility.

DOES BREASTFEEDING DURATION INFLUENCE FAMILY FOOD INSECURITY?

Abstract BACKGROUND Across all demographics, families without consistent access to adequate food place children at health risk. Consequences may persist beyond early life into adulthood. Public policy positions breastfeeding, the ideal nutrition for infants, as an important solution to reducing family food insecurity (FFI). However, few studies have investigated the association between breastfeeding duration and FFI. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the association between total breastfeeding duration and FFI in Canadian urban children. DESIGN/METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted of children aged 0–2 years, from a practice-based child research network. Total breastfeeding duration was collected from parent-reported questionnaires. FFI was measured using 2-item food insecurity and validated 1-item NutriSTEP screens. Multivariable regression analysis was performed adjusting for pre-specified covariates. RESULTS Among 3838 children, the mean total breastfeeding duration was 10.6 months (SD=6.7). Families with food insecurity (14.7%) had increased odds of younger mothers, more males and older and more children. In adjusted model, breastfeeding duration was not associated with FFI (OR 0.99; 95% CI 0.98, 1.01). Low-income families were 9 times more likely to be family food insecure than high-income families (p=0.00). CONCLUSION Contrary to public policy, our study found no association between breastfeeding and family food insecurity (FFI). However, other factors may predominate, in particular family income and structure. Given the detrimental impact of FFI, further research is needed to understand the role of infant feeding practices within the larger political, policy and cultural framework.

Principled Rhetoric as Coalition Management: Speech in the Reconstructive Presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan

This article examines the rhetorical leadership of reconstructive presidents: how they use political principles and ideology in an attempt to moderate and integrate diverse groups within their partisan regime. It analyzes the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, who shared a method of rhetorical leadership that I call principled rhetoric. Principled rhetoric explains specific public policy positions by referring to broadly shared partisan values and aspirations. By using principled rhetoric, a president attempts to articulate common regime principles rather than factional motives to gain support for public policy. Principled rhetoric provides competing partisans with a shared rationale to support a given public policy, even if their specific policy preferences diverge. By developing and perpetuating a principled consensus on policy, these two presidents attempted to deepen partisans’ identity through a common regime narrative. To illustrate the use of principled rhetoric, I focus on Roosevelt’s and Reagan’s advocacy for regime-defining public policies: Social Security and budget and tax cuts, respectively.

Climate policy support under political consensus: exploring the varying effect of partisanship and party cues

ABSTRACTBy creating attitudinal rifts among partisan voters, political polarization is expected to negatively affect chances of effectively mitigating climate change. While such expectations generally have found support, less attention has been paid to the opposite claim that political consensus should eliminate the partisan dimension in climate change politics. This study tests this claim by studying how party identification, and party cues specifically, affects public policy attitudes in a context defined by political consensus. Using data from a large online access panel in Sweden, party identification and party cues are shown to matter for policy attitudes even in a consensus context. This effect is not limited to certain issues but is found across a wide range of policies, and the effect of party cues, for a given issue, varies across parties. The implications of this study and areas for future work are discussed.