Abstracts

Richard C. Rich, W. David Conn, and William Owens. ""Indirect Regulation" of Environmental Hazards Through the Provsion of Information of the Public: The Case of SARA, Title III." Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 21, No.1, Spring, 1993.

Title III of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization ACt of 1986 seeks to reduce the risks of chemical accidents through a strategy of indirect regulation that relies on providing the public with infromation about chemical hazards. For this strategy to be effective, citizens must aggressively utilize the information provided to monitor industrial practices and press for risk reduction. This article reports the results of a national study that examined selected aspects of he implementation of Title III in an effort to assess the likely outcome of its attempt at indirect regulation. Our focus is on the degree to which the Title III-mandated Local Emergency Planning Committees are pursuing policies that are likely to get the necessary information to citizens and foster community debate on hazardous materials issues.

Daniel McCool. "Indian Water Settlements: The Prerequisites of Successful Negotiation." Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 21, No.2, Summer, 1993.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the federal government adopted a policy of negotiating, rather than litigating conflicts over Indian water claims. In the ensuing years numerous settlements have been authorized by Congress. According to the literature on dispute resolution, successful negotiations are usually characterized by a specific set of conditions. This paper assesses the extent to which Indian water settlements are characterized by these conditions.

Priscilla M. Regan. "Ideas or Interests: Privacy in Electronic Communications." Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 21., No. 2, Summer, 1993.

This article examines why the idea of privacy failed to structure policymaking in the case of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Although the relatively quick passage of ECPA might appear to be a case of the politics of ideas, the model of interest group politics more simply explains policymaking. The analysis of this case suggests several factors as important in establishing the conditions under which a politics of ideas will be realized.

James T. Young. "The Origins of New Deal Agricultural Policy: Interest Groups' Role in Policy Formation." Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer, 1993.

In its examination of New Deal agricultural programs, this article take issue with the pluralist, state-centered and class-centered approaches which ignore the complexity of these policy programs' development and implementation as well as the role of organized interests. This oversimplification is rectified through a comparison of the AAA and FSA programs, which demonstrates the primary role played in these programs' existence by organized interests both outside and also within, the state.

Debra C. Minkoff. "The Organization of Survival: Women's and Racial-Ethnic Voluntarist and Activist Organizations, 1955-1985." Social Forces, June, 1993.

Despite the centrality of formal organizations to efforts at social change, little is know about how survival prospects vayr between different kinds of change-oriented organizations. in this article, I present an event history analysis of the disbanding of national women's and minority membership organizations between 1955 and 1985. The results suggest that membership groups that follow an accepted course of action based on moderate objectives and targeted to nonpolitical arenas are relatively secure. Moreover there is no significant difference between women's and minority organizations. As in other organizational fields, survival chances are affected by liabilities of smallness, "adolescence," and "transformation."

Ruth D. Peterson and Lauren J. Krivo. "Racial Segregation and Black Urban Homicide." Social Forces, June, 1993.

Social deprivation and social isolation perspectives provide grounds for expecting residential segregation to increase violent crime among oppressed minorities. Unfornately, scholars seldom have included residential segragation in analyses of violent crime. In addition, most research nas analyzed the relationship between general rathern than race/ethnic-specific crime rates and social and demographic predictors. To address these shortcomings, we examine the impact of racial residential segregation rates of African American homicide victimization for large U.S. central cities. The analyses demostrate that black-white segregation leads to higher rates of black killing although the relationship exists only for stranger and acquaintance homicides. This suggests that social isolation, rather than social deprivation, is the mechanism by which segregation leads to higher levels of homicide among African Americans.

Jurgen Feick. "Comparing Comparative Policy Studies - A Path Towards Integration?" Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 12, No. 3.

This paper tries to integrate and generalize research results from selected comparative policy studies in the fields of economic, social, educational, environmental and health and safety policies. The countries included are Britian, Sweden, and the United States. The concepts of institutional and organizational structure, culture orientation and policy style are applied in order to develop descriptive taxonomies to suggest how these factors might influence ultimate policy outputs.

Jenny Stewart. "Corporatism, Pluralism and Political Learning: A Systems Approach." Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 12, No. 3.

