Suchergebnisse

AbstractSeveral recent studies have investigated the relationship between direct democracy and public policy outcomes, with mixed findings. These inconsistencies may stem, in part, from researchers' failure to recognize that direct democracy institutions are distributed nonrandomly across the American states. That is, certain factors may lead a state to adopt the initiative process and influence other policy choices. We revisit the question of how the initiative influences state fiscal policy using panel data from 1960-2000 and a full-information maximum likelihood estimator that explicitly accounts for the endogeneity of the initiative. Our findings suggest that failure to endogenize the initiative in empirical analyses leads to substantially biased estimates of its effects. In particular, we find that once factors that predict whether a state has adopted the initiative are controlled, the initiative has a positive effect on state revenue generation and spending.

Do instruments of direct democracy affect policymaking and, if so, how? The political science literature is rife with increasingly sophisticated empirical efforts to answer these questions (Matsusaka 2004; Lupia and Matsusaka 2004). Having expended much energy over the past two decades studying the initiative's effects on state and local policy, Matsusaka (1995, 2004) is convinced that initiative states spend and tax less than states without the initiative (2004, 3; 1995). Agnostic about whether initiative states spend and tax more or less than noninitiative states but puzzled by scholars' failure to account for the endogeneity of the initiative in their models, we sought to determine whether the fiscal conservatism ascribed to the initiative remained after explicitly modeling states' initiative status. Our study, published in this issue of State Politics and Policy Quarterly contradicts Matsusaka's conclusions.

During the past few years, a new wave of reform has been launched under the rubric of reinventing government. Yet, despite the hype, little is known about the extent to which reinventing government is a reality across the country. The authors undertake a systematic analysis of reform activity in a large sample of suburban municipalities and find low rates of adoption of current reforms. Although a number of identifiable and theoretically important institutional constraints inhibit reform activity, city manager leadership appears to be critical for overcoming the impediments to efficient governance.