State Governors Research Articles

Addressing the Impediments to the Perfection of Land Title in Nigeria: A Comparative Discourse with England

Land is an essential natural resource endowed by nature and deposited all over the world for the survival and well-being of humanity. In Nigeria, land control is vested in each federation state's Governor. The Federal Government controls the ownership and exploitation of mineral deposits irrespective of where the mineral deposits may be located. There is often contention about the rights of individual citizens, families, and communities in land ownership. The question of trespassing has often been a subject of litigation in Nigerian courts for decades with the advent of commerce and trade. The primary objective of this article is to examine land ownership, land allocation, and how the certificate of occupancy and Governor's consent affect land ownership, lease, and purchase of land in Nigeria. This article proffers solutions to issues arising in Nigerians’ right to ownership of land. The methodology adopted in this article is essentially doctrinal, using primary sources such as law reports and statutes. The article also refers to secondary sources such as law textbooks, newspapers, and internet materials. It recommends comprehensive reforms toward easing land acquisition and minimising the incidence of trespass to land in Nigeria.

Preemption in the Intergovernmental Trenches: Explaining Gubernatorial Preemption Style during COVID-19

Abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, governors preempted local governments at unprecedented levels. A rich literature examines state preemption of local governments, but gubernatorial preemption – and the strategies governors use to do so – remain understudied. This paper examines what institutional and political factors influenced governors’ preemption style during the pandemic by analyzing a dataset of over 1,200 COVID-19 executive orders, classified by their style of preemption: ceiling, floor, or vacuum. Governors in states with high local autonomy rely on ceiling and floor preemptions. Republican governors are likelier to issue ceiling preemptions that bind local governments’ hands. Governors in states with ideologically dissimilar local governments tend to issue vacuum preemptions. When non-preempting previsions are dropped from the analysis, local autonomy does not significantly affect issuing one type of preemption over another. On the other hand, Republican governors are more likely to issue both ceiling and floor preemptions over vacuum preemptions. Governors in states with high ideological asymmetry are less likely to issue ceiling and floor preemptions over vacuum preemptions. These findings provide insight into gubernatorial behavior, interactions between state and local governments, and how theories of federalism can teach us more about how governments respond to crises.

Centering and uplifting youth voice in planning for a more resilient climate future in rural Colorado: a case study of a student resilience team asking for change

Rural communities are increasingly facing challenges from climate-related natural hazards such as drought, wildfire, and flood. These cascading hazards threaten social, emotional, physical, and economic well-being, and pose unique challenges to rural areas which may already struggle to find enough resources. Yet, rural areas are rich in social capital, creativity, and resilience, and future leaders are learning how to build agency and increase their community’s resilience in school settings. Students in Estes Park, Colorado, have experienced major climate-fueled hazards in their lifetimes, surviving the floods in 2013 and the East Troublesome and Cameron Peak wildfires in 2020. At Estes Park Middle School, the Environmental Resilience Team (ERT) is an afterschool group of students who are actively participating in promoting public awareness, mitigation, and policy-making to increase resilience to natural hazards. Supported by the Hazard, Education, Awareness, and Resilience Task Force (HEART Force) Program, a comprehensive curriculum that immerses students in the study of their community’s resilience to floods and fires, in conjunction with the Earth Force Environmental Civic Action resources, students and educators gained the tools needed to spearhead community discussions on resilience, all while striving to mitigate and minimize future risks. In this paper, we tell the story of the Environmental Resilience Team’s campaign to pass statewide legislation to implement Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Building Codes in high-risk areas. Students visited the Colorado State Capitol, met with their State Senator and Governor to lobby for the passage of the bill. This initiative builds upon years of action projects, including service projects to mitigate fire risk in vulnerable populations within the mountain town of Estes Park and build community education and awareness through the distribution of “go-bags” to community members. By including youth voice in public decision-making and planning for climate resilience, community leaders and policymakers can develop more holistic plans that include multigenerational input. This research is part of a broader study across implementations of HEART Force in several classrooms that showed that the HEART Force program helped students develop a sense of agency and grow in their understanding of community resilience.