Whether corporatism matters or not is one the the most difficult and intriguing questions confronting policy analysis. One approach to the problem not previously adopted is to use systems analysis as a means of teasing out the implications of general structural differences between corporatist and pluralist polities. By using a systems analysis framework, it is shown that corporatist and pluralist states differ in the ways in which they process information and generate support. The combination of centralization and consensus proves to be the key to the apparently greater learning capacity of corporatist systems. The analysis suggests that policymaking itself be better understood as a learning mechanism rather than as an allocative process.

Steven G. Livingston. "Knowledge Hierarchies and the Politics of Ideas in American International Commodity Policy." Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 12, No. 3.

Multiple knowledges are available for utilization in policy choice. The rank ordering of knowledges for use in decisionmaking is thus a fundamental predecision. This article shows how this predecision necessarily constrains the processes associated with a politics of ideas, using cases from American international commodity policy. Even when the supposed preconditions of this sort of politics are present, policy change did not occur when the propsed ideas arose from a knowledge accorded secondary status in policymaking circles. The politics of ideas, so often protrayed through cases of innovation, may be quite conservative, constrained by knowledge hierarchies which reflect prior political circumstances.

Bruno S. Frey. "Efficiency and Democratic Political Organization; The Case for the Referendum." Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 12, No. 3.

This paper argues that democratic forms of government are necessarily inefficient relative to other types of decisionmaking and that if individuals are as rational in their actions and expectations as voters as they are meant to be in the market, then government failures attibuted to democracy lessen or disappear. Using example from Switzerland, the paper demonstrates how more democracy, i.e. the use of initiative and referendum, may actually improve the efficiency of government by giving the mass of citizens the information and opportunity to frustrate efforts of the "classe politique" to from a coalition against the voters.

James Gimple. "Reforms-Resistant and Reforms-Adopting Machines: The Electoral Foundations of Urban Politics, 1910- 1930." Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2, June, 1993.

This article shed lights on the relationship between municipal electoral characteristics, progressive reform adoption, and the presence of machine political systems for the period between 1910-1930. Machine politicians and their supports did stand in the way of reforms, but not everywhere. A two-stage model suggests that the electoral factors contributing to machine presence are not exactly the same as those contributing to resistance to reform. Receptivity to reform was frequently exogenous to whether a city was regime dominated.

Nicholas O. Alozic and Lynne L. Manganaro. "Women's Council Representation: Measurement Implications for Public Policy." Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2, June, 1993.

In this paper we suggest that understanding women's representation on city councils requires that attention be paid to potential differences between communities where women have been able to break the cycle of exclusion from those where they have not, in addition to the degree of women's representation. This paper compares two different measures of women's council representation using both logit and the OLS regression. The results indicate that, alone, electoral structure is not a significant explanatory power in understanding either the presence of women's representation on city councils or the extent of women's representation on these legislative bodies. However, the size of the council has a significant effect which, except among district election cities, largely improves the likelihood of electing a woman to the council (as compared to improving the degree of women's representation).

Richard C. Feiock and Johathan P. West. "Testing Competing Explanations for Policy Adoption: Municipal Solid Waste Recycling Programs." Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2, June, 1993.

Cities were the source of a substantial amount of policy activity regarding recycling during the 1980s. This paper explores a set of variables, based on alternative conceptions of municipal policymaking, to explore differences between cities adopting residential curbside recycling programs and cities not adopting such policy changes. Probit analysis finds empirical support for explanations of policy adoptions based on need, party competition, fiscal capacity and interest groups organization.

Mauricoio Schoijet and Richard Worthington. "Globalization of Science and repression of Scientists in Mexico." Science Technology, and Human Values, Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring, 1993.

The restructuring of the global economy and a severe crisis of legitimacy in the Mexican political system have generated a turn toward neoliberalism by the ruling party in a bid to attract foreign investment. A key component of neoliberal science policy is the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI), a system of salary increments for selected researchers during the 1980s. Examination of SNI's decisions reveals numerous discriminatory and self-serving practices that are inconsistent with widely accepted norms in the scientific community. During the same period, repressive actions against researchers, such as the peremptory closure of research institutions, firing of researchers, and direct intimidation, have increased. The victims of discrimination and repression documented here are disproportionately foriegn-born mexicans, leftists, critics of the ruling party, and researchers in environmental and energy studies.

