Public Policy Scholars Research Articles

The Politics of Crisis Policymaking: Chernobyl and Swedish Nuclear Energy Policy

Public policy scholars often accentuate the key role of crises in explaining policy change; however, much empirical work still remains to be done in order to explain crisis‐induced policy outcomes. This article explores the prediction of the Advocacy Coalition Framework that stable coalitions and impediments to learning reduce the likelihood for policy change after a crisis. Strategic action is emphasized as a supplementary variable focusing on the role of political motivations in post‐crisis policymaking. Sweden's decision not to accelerate the nuclear power phaseout following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster provides a case study to assess the utility of these explanations. Findings corroborate theoretical expectations about stable minority coalitions, cast doubts over the presumed rigidity of policy core beliefs, and emphasize strategic action and cognitive heuristics as important motivations for policy choice. The article concludes by outlining three sector‐specific variables (ideological salience, level of conflict, and previous crisis experiences) that add to the explanation of crisis‐induced policy outcomes.

Global Public Policy, Transnational Policy Communities, and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes thatcoexistalongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “globalagora.” Thesecond sectionadapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. Thethird sectionasks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.

Assessing the Feasibility and Impact of Federal Childhood Obesity Policies

Research on childhood obesity has primarily been conducted by experts in nutrition, psychology, and medicine. Only recently have public policy scholars devoted serious work to this burgeoning public health crisis. Here the authors advance that research by surveying national experts in health/nutrition and health policy on the public health impact and the political feasibility of fifty-one federal policy options for addressing childhood obesity. Policies that were viewed as politically infeasible but having a great impact on childhood obesity emphasized outright bans on certain activities. In contrast, education and information dissemination policies were viewed as having the potential to receive a favorable hearing from national policy makers but little potential public health impact. Both nutrition and policy experts believed that increasing funding for research would be beneficial and politically feasible. A central need for the field is to develop the means to make high-impact policies more politically feasible.

Considering Reasonableness

Despite the relative ease and regularity with which it is used by policymakers and the functional role that it often plays in the policy development process, the concept of reasonableness has essentially been overlooked by public policy scholars in their analysis of the factors influencing the development of public policy. However, the maintenance of the analytical status quo is likely to prove increasingly difficult. As the issues that governments must address become increasingly complicated and controversial and it becomes correspondingly more difficult to identify easily or clearly the most appropriate response to associated problems, policymakers will inevitably be forced to place greater reliance on the concept of reasonableness as the final court of appeal when seeking to determine the attractiveness and acceptability of policy decisions. Accordingly, it seems ‘reasonable’ to suggest that greater, explicit consideration be given to the concept of reasonableness and the role it does and should play in the development of public policy. This article simultaneously offers both a brief overview of the current situation with respect to the meaningful consideration of the concept of reasonableness by public policy scholars and practitioners and a preliminary argument for a reconsideration of the analytical status quo.

Envisioning the Possibilities for a Good Life: Exploring the Public Policy Implications of Intersectionality Theory

SUMMARY Public policy is one of the younger, interdisciplinary subfields in the social sciences, but one of the most promising in terms of its social relevance. While public policy has made major strides in terms of analytical and methodological development, it has largely ignored the development of intersectional theory-a broad theoretical paradigm that has much to offer public policy scholars. In this article, the author discusses the contribution made by intersectionality scholars to the social sciences and advances ways in which intersectionality theory could extend efforts to elucidate public policy outcomes and women's political leadership.

