The transmission of ideas, information, and resources forms the core of many issues studied in political science, including collective action, cooperation, and development. While these processes ...imply dynamic connections among political actors, researchers often cannot observe such interdependence. One example is public policy diffusion, which has long been a focus of multiple subfields. In the American state politics context, diffusion is commonly conceptualized as a dyadic process whereby states adopt policies (in part) because other states have adopted them. This implies a policy diffusion network connecting the states. Using a dataset of 187 policies, we introduce and apply an algorithm that infers this network from persistent diffusion patterns. The results contribute to knowledge on state policy diffusion in several respects. Additionally, in introducing network inference to political science, we provide scholars across the discipline with a general framework for empirically recovering the latent and dynamic interdependence among political actors.
Frederick J. Boehmke's book makes explicit the many consequences-intended and unintended-of having direct legislation possible in a state. Many studies of the initiative process argue that it is a ...flawed process that rewards wealthy interests. While evidence to support this conclusion is often drawn from a number of high-profile, high-expenditure initiative campaigns, ballot campaigns are merely one consequence of the initiative process. The ability to propose legislation directly to the people fundamentally changes the process through which citizens are represented by organized interest groups, benefiting typically underrepresented interests. To demonstrate this, the author models the incentives that the initiative process creates for interests to organize and for how they communicate their preferences to policy makers. Interests that represent a broader range of the public are found to gain the most from the option to propose initiatives, implying that the set of organized interests in initiative states should reflect this advantage. Ironically, an effect of direct legislation is to potentially increase the effectiveness of special interest lobbying in state legislatures-in a sense, the opposite of the direct control that gives direct legislation its theoretical appeal. Yet, the clear effect is one of empowering voices that traditionally had very little effect in the legislative process. If greater representation is the goal of direct legislation, it is a clear success, even though that success does not really come in the act of ballot initiatives itself.
State Policy Innovativeness Revisited Boehmke, Frederick J.; Skinner, Paul
State politics & policy quarterly,
09/2012, Letnik:
12, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
How do the American states vary in their propensity for innovativeness, or their willingness to adopt new policies sooner or later relative to other states? Most studies today use event history ...analysis (EHA) to focus almost exclusively on one policy area at a time at the expense of a broader understanding of innovativeness as a characteristic of states. To return to the concept of innovativeness more broadly, our study revisits and updates the original approach taken by Walker by updating his average innovation scores with new data covering more than 180 different policies. We use these data to construct a new, dynamic measure of innovativeness that addresses biases and shortcomings in the original measure and we provide measures of uncertainty for both. These new scores build on the logic of EHA to address issues such as right-censoring and to facilitate measuring changes in innovativeness over time. We then compare the two measures of innovativeness and evaluate differences across states, spatial patterns, and changes in innovativeness over time.
Despite its rich tradition, there are key limitations to researchers' ability to make generalizable inferences about state policy innovation and diffusion. This paper introduces new data and methods ...to move from empirical analyses of single policies to the analysis of comprehensive populations of policies and rigorously inferred diffusion networks. We have gathered policy adoption data appropriate for estimating policy innovativeness and tracing diffusion ties in a targeted manner (e.g., by policy domain, time period, or policy type) and extended the development of methods necessary to accurately and efficiently infer those ties. Our state policy innovation and diffusion (SPID) database includes 728 different policies coded by topic area. We provide an overview of this new dataset and illustrate two key uses: (i) static and dynamic innovativeness measures and (ii) latent diffusion networks that capture common pathways of diffusion between states across policies. The scope of the data allows us to compare patterns in both across policy topic areas. We conclude that these new resources will enable researchers to empirically investigate classes of questions that were difficult or impossible to study previously, but whose roots go back to the origins of the political science policy innovation and diffusion literature.
