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Policy diffusion literature generally studies the adoption of similar policies across jurisdictions, but often overlooks how opposing policies or legal constraints may influence the enactment of rigid state constitutional amendments. The current study models the spread of state constitutional amendments designed to prevent future policy change. Using conditional event history analysis on all states from 1999 to 2011 the empirical models analyze the spread of same‐sex marriage prohibitive amendments across the United States. Findings suggest that the nearby adoption of opposing policies encourage state legislatures to introduce prohibitive amendments. The regional diffusion effect suggests that policymakers "protect" their jurisdiction from nearby diffusion forces or seek electoral gains by symbolic protection by committing an already existing policy into the rigid state constitutional framework. Regional policy diffusion may, therefore, be explained by a countermovement mechanism unique to the state constitutional amendment process. This protective strategy among state legislatures and citizens may explain why many policy areas are frequently codified in state constitutions.

Public management literature has previously examined privatization in which government contracts with private firms or other organizations to provide goods or services to the public. However, privatization of organizational structure through the creation of special purpose organizations remains relatively underexplored. This study examines the policy consequences of privatizing state lottery organizations by comparing the revenue returned to state governments from lotteries managed by independent state agencies to lotteries managed by privatized special purpose organizations. Using data on the organizational structure and revenue returns of the state lottery administrations in the United States from 1985-2008, fixed effects analyses demonstrate that independent state lottery agencies are more effective than privatized special purpose administrations. The revenue costs of lottery administrative privatization are robust to multiple measurements and specifications, and suggest that choosing a privatized organizational structure can cost states tens of millions of dollars in lost lottery revenue annually. Special purpose lottery administrations maximize returns to state governments in average-sized states with low African American populations. State-agency lottery administrations maximize returns to state governments in small- or large-sized states with high per capita income and high population density. Implications of state special purpose administrations and future research opportunities are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented changes in global work dynamics including mandating telework for most of the U.S. federal workforce to protect employees from health and safety hazards of the communicable virus. Although not ubiquitous, many federal employees had experience with these arrangements because they voluntarily chose telework prior to the pandemic through provisions in the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010. Using the 2020 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), which focuses on telework perceptions and experiences, this study explores the effect of the involuntary telework mandate on employees' attitudes toward telework after several months through a prospect theory framework. Findings demonstrate that several factors including previous telework experience and experiential learning may influence employees' preference for and voluntary selection into telework moving forward. These dynamics suggest an endowment effect for telework among employees who gained telework experience before and during the pandemic. In addition, employees may choose telework as an alternative work arrangement when they are not satisfied with their organizations or jobs but want to maintain employment. These findings suggest that agencies should continue to offer robust telework opportunities to satisfy and retain employees.

AbstractIn the 1970s, many viewed domestic violence as a private concern. Since then, every state has adopted a domestic violence coalition to address intimate partner violence (IPV) through government intervention. States vary, however, in the structure of the coalitions, participation in federal programs, and the comprehensiveness of IPV services offered. Using the theoretical lenses of policy diffusion and policy drift, this study assesses the development of IPV coalitions from 1976 to 2018, paying particular attention to institutional structures, intergovernmental resources, and strategic service priorities. We find evidence of policy drift and multidirectional policy diffusion in state IPV institutional structures, service delivery, federal program participation, and strategic priorities of these activities. Federal grant programs increase the likelihood of program emulation among states and may encourage innovation within existing institutional and policy structures for the development of comprehensive services and a preventive approach to IPV that best serve vulnerable groups.

Many governments across the globe enacted mandatory stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the many consequences of these governmental protection orders is to confine potential perpetrators and victims of gender-based violence in close proximity thereby reducing the opportunity for survivors to report abuse and get assistance. In this essay, we describe the multilevel governmental response in Argentina to address gender-based violence during the first month of mandatory stay-at-home order amid the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. National and provincial governments enacted innovative and coordinated responses to gender-based violence that targeted systemic causes of gender-based violence, ensured continuity of existing services, and generated new communication strategies to allow nonverbal reporting during the pandemic. The Argentinean example suggests that governmental organizations should consider the gendered effects of government responses to emergencies and respond through a multilevel and cross-sectoral response to protect groups disproportionately affected by the crisis and resulting policy.