Editors' Notes

This issue of the Policy Studies Journal includes articles of interest and value for a broad spectrum of policy scholars and practitioners. Dorothy Daley (University of Kansas) examines the diffusion of voluntary market mechanisms as state-level policy instruments for addressing environmental problems in the US. She finds that the states are responsive to both interest group pressures and to the actions of surrounding states, effectively coupling diffusion models with advocacy-based models of policy change. On a methodological note, Paul Steinberg (Harvey Mudd College) addresses the daunting problem of causal attribution in policy cases for which data are limited. Drawing on the concept of process tracing, Steinberg proposes a useful means for ranking the importance of the identified causal paths. For practitioners, we include papers that explore the mode in which policy analysts ply their trade (by Iris Geva-May, Simon Fraser University) and careful analysis of the kinds of tradeoffs faced by NGOs that “partner” with governments to produce public goods (by Kwangho Jung of Seoul National University and Jae Moon of Yonsei University). And Brian Gerber (University of West Virginia) provides an extremely useful review essay of what has been learned about disaster management practices in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Also in this issue is a collection of papers, guest-edited by Kishore Gawande (Texas A&M University), addressing the environmental implications of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The focus of the collection is on the prospect that less restrictive trade policies will result in shifting pollution to those states with most lax pollution standards—dubbed the “pollution haven” effect. These papers provide a lucid account of the related theoretical issues, followed by analyses that empirically test the pollution haven proposition at the level of the state, the individual business or firm, and at the level of the operating industrial plant. We are particularly pleased with the manner in which this collection employs multiple points of focus, coupled with careful empirical analysis, to provide both practical and theoretical policy implications. In sum, this is an exciting issue that we expect will hold broad interest for the community of public policy scholars and practitioners. We are deeply grateful to both the authors and reviewers who gave of their time and effort to bring it about. On a more administrative note, this issue the Policy Studies Journal marks the last before a change of institutional homes. In August of 2007, the PSJ will move from Texas A&M University to the University of Oklahoma. We express our lasting appreciation for the support that the Journal has received from Texas A&M, and especially from the Bush School and the Bush Library Foundation which provided generous support for the editorial functions of the PSJ. We will discuss the future of the Journal at the University of Oklahoma in a later edition of these editorial notes. As always, our editorial policies are designed to bring you the best writing in public policy, covering the range of theoretical and substantive developments in the field. We continue to urge you to send your best papers to the Policy Studies Journal. Hank C. Jenkins-SmithEditorWarren S. EllerManaging Editor

Can regulation and governance make a difference?

Can regulation and governance make a difference?

THE CREATION AND DESTRUCTION OF SOCIAL CAPITAL by Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen and Gert Tinggaard Svendsen

This book will contribute substantially to academic and popular debates on social capital and will be an invaluable source of reference for all social scientists. It will particularly appeal to students and scholars of public policy, economics, sociology, political science, anthropology and history.

The Conditioning Effects of Policy Salience and Complexity on American Political Institutions

Years ago, Bill Gormley introduced public policy scholars to a new and innovative salience‐ complexity typology for regulatory policies. This typology not only helps scholars catalog numerous policies into distinct categories, but also helps explain variation in political processes. Specifically, different policies provide different incentives for political actors to be involved in policymaking. Salience encourages activity on the part of elected officials; complexity often requires policymaking outside of the public sphere. In this article, I extend Gormley’s salience‐complexity typology to more than just regulatory policies and confirm that levels of institutional activity vary across this range of public policies. I also expand on Gormley’s contribution by differentiating the distinct impacts that policy type has on the policy activities of Congress and the presidency, and propose that institutional activity differs according to the dynamics of a policy’s salience.

The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy

The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy. By Richardson Dilworth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 280p. $49.95.In his book, Richardson Dilworth takes the familiar argument that cities use development policy to compete for residents in our fragmented metropolitan areas and flips it on its head. In Dilworth's account, development policy is an important causal factor in the creation of the fragmented metropolitan areas in which this competition occurs. His detailed historical accounts of how communities in New York and New Jersey in the late 1800s dealt with issues of incorporation, consolidation, and annexation speak to current interest among urban politics scholars in patterns of suburbanization and the politics of regional coordination. By providing interesting accounts of how a good goes from being defined as private to public (e.g., water, gas), this book may also interest public policy scholars more generally.

Dealing with Terrorism: Stick or Carrot?

The proposed anti-terrorist policy has two important advantages over a coercive policy. The whole interaction between terrorists and the government transforms into a positive sum game and the strategy undermines the cohesiveness of the terrorist organisation. Surveying empirical results on the effects of terrorism on the economy and society, Bruno Frey demonstrates the strength of an economic approach to terrorism, which will be of great interest to social and also political scientists, public policy scholars, international relations experts and researchers, and above all, economists. The alternatives to deterrence illustrated in the book are advantageous for the general public and politicians, and the actuality that a positive policy is better than a coercive policy will be of great appeal to educators.

