Suchergebnisse

Governments that want to subsidize goods or services can delegate responsibility for production to a public agency as part of its overall mission, subsidize production of specific outputs, or subsidize specific beneficiaries of excludable goods and services. For public postsecondary education, the corresponding funding mechanisms are operating appropriations that delegate authority to choose outputs and beneficiaries to public colleges and universities, grants and contracts, or student financial aid. Consistent with theories explaining delegation of policymaking authority, I find that the mix of funding mechanisms depends on institutions that affect planning capacity and oversight costs: States with more professional legislatures or statewide coordinating boards delegate less, that is, they spend more on grants and contracts and need-based student aid relative to appropriations. Relative use of grants and contracts decreases as the number of institutional governing boards increases, but use of need-based aid does not.

Recent election cycles in the U.S. have seen a massive increase in fundraising by political campaign committees. In new research, Robert C. Lowry finds that these committees do not all raise money from the same kinds of communities. Studying itemized contributions by individuals to campaign committees, he writes that competitive districts generate more contributions to local candidates running in those districts, but there are fewer predicted contributions to many other kinds of committee. He also finds that the contributions made can be greatly affected by the district's levels of income, education and urbanization.

Political campaign contributions are not made in a vacuum. Rather, contributions from individuals are affected by the political and legal environment experienced by potential donors. I study itemized contributions to candidates, parties, and political action committees (PACs) aggregated by congressional district for 1994-2006. The timing and competitiveness of presidential, congressional, and even state elections affect the expected benefits and opportunity costs of contributing to all types of committees, and this is reflected in the amounts contributed through different channels. Political party committees raising hard money contributions relied more on districts with high per capita income, education attainment, and urbanization after the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) than before, but were still less dependent on these districts than soft money committees before the BCRA. Overall, the BCRA led to less reliance on districts with high socioeconomic status as sources of itemized contributions to committees regulated by the Federal Election Commission.

AbstractSocial services in the United States are supplied by both the public and private sectors. Previous political science research has focused on public transfers or Medicaid; I study "Other Public Welfare" programs that include contracts and grants to private social services providers, focusing on the relationship between the two sectors. My results imply that an increase in either Other Public Welfare spending or private individual and family services employees leads to an increase in the other sector. I find weaker evidence of similar relationships involving private residential care or day care services, and private social services employment is generally independent of public spending on transfers and Medicaid. My results have implications for the full effects of changes in public welfare spending, including the effects on the private sector, as well as the effects of organized interests on public welfare spending.

A great deal of research focuses on contributions by political action committees (PACs) to candidates, but PACs are also institutional mechanisms for mobilizing contributions by individuals. Restrictions on the ability of PACs sponsored by businesses, trade associations, and labor unions to solicit contributions and the private benefits of contributing imply that these PACs are likely to mobilize donors who do not otherwise contribute to political campaigns. Analysis of itemized contributions to PACs during the 2004 election cycle confirms this. Moreover, the numbers of donors and dollars contributed to sponsored PACs aggregated by congressional district during 1996-2006 are relatively unaffected by electoral competition, presidential cycles, or changes in campaign finance regulations, and the effects of urbanization are less uniform than for nonconnected PACs. PACs sponsored by economic institutions therefore expand the pool of donors beyond the usual suspects.

Scholars of state politics and policy have devoted little attention to the public universities where so many of them work. Public higher education is organized at the state level, and its funding and governance have been debated at length in many states in recent years. Moreover, these universities provide opportunities for contributions to a variety of theoretically-grounded research, including the decision to make or buy public services, principal-agent issues and institutional arrangements for governance, the politics of institutional reform, the determinants of government appropriations and budgetary trade-offs, and internal decisionmaking in state-owned enterprises, public bureaucracies, and nonprofit organizations. Research on these issues could not only generate insights relevant to many types of institutions and public services but also contribute to ongoing policy debates over relations between state governments and higher education. Adapted from the source document.