ANALYSIS OF THE INSTITUTIONAL CONDITIONS OF ELECTIONS IN RUSSIA

The article examines the evolution of the institutional framework of the electoral process in Russia since the early 1990s. The main changes in the system of elections of deputies of the State Duma, governors and municipal authorities, as well as in the field of party building, are analyzed. The article concludes that in recent years there has been a tendency in Russia to liberalize electoral legislation and increase the role of political parties in the electoral process.

Using Twitter to fight the COVID-19 pandemic: the case of United States governors

ABSTRACT This study explores how United States governors used Twitter in non-political contexts during the pandemic. We analysed the content and volume of governors’ tweets during the pandemic using semantic network analysis and applied negative binomial regression analysis to identify the variables influencing their Twitter use. No content differences were found among the governors during the pandemic, regardless of party affiliations. Factors such as election wins and competition levels were significantly correlated with tweet volume. Governors prioritize political motives such as reelection over party affiliation on Twitter, using it strategically for political goals and increasing engagement during times of heightened public attention, such as COVID-19.

The effects of SNAP emergency allotments on state-level SNAP benefits and enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, all US states provided emergency allotments (EA) to enrollees of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to alleviate rising food insecurity. However, 18 states opted out of the SNAP-EA program before its official expiration in February 2023. Using a staggered difference-in-differences model to account for state-level variation in the timing of the SNAP-EA opt-out decisions, we analyzed SNAP and SNAP-EA data from the US Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service to quantify the impact of state opt-out decisions on SNAP benefit size and enrollment. We found that the average SNAP monthly benefit among 18 SNAP opt-out states was reduced by $183 (95% confidence interval [CI]: -$214, -$152) per beneficiary. The percentage of the state population enrolled in the SNAP program among the opt-out states modestly decreased by 0.35 (95% CI: -0.61, -0.10) percentage points. Additionally, we employed logistic regression models to associate state opt-out decisions with state-level characteristics. We found that the state governor's political party being Republican was the only significant predictor for the state's opt-out decisions. Our findings help explain why opting out of SNAP-EA has been associated with higher food insufficiency and shed light on the impact of political decisions to opt out of SNAP-EA on the lives of millions of Americans.

The N400 effect captures nuances in implicit political preferences

We conducted a study in San Antonio, Texas, in the weeks preceding the 2022 state Governor election to determine if implicit or explicit measures of political preference could predict voter behavior. We adapted an established event-related potential (ERP) paradigm showing political statements to participants one word at the time where the last word made the statement pro-Republican or pro-Democratic. Our sample of college students included decided and undecided voters, and was reflective of the demographic make-up of south-central Texas. Our implicit measures were an established authoritarianism scale and the N400 effect to the sentence-final word. The N400 is an ERP to any stimulus that engages semantic memory and has been shown to measure implicit disagreement with political statements. Explicit measures of political preference and authoritarianism were predictive of vote choice. The expected N400 effect was found for Democratic voters, with larger amplitude to pro-Republican than pro-Democratic statements. Surprisingly, decided Republican voters showed no difference in N400 responses to pro-Republican and pro-Democratic statements and there was no group difference in the N400 effect. In turn, the N400 was not predictive of voter behavior. We argue that the N400 effect reflected individual political preferences, but that ultimately voter behavior aligned with partisan identity.

The Lagos State COVID-19 Think-tank, a Potential Framework for Decision-making in a Pandemic Era.