Editor's Notes

Editor's Notes

Rethinking Bureaucrats in the Policy Process: Criminal Justice Agents and the National Crime Agenda

Policy scholars have noted that bureaucrats can play an important role in defining policy alternatives. Few studies, however, examine the extent of their involvement in this process. This study contributes to public policy scholarship by offering a framework for understanding the strength of bureaucratic involvement in the process of defining problems and policy alternatives. Using witness data from congressional hearings on crime between 1947 and 1998, I find that federal, state, and local criminal justice bureaucrats have come to occupy a central role in the process of defining policy alternatives. In addition, I find that the centrality of criminal justice actors comes at the expense of interest groups, community organizations, and citizens/victims. Implications for criminal justice policy and understanding bureaucratic involvement in the policy process are discussed.

The Globalization of American Law

A substantial body of research suggests that the United States has a distinctive legal style characterized by detailed rules, extensive transparency requirements, adversarial procedures for dispute resolution, costly legal contestation involving many lawyers, and frequent judicial intervention in administrative affairs. Recently, scholars of comparative law and public policy have asked whether this American legal style is spreading around the world. Some scholars have argued that legal styles are converging on an American model, while others have argued that distinctive national legal styles will persist. This article addresses this emerging debate. We argue that American legal style is spreading to other jurisdictions. However, we depart from predominant explanations, which attribute convergence to international regulatory competition or emulation. Instead, we argue that economic liberalization and political fragmentation have undermined traditional approaches to regulation and have generated functional pressures and political incentives to shift toward American legal style.The authors thank Kenneth Abbott, Ward Bower, Kent Calder, Robert G. DeLaMater, Tom Ginsburg, Jack Goldsmith, Milton Heumann, Mark D. Hunsaker, Nicolas Jabko, Robert Kagan, Susan Lawrence, Kathleen McNamara, Michael Paris, Mark Ramseyer, Amy Searight, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Tatsushi Terada, David Vogel, Albert Yoon, and participants in presentations at the 2001 International Studies Association Convention, the 2001 American Political Science Association Convention, Northwestern University's Center for International and Comparative Studies, the University of Chicago Law School, and Princeton University's Center of International Studies for their comments on earlier versions of the article. The authors thank Rachael Snyder, Fatima Khan, Hisako Yamamoto, Masako Ishiwata, and Kei Yamaguchi for their research assistance and Akiko Tsuda, Akemi Ideuchi, and Mio Kato for secretarial assistance. Kelemen thanks the Frank Kneller Fund at Rutgers University and the Center of International Studies at Princeton University for financial support. Views expressed herein are those of the authors alone and are not necessarily those of any institutions with which they are affiliated.

The politics of ‘branding’ in policy transfer: the case of DOTS for tuberculosis control

How and why policies are transferred between countries has attracted considerable interest from scholars of public policy over the last decade. This paper, based on a larger study, sets out to explore the processes involved in policy transfer between international and national levels. These processes are illustrated by looking at a particular public health policy—DOTS for the control and treatment of tuberculosis. The paper demonstrates how, after a long period of neglect, resources were mobilised to put tuberculosis back on international and national public policy agendas, and then how the policy was ‘branded’ and marketed as DOTS, and transferred to low and middle income countries. It focuses specifically on international agenda setting and policy formulation, and the role played by international organisations in those processes. It shows that policy communities, and particular individuals within them, may take political rather than technical positions in these processes, which can result in considerable contestation. The paper ends by suggesting that while it is possible to raise the profile of a policy dramatically through branding and marketing, success also depends on external events providing windows of opportunity for action. Second, it warns that simplifying policy approaches to ‘one-size-fits-all’ carries inherent risks, and can be perceived to harm locally appropriate programmes. Third, top-down internationally driven policy changes may lead to apparent policy transfer, but not necessarily to successfully implemented programmes.

Where Is Gender in Agenda Setting?

Abstract Why do some issues surge to the forefront of our attention while others languish in obscurity? Feminist scholars have explored the emergence of issues such as rape, battering, no-fault divorce, pay equity, and other women's issues on the public agenda. Despite a burgeoning body of literature on feminist social movements within history, political science, and sociology over the last twenty-five years, scholars of agenda setting, public policy, and American politics more generally have largely ignored this work. Not surprisingly, this research cannot be simply added in to the dominant agenda setting theoretical paradigm; rather, the findings disrupt conventional understandings. This essay critiques two canonical works, Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies(1995) and Baumgartner and Jones's Agendas and Instability in American Politics(1993), and discusses exemplary feminist research. It argues that if we want to know how norms change we need to broaden our scope beyond political elites...