虽然对州政策创新与扩散的研究已取得丰硕成果，但研究者在将其推广到一般情形时仍然受到许多关键限制。本文介绍了新的数据和方法，把对单一政策的实证分析推广为对政策群的综合分析，并严格推算出了这些政策的扩散网络。我们收集了一些有关于政策采纳的数据，这些数据适合用于估算政策的创新性并追踪扩散关系的特定方式（如通过政策领域、时间段或政策类型）；同时，我们也进一步发展出了新的方法以更加准确有效地推断这些网络关系。我们的州政策创新和扩散数据库（SPID）包括了按议题编码的728个不同政策。我们概述了这个新的数据集，并说明了其两个主要用途：（i）用于提供静态和动态的创新性度量；（ii）用于推论潜在的政策扩散网络，这些政策网络包括了政策在各州之间扩散的共同路径。这个数据集使我们得以比较不同政策议题的发展模式。对于某些源于政治学领域政策创新与扩散文献中的问题，我们过往难以或者不可能对其进行研究，然而我们在本文中的结论是，我们所提出的这些新成果可以使研究人员对这些问题进行实证上的探索。
I demonstrate a source of bias in the common implementation of the dyadic event history model as applied to policy diffusion. This bias tends to severely overstate the extent to which policy changes ...depend on explicit emulation of other states rather than on a state's internal characteristics. This happens because the standard implementation conflates policy emulation and policy adoption: since early adopters are policy leaders, later adopters will appear to emulate them, even if they are acting independently. I demonstrate this ambiguity analytically and through Monte Carlo simulation. I then propose a simple modification of the dyadic emulation model that conditions on the opportunity to emulate and show that it produces much more accurate findings. An examination of state pain management policy illustrates the inferential differences that arise from the appropriately modified dyadic event history model.
Subverting Administrative Oversight Boehmke, Frederick J.
State politics & policy quarterly,
12/2018, Letnik:
18, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
I study the consequences of interest group campaign contributions for administrative oversight. Unlike the few previous studies in this area, however, I study the influence in state bureaucracies and ...at the level of individual groups. Specifically, I test whether campaign contributions to state elected officials influence the outcomes of annual inspections of skilled nursing facilities in 16 states, leveraging the context of state politics in two important ways. First, I consider the differing effects of contributions to the legislative and executive branches. Second, I argue that legislative capacity for oversight influences the efficacy of contributions Regression analysis of inspection results with controls for facility characteristics provides evidence that contributing facilities have better overall inspection results, with a large reduction in citations for severe problems. Furthermore, contributions to legislators reduce overall problems, particularly in less professionalized legislatures, while those to the governor reduce severe ones.
Protest events affect public opinion on the issue of interest. However, the extent to which an individual’s proximity to protests impacts public opinion is less examined. Does a protest event ...occurring nearby, i.e., within an individual’s neighborhood, impact their opinion? Do protests that happen further away, perhaps in the next county, have the same impact on public opinion? This study analyzes the impact of exposure to protests by focusing on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020 using public opinion data from Iowa merged with protest locations in Iowa. Specifically, we examine public support for BLM and for defunding the police. We evaluate the role of distance through a discrete mileage cut-off and a distance decay function. Our analysis shows that people living closer to protests show greater support for the BLM movement in general and, to a less extent, for defunding the police. The results suggest that protests may affect public opinion, but only within a very narrow range of a few miles.
Frederick J. Boehmke’s book makes explicit the many consequences—intended and unintended—of having direct legislation possible in a state. Many studies of the initiative process argue that it is a ...flawed process that rewards wealthy interests. While evidence to support this conclusion is often drawn from a number of high-profile, high-expenditure initiative campaigns, ballot campaigns are merely one consequence of the initiative process. The ability to propose legislation directly to the people fundamentally changes the process through which citizens are represented by organized interest groups, benefiting typically underrepresented interests. To demonstrate this, the author models the incentives that the initiative process creates for interests to organize and for how they communicate their preferences to policy makers. Interests that represent a broader range of the public are found to gain the most from the option to propose initiatives, implying that the set of organized interests in initiative states should reflect this advantage. Ironically, an effect of direct legislation is to potentially increase the effectiveness of special interest lobbying in state legislatures—in a sense, the opposite of the direct control that gives direct legislation its theoretical appeal. Yet, the clear effect is one of empowering voices that traditionally had very little effect in the legislative process. If greater representation is the goal of direct legislation, it is a clear success, even though that success does not really come in the act of ballot initiatives itself.
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