Lagos state remains the epicenter of COVID-19 infection in Nigeria. To facilitate the emergency preparedness and response to COVID-19, the State Governor and Incident Commander constituted a Think Tank comprising 13 experts from various disciplines committed to the health of the public. The Think Tank assisted the government with decision-making strategies and supported the emergency operation centre (EOC) for the COVID-19 response. Their main achievements were developing frameworks for decision-making and strategies for phased easing of the State-wide lockdown. The challenges encountered were that it was often viewed as a parallel structure to the EOC and separated from the traditional civil service structure; causing some reluctance to implement ideas generated by the Think Tank. Nevertheless, the Think Tank played an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic; the lessons learned might help other states and resource-limited countries wishing to adopt this approach to emergency response.

Strategies to Improve Nutrition Commitments of State Governors: Insights From the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) Secretariat

Strategies to Improve Nutrition Commitments of State Governors: Insights From the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) Secretariat

Simplified model relating blank and null votes to voter turnout from Brazilian state elections results

Studies investigating opinion dynamics in elections have mainly focused on votes cast for candidates. However, voter opinions can also be expressed through blank and null votes when none of the candidates represents them. Therefore, our study proposed to model blank and null votes in a scenario of only two candidates using data from nine election years for Brazilian state governors that took place in a second round, making a total of 90 elections. We analyzed the relationship between the turnout and votes for each candidate, as well as blank and null votes, representing the three partitions of the votes in a second-round election. We found the behavior scaling laws for all elections and the three partition votes, totaling 270 fits. Combining this result with the probability conservation of the votes over the voter turnout, we developed a model for the blank and null votes depending on a single parameter. The scaling law behavior of blank and null votes allowed us to observe that voters in the larger populations are more difficult to win over.

Lighthouse in the Mist

Previous research has explored the interactions between public leaders and citizens through social media channels. However, there is a gap in our understanding regarding the communication of limited information to the public during times of crisis. This study focuses on the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis scenario and investigates how state governors utilized Twitter to communicate with the public, as well as the subsequent impact on citizens' responses. Employing computational social science techniques, this research analyzes a dataset comprising 47,831 tweets posted by U.S. state governors during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, spanning from March to August 2020. The results affirm the crucial role of social media in crisis communication and offer insights into effective social media strategies for public communication.

Maintaining Portland’s “progressive dystopia”: housing, carcerality, and the real estate state

ABSTRACT In 2020, a coalition formed between a local real estate developer, a nonprofit, and a senator soon to run for state governor, with the goal of turning a never-used county jail in Portland, Oregon, into a homeless shelter. Reading with abolitionist anthropologist Savannah Shange’s concepts of “progressive dystopia” and “carceral progressivism,” this paper is a case study of Wapato Jail’s redevelopment into the Bybee Lakes Hope Center, serving as an in-depth look at how Portland’s localized real estate state utilizes the logics of “carceral progressivism” to maintain the city as a dystopia that works for them [Shange, S. (2019). Progressive dystopia: Abolition, anti-blackness, & schooling in San Francisco. Duke University Press]. Utilizing data from archival materials, news media, and twenty interviews, I argue that the real estate state, composed of local developers with long-standing stakes in the city, form alliances in an attempt to shift the provision of services away from a Housing First approach and to maintain the city in a state of “just crisis enough” to keep growing profits and property values. Cutting across abolitionist and carceral geographies, I present an engagement with the maintenance and growth of carcerality within the real estate state, particularly as elites get involved with homeless services.

Republican governor, unified government, and the U.S. states’ death penalty executions

ABSTRACT Currently, 24 states in the U.S. still permit the death penalty, along with three states temporarily suspending it. Nevertheless, there exists substantial variation in the extent to which each state actually carries out the executions. While studies have explored factors influencing this variation, little attention has been paid to the political role of state governors’ and legislatures’ support in the different tendencies toward death penalty executions across states. To fill this gap, we empirically tested how governors’ party affiliation and unified political support from the legislature affect death penalty executions in the U.S. We demonstrated that states with a Republican governor are more likely to execute the death penalty. Additionally, we found that this tendency is significantly stronger when both chambers of the state legislature are dominated by Republicans (i.e. Republican-unified government), which is consistent with the theoretical expectation of unified government discourse in the policy making and implementation contexts.

