Suchergebnisse

AbstractIndividuals' risk perceptions shape their attitudes and behaviors, and to the extent that governments respond to public demands, they also influence public policy priorities. Conversely, risk misperceptions—that is, when risk perceptions do not align with realities—may lead to suboptimal behaviors and inefficient public policy. This study investigates the phenomena of environmental risk misperceptions. Specifically, with an original survey that enables a direct comparison of perceived and actual environmental risks at the local level, it examines the relationships between personal attributes and risk misperceptions. The findings show that individuals exhibit optimism bias in assessing local environmental risk. On average, people rank their communities as experiencing less risk from toxic air pollution than objective measures suggest. Moreover, Whites, males, conservatives, and older people tend to have larger optimism bias and have lower chances of possessing correct risk perceptions than their counterparts, respectively, while respondents who are married, poor, who go to church regularly, and have strong pro‐environmental orientation, tend to have smaller optimism bias and have higher chances of possessing correct risk perceptions than their respective counterparts. The systematic misperception of local environmental risk underscores the importance of information provision and risk communication, and the sociopolitical correlates of misperception suggest that targeted and more nuanced strategies are required to correct misperceptions.

Contemporary American politics features intense political polarization and closely contested battles over the direction of public policy. Conservatives and liberals alike have used the many venues in the American federal system to try to gain an advantage. In this article, we suggest that a key feature of contemporary American federalism is the institutional advantage that conservatives have achieved due to recent shifts in the ideological conservatism of the federal judiciary and growing Republican dominance in state legislatures. We assess the consequences of these developments, focusing on efforts to weaken federal administrative agencies' authority and discretion, challenge individual voting rights and institutional control over elections, expand conservative approaches to personal liberties in areas such as abortion, religious practice, and gun rights, and to preempt local policy authority. These developments have the effect of consolidating authority in the hands of Republican-controlled state governments and in some cases bringing about national-level policy changes via state initiatives, and with important implications for American society, politics, and federalism.

In this introductory article for the 2020–2021 Annual Review of American Federalism, we review notable developments in U.S. politics and policy during the last year, with an emphasis on their intersections with and consequences for federalism. We focus in particular on the 2020 elections and the COVID pandemic, along with policy developments in the areas of criminal justice and police reform, health care, environment, immigration, and equality and religious liberty. The events of the past year, especially those related to the pandemic and the fallout of the presidential election, led to a resurgence of public interest in federalism and a focus on the importance of government decision-making of state and local governments. Events during the last year have not only reinforced partisan polarization but have also deepened the existing divide of Americans along partisan lines and perhaps in new ways. Partisan differences have increasingly become cultural differences, so that political and policy differences have saturated American culture in notable ways.

AbstractThe state of American federalism is characterized by polarization and punitiveness. As in previous years, political polarization continues to shape intergovernmental relations. But we also identify punitiveness as an increasingly prevalent aspect of vertical power sharing. Punitive federalism describes the national government's use of threats and punishment to suppress state and local actions that run contrary to its policy preferences. In this Annual Review of American Federalism overview article, we introduce the concept of punitive federalism and discuss its application to contemporary public policy. We also highlight federalism implications concerning the COVID-19 pandemic; discuss recent policy developments concerning the environment, gender identity, health care, immigration, reproductive choice, and sexual orientation; and review recent Supreme Court decisions that impact intergovernmental relations.

Several themes characterize the state of American federalism. Increasing political polarization shapes preferences with respect to locating the vertical balance of power. To implement these preferences, the federal government is primarily relying on regulatory rollback and unilateral action. With Congress largely unable or unwilling to check the executive branch, states have pushed back on use of the tools of the administrative presidency through litigation. We address these themes through an analysis of voting and elections along with important policy developments from the previous year in the areas of immigration, health care, environmental policy, education, gun control, and criminal justice. We also review important federalism developments from the Supreme Court's 2017 term.

Does environmental regulation vary over poor and minority communities? An uneven governmental response may follow from regulators' varying incentives to negotiate enforcement challenges. We argue that regulators confront two in particular. Regulators can pursue political enforcement, responding to mobilized interests, regardless of environmental risk, or they can pursue instrumental enforcement, responding to at‐risk communities, regardless of political mobilization. To examine these competing strategies, we use an original dataset from the EPA's Risk‐Screening Environmental Indicators model to develop a geographic "riskscape" combined with census tract community data and facility‐level enforcement data. We find that state regulatory agencies pursue a mixture of political and instrumental enforcement, but that these tactics are applied unevenly across traditional environmental justice communities. Specifically, state agencies devote more attention to facilities in communities with relatively higher risk, but less attention in the area of punishment for violations for facilities located in Hispanic communities. Importantly, this lack of attention to Hispanic communities is not mediated by the relative level of risks that they face, but it is to a significant extent in communities in which environmental justice advocacy organizations operate.

Case selection is ubiquitous in public management research. Rarely do scholars have access to entire populations of interest. Yet, the manner by which scholars select samples to conduct their analyses can have profound consequences on their ability both to draw valid causal inferences and to estimate accurate relationships. In this article, we review the basic threats to inference that are likely to emerge in the presence of non-random case selection, with specific attention to their manifestation in empirical public management research. The article first reviews the threats to causal inference presented by case selection, focusing on their implications for internal and external validity. We then summarize a standard set of solutions to address potential problems for empirical models caused by non-random case selection. As part of this discussion, we review recent articles published in this journal to illustrate the prevalence of selection issues in contemporary public management studies, and then illustrate several techniques that have been developed to overcome specific problems to show their utility for public management research. Adapted from the source document.

Political competition lies at the core of representative democracy. Yet, uncompetitive elections and uncontested races are widespread in the United States, particularly at the state level. In this article, we analyze the consequences of uncontested elections on lawmaking activity. Our primary hypothesis is that legislators who run unopposed are less active lawmakers than those who were selected through competitive elections. Studying roll‐call vote participation and bill introduction and enactment for most of the U.S. states for 1999–2000, we find that state legislators elected in unopposed elections perform more poorly compared to their colleagues elected in competitive contests.

While few would disagree that elections serve a fundamental role in democracy, there is considerable debate regarding the rules by which elections should be conducted. State and local officials responsible for carrying out elections face difficult challenges, and often must work to achieve what many view are two competing aims: increasing voter turnout and minimizing voter fraud.

For nearly two decades, environmental justice advocates have charged that low-income and minority groups suffer a disproportionate burden from environmental risks associated with exposure to air, water, and land pollution as well as proximity to hazardous waste and other pollution generating facilities. Claims of these inequities have been amplified by a growing social movement that began with widely publicized protests in Warren County, North Carolina, where a predominantly black community mobilized in large numbers to fight the siting of a PCB landfill. Since that time, grassroots organizations have sustained and brought national attention to the environmental justice movement, which is often characterized as a new kind of social campaign embodied by the convergence of civil rights and environmental activism. Government at all levels have taken notice of environmental justice concerns, and responded with a variety of initiatives to these inequities (real and perceived). This policy report briefly summarizes new research that examines an understudied dimension of the environmental justice argument: that government behavior contributes to the alleged inequities. ; Includes bibliographical references