Suchergebnisse

We used a quasi-experimental research design to study the extent of motivational crowding in a recent sustainable development intervention in northern India. The project provided participants with both private and communal material benefits to enhance their incomes, and environmental and social information to inculcate pro-environmental motivations. We compared changes in reported motivations of participants for conserving forest resources, before and after project implementation, with changes in reported motivations of matched nonparticipants. We found that villagers who received private economic benefits were more likely to