Manufactured State Immigration Emergencies as State Vigilantism

President Trump shattered norms when he declared a national emergency at the U.S.–Mexico border to build a border wall. State governors have now followed that lead in taking up what Justice Jackson, dissenting in Korematsu v. United States (1944), called the “loaded weapon” of emergency—doing so, like Trump, in the context of the border. Governors of Texas, Arizona, and Florida have all issued state declarations of emergency based on (1) migration, and (2) the Biden administration’s purported failure to engage in immigration enforcement. These state emergency declarations have not been studied or even identified in legal literature as a state mirror to Trump’s federal declaration, even though they are as norms-shattering as the Trump declaration was both facially and in implementation. In justifying the emergency declarations, the governors have used xenophobia and the logic of self-help from international law. In other words, this is state vigilantism: claiming that because the federal government is not using its power to protect states’ residents, the states are unilaterally exercising it themselves under state emergency authority. This state vigilantism is sweeping, extraordinary, and contrary to the Supremacy Clause—particularly in Texas, which has implemented a parallel system of state immigration enforcement and has deployed National Guard soldiers along the border with instructions to force migrants into Mexico. It is also continuous with the erosion of norms begun with Trump’s border wall “emergency.” In addition to the reforms that scholars suggested following Trump’s declaration, to combat state vigilantism, I propose that the federal government not only focus on Supremacy Clause litigation but also exercise its civil rights enforcement authority and that state legislatures and judges limit the scope of state emergency declarations, to exclude policy disagreements with the federal government.

Human Security Situation and State Police Establishment Contention in Nigeria

This study examined human security situation and state police establishment contention in Nigeria. This theoretical paper draws its arguments primarily from secondary sources of data, such as journal publications and textbooks. The study concluded that the capacity of the Police is further reduced due to the deployment of a good number of policemen to undertake “guard duties” and private security services for the rich and affluent in the society. Perhaps, the greatest impediment to police effectiveness in Nigeria remains corruption. The limited funds meant for security and other developmental purposes are diverted by those responsible for their utilization. This creates an unending vicious cycle of poverty, deprivation, greed, exploitation, unemployment and general underdevelopment that culminates in weakening the capacity of government to provide social services, fund security ultimately undermining national security. This study recommended a reform which would pave way for state police formations and give power to state governors over the police contingents in their states.

Modelling Factors that Predict Differences in Childhood Mortality in Lagos Communities Using Prognostic Logistic and Poisson Regression Models

Lagos State is a city with one of the largest concentration of people in the world with heterogenous behaviour and cultural beliefs. There are different prognostic models in the medical sciences, yet their real life application, especially to childhood mortality is limited. There are variations in childhood mortality rate across different communities in Lagos State. Childhood mortality is a subject of interest to World Health Organization (WHO) and one of the major Millennium Development Goals. In 2014, the Special Adviser to the Lagos State Governor on Public Health, Dr. Yewande Adeshina said that under-5 and infant mortality rates in Lagos state have reduced due to various health interventions being implemented in the State. However, the truth of the matter is that childhood mortality is still high and this is an indication that we still have lots of work to do in this regard. In this paper, prognostic models were used in modelling factors that predict the differences in childhood mortality in Lagos communities. Six models, two each from logistic regression, linear regression and Poisson regression models were used. Primary data were collected from mothers that fall in the age bracket (15-49), who reside in any of the 5 divisions of Lagos State, namely Ikorodu, Badagry, Lagos Mainland/Ikeja, Lagos Island and Epe. Five variables were identified as covariates. The prognostic multi-variable models were employed. The binary logistic regression model with 5 covariates was selected as the best model for the binary response variable, while the Poisson regression model with 4 covariates was selected as the best model for the count response variable. At the end of the research, Ikorodu, Badagry and Epe communities have higher than expected childhood mortality rates. Also, we estimated childhood mortality rate in Lagos State and measured the variations in childhood mortality across Lagos communities. The factors that predict these variations were detected and control measures were recommended to reduce the difference in childhood mortality rate in Lagos State.