Governance and Performance: New Perspectives. Edited by Carolyn J. Heinrich and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000. 349p. $65.00 cloth, $23.95 paper. Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research. Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., Carolyn J. Heinrich, and Carolyn J. Hill. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001. 212p. $60.00.

Carolyn Heinrich, Laurence Lynn, and Carolyn Hill are public management and policy scholars who puzzle over the workings of government. Their efforts aim not only to add to our understanding of these workings but also to provide a template for future study. The first volume by Heinrich and Lynn is designed around a set of working papers originally introduced at a conference of government and policy scholars in May 1999 at the University of Arizona, and are oft referred to as “the Arizona papers.” The publication is the result of a research project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to study best practices in government management. The second volume authored by Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill argues for a theoretical framework to guide future research.

In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

Few historians have contributed more to our understanding of the history of women, and women's effect on history, than Alice Kessler-Harris. Author of the classic Out to Work, she is one of the country's leading scholars of gender, the economy, and public policy. In this volume, Kessler-Harris pierces the skin of arguments and legislation to grasp the preconceptions that have shaped the experience of women: a gendered imagination that has defined what men and women alike think of as fair and desirable. In this brilliant account that traces social policy from the New Deal to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs has distorted seemingly neutral social legislation to further limit the freedom and equality of women. Government rules generally sought to protect women from exploitation, even from employment itself; but at the same time, they attached the most important benefits to wage work. To be a real citizen, one must earn-and most policymakers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women were not, and should not be breadwinners. Kessler-Harris traces the impact of this gender bias in the New Deal programs of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and fair labor standards, in Federal income tax policy, and the new discussion of women's rights that emerged after World War II. For generations, she writes, American women lacked not merely the practice, but frequently the idea of individual economic freedom. Only in the 1960s and '70s did old assumptions begin to break down-yet the process is far from complete. Even today, with women closer to full economic citizenship than ever before, Kessler-Harris's insights offer a keen new understanding of the issues that dominate the headlines, from the marriage penalty in the tax code to the glass ceiling in corporate America.

Assessing JPAM after 20 Years

AbstractJPAM aims to be the principal research journal for public policy scholars. A citation analysis of JPAM and competitor journals for the period 1986–1995 shows that JPAM's most frequently cited articles are cited more often than those of other broad policy journals, about as often as those in journals on specific policy areas, except for health policy, and less often than principally methodological journals. JPAM does meet its goal of serving as an outlet primarily for public policy scholars and it covers a wide range of policy topics. A survey of subscribers shows correspondingly broad interests and that members rated the journal among their most valued. However, few articles are frequently cited, very few of the citations appear in major journals, and the range of disciplines represented is narrow. Some suggestions are offered for strengthening the journal. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

National parks and rural development: practice and policy in the United States

Protecting land in parks is often seen as coming at the expense of rural economic development. Yet recent events such as the contentious debate over the development of Canyon Forest Village on the south rim of the Grand Canyon suggest just the opposite: healthy natural systems can be enormously valuable to rural economies. National Parks and Rural Development offers a thorough examination of the interdependent roles of national parks and the economies of rural communities in the United States. Bringing together the thinking and views of economists, historians, sociologists, recreation researchers, and park managers, the book considers how those roles can be most effectively managed, as it offers: - a wide-ranging review of history and important concepts in rural development and parks management - five case studies of rural development near national parks that identify lessons learned, principles applied, mistakes committed, and advances made - personal essays from leaders in the parks management field For each section, the editors offer introductory discussions that provide context and highlight key points. The editors also provide a detailed conclusion, which summarises policy implications and presents specific recommendations for improving rural development and park management policies. Case studies include: Cape Cod National Seashore, Alaskan parks and wilderness areas, Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon, and three parks in the Pacific Northwest (Mt. Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades). National Parks and Rural Development is a unique synthesis and guide to solving conflicts between the needs of human communities and nature near federal lands. It will be an important work for agency personnel, non-governmental organisations, and students and scholars of rural economic development, public policy, environmental economics, and related fields.