Thomas Faist. "From School to Work: Public Policy and Underclass Formation Among Young Turks in Germany During the 1980s." International Migration Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer 1993.

In comparative perspective, Germany shows a high degree of public responsibility for job training of school leavers. However, while the participation of rate of young Turks in the dual system of vocational and job training has increased over the past decades, a high degree of ethnic inequality has persisted. Ethnically-specific access to job training and employment has developed. This finding applies even more to young Turkish women than to Turkish men. Nevertheless, no ethnic underclass emerged during the 1980s.

David L. Sollars. "Assumptions and Consequences of the War on Drugs: An Economic Analysis." Policy Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring, 1992.

Using recent evidence form the state of Florida, the outcomes of the "War of Drugs" are analyzed by critically evaluating the assumptions that underlie the policy. It would appear that many of the assumptions may not be valid, thereby in part explaining the apparent failure of the drug law enforcement strategy to attain the stated objectives. Alternative strategies are briefly considered.

Robert G. Sheets and Yuan Ting. "Worker Perspectives on the Private Financing of Government Sponsored Dislocated Worker Programs. Policy Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring, 1992.

This study analyzes worker perspectives on the financing responsibilities of businesses, workers, and government for dislocated worker programs that provide job search and retaining assistance to unemployed workers. It is based on a survey of 1,555 experienced workers in Illinois. Joint business and worker financing approaches were the most favored and the least polarizing alternative. In contrast, the government grant approach was extremely polarizing with significant support but strong negative reaction among higher-income, white, and college educated workers. Surprising strong negative reaction was also found among lower-income, blue-collar workers. The results are consistent with related research on the conservative attitudes of American workers toward social welfare programs.

Nancy C. Roberts. "Public Entrepreneurship and Innovation." Policy Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring, 1993.

This article presents a conceptual framework of public entrepreneurship. Public entrepreneurship is defined as the generation of a novel or innovative idea and the design and implementation of the idea into public sector practice. The conceptual framework is used to distinguish between public entrepreneurs and other actors in the policy process, and to clarify the differences between policy, political, executive, and bureaucratic entrepreneurs. Taking a functionalist perspective, the article differentiates between individual and collective entrepreneurship and generates propositions to move us closer to a theory of public entrepreneurship.

"Symposium: Overview of State Policy Problems." Policy Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring, 1993.

Following an introductory essay by Fred Meyer and Ralph Baker the symposium explores several articles state responses to important policy issues. Many of the authors address state actions in light of the Reagan revolution and Nixon's New Federalism. The symposium includes articles by David M. Hedge and Michael J. Scicchitano on regulatory authority and Gayle Binion on surrogate parenting. Two essays, the first by Cal and Janet Clark and the second by Steven Daniels focus on federal aid to local governments. Sheldon Kamieniecki and Paula Lackie analyze high-technology capacity across the 50 states and Paul Teske examines state telecommunications policies. Finally, articles by Jerry F. Medler and Alvin Mushkatel, Richard C. Feiock and M. Margaret Haley, Charles Davis, and Eric B. Hersik look at state policies toward a wide variety of environmental issues.

Laurence J. O'Toole, Jr. "Interorganizational Policy Studies: Lessons Drawn from Implementation Research." Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Vol. 3, No. 2, April 1993.

Contingency approaches to organizing suggest that policy objectives are more likely to be achieved if the structures employed for implementation mesh with the policy objectives being sought. Interorganizational arrangements are used increasingly in carrying out public programs, and contingency logic can be used to assess the degree of match between policy objective and interunit structure. Here the contingency logic as applied to interorganizational implementation is reviewed and its assumptions identified. To probe these assumptions, empirical evidence is analyzed from one policy sector which would seem especially promising. The findings suggest that even under highly favorable conditions, a contingency perspective provides only limited help. The research demonstrates the need for additional conceptual clarification and theoretical care in reaching conclusions about the impact of interorganizational structures on policy settings.