Party affiliation, economic interests and U.S. governors’ renewable energy policies

This paper explores the impact of U.S. state governors’ party affiliation and economic interests on renewable energy outcomes. Using data on installed renewable capacity, we find that, on average, Democratic governors had a positive impact on the state-level adoption of renewable energy. However, the effect is highly heterogeneous. There are no differences in renewable energy outcomes between Democratic and Republican governors in states where the energy-intensive manufacturing industries are economically important or in states where the natural renewable endowment is scarce. Consistent with a political economy approach, we argue that in the area of renewable and climate policy, governors’ policy preferences are overridden by holding office motivations and economic interests.

Information gap in INEC communications and its influence on vote buying outcome in 2023 gubernatorial election in Delta State, Nigeria

The hallmark of democracy is regular elections. The education of voters before elections must be effective and efficient. This study on the knowledge gap in elections identifies potential ineffective voter education strategies that result in the success of vote-buying, a hotly debated and viral topic in today's conversation on the conduct of elections in Nigeria. The research method employed for the study was survey. Copies of the questionnaire were utilized to collect information, which was then analyzed using basic descriptive statistical techniques. The study, which is based on theories of the State and Clientelism, aims to ascertain the degree to which INEC, NGOs, and other Government agencies educated the electorates before the 2023 elections as well as the level, if any, of vote-buying in the Delta state governorship elections. The results demonstrate that there is a lack of effective and efficient voters' education, and this has a detrimental influence on citizens' trust and confidence in Nigeria's electoral system, resulting in a variety of electoral manipulations. Before elections, the report suggested voter education to inform the people.

The Question of Diplomatic Immunity and Privileges in International Law: The D.S.P Alamieyeseigh Experience

The complex nature of the international system prompted states to adopt treaties, laws and conventions to facilitates peaceful international relations and mutual co-existence hence, this paper examined the relevance of these treaties, laws, rules and conventions especially as it relates to diplomatic immunity and who is qualified to enjoy such diplomatic immunity in contemporary international law. The study observed that elected state governors in Nigeria are entitled to diplomatic immunity as reflected in section 308 of the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria 1999 as amended. Further findings also revealed that the arrest, detention and trial of D.S.P. Alamieyeseigha in London by the British government violated the provisions of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons including diplomatic agents. Data for the study were drawn from secondary sources while analysis was done descriptively through the qualitative method. In other to strengthen international law and regulate the actions of states and leaders at the global level, state legislatures, national parliaments and agencies of government including the judiciary should be empowered to moderate and check the actions of state governors, president's and other category of political leaders. This will ensure that personal actions and acts are not misrepresented as acts of state/government at all levels.

Electoral Accountability for Rising Tuition in the US: Evidence from a Survey Experiment and Observational Data

ABSTRACT Tuition levels in the US have been rising at an above-the-inflation pace, leading to spiraling student debt levels and negative effects on students’ well-being. While student outcomes of rising tuition are well known, the political reasons behind the decisions of policy makers to contain tuition increases or not remain poorly understood. In this article, we focus on electoral accountability that policy makers face for rising tuition by examining voters’ reactions. Using a survey experiment with a sample of US adults (N = 1040), we show that clarity of responsibility is an important factor affecting reactions to rising tuition levels. When voters are informed about the role of the government in tuition setting, they are more likely to vote out policy makers responsible for cuts in funding. We show a similar relationship in observational data using a nationally representative survey from Cooperative Congressional Election Study. State governors’ approval is lower in states where tuition levels increased recently, and the relationship is moderated by the visibility of government in tuition-setting. By demonstrating that policy makers face repercussions for rising tuition but are able to avoid blame in certain conditions, we contribute to scholarly understanding of preferences of policy makers in higher education.