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic dramatically changed employment across sectors in 2020. This Viewpoint essay examines public sector labor relations during the pandemic and describes the impact bargaining process that is used to protect public employees. The authors draw on their own experience with impact bargaining negotiations and the public labor relations, conflict management, and civil service reform literatures to develop recommendations for public union labor leaders during times of crisis. They suggest that public unions have an important role in crisis management but must act strategically to develop good working relationships with leadership and successfully negotiate employee protections in uncertain times.

AbstractSince the New Public Management movement began, public and nonprofit organizations have been adopting and adapting businesslike practices, including branding and marketing. There remains a knowledge gap in understanding why organizational actors choose to allocate resources to adopt branding and marketing policies. This article explores organizational branding initiatives within the context of research extensive (N = 109) higher education institutions in the United States from 2006 to 2013. Seventy‐two universities (66 percent) have introduced branding initiatives since 2006. Findings suggest that the publicness of organizations influences branding and marketing isomorphism in nuanced ways and that organizations are more likely to adopt new branding initiatives to promote higher general performance. Organizations adopt branding strategies in response to national trends and efforts to capitalize on their own strong performance rather than mimicking stronger‐performing peers.

Unlike the U.S. Constitution, many state constitutions include provisions for regulating and legislating specific policy issues. Embedding policy proscriptions in state constitutions may impact the rate and likelihood of policy diffusion. To examine how the amendment process influences diffusion resulting from geographic competition, we estimate a well‐known policy diffusion model, using state‐sponsored lotteries as a case study. Our mixed model of survival analysis separately estimates amendments and lottery adoptions allowing for different covariates and baseline hazards in each model. We find that there are different diffusion effects for constitutional amendments and policy adoptions, that the two‐step process requires a more professionalized legislature, and that amending the state constitution influences the timing of the adoption process. Once we take into consideration the two‐step process of lottery diffusion, we find a conditional diffusion effect that is over twice as large as previous estimates, and an overall diffusion that is larger than estimates from event‐history estimation, suggesting that the constitutional hurdle is an important determinant of policy adoption. These effects occur over the entire policy adoption phase (1961–2009), over multiple specifications of the baseline hazard, for alternate measures of diffusion, and for alternate model specifications, thereby suggesting that the constitutional hurdle is an important element of state policy, and it should be empirically considered in future models of policy diffusion.

PurposeThis paper analyzes how a national social enterprise policy encourages the social missions of social enterprises and uncovers the relationships between social enterprise governance and labor equity, an area that has been rarely studied in nonprofit governance studies.Design/methodology/approachThe study analyzes the effects of four legal requirements for work-integrated social enterprises (WISEs) codified by the Social Enterprises Promotion Act (SEPA, 2007) in South Korea. Then, it relies on panel regression analysis (2020–2022) to examine how the compositions of the governance of WISEs are related to their hiring and wage equity.FindingsThe institutional arrangements required by SEPA have resulted in positive social impacts for most WISEs. However, the results of regression models show that individual participant groups in the WISE governance achieved mixed results depending on the labor issue.Research limitations/implicationsGenerally, this research explores the concept of diversity and its utility in nonprofit governance, with a particular focus on targeted diversity policies, demonstrating that governance arrangements influence the success of these policies.Practical implicationsThe findings bring new insights for policymakers about "altruistic economic entities." For practitioners in social enterprises, the results of the regression models underscore the importance of understanding the participant composition of decision-making meetings.Originality/valueThis study sheds light on labor equity, which government-certified social enterprises should achieve from the perspective of nonprofit governance.

Over the course of this decade, Florida has emerged as one of America's fastest growing and most visited states. As many of the state's municipalities compete for opportunities to expand their tax base and achieve other municipally centered goals, they are faced with the challenge of needing to strategically differentiate themselves from their peers to attract opportunities. One way to accomplish this is through using marketing as a tool of strategic management. While literature shows that marketing engagement is happening in cities throughout the world, we lack a clear understanding of what American municipalities are doing about marketing and why they are increasingly choosing to participate in the activity. This work provides a glimpse into how a sample of Florida cities are strategically using marketing and what city managers and communication officials are specifically hoping to accomplish with marketing activity. The purpose of this research is to answer the following three questions: Why do city governments engage in marketing? Do city government officials engage in marketing from a strategic management perspective? How do city governments engage in marketing? Utilizing surveys and interviews from city managers and communication officials at the municipal level from across the state, this exploratory study sheds a light onto how several cities using marketing as a strategic management tool to achieve articulated goals. We provide recommendations for practitioners exploring strategic use of marketing and practitioners seeking to expand marketing engagement within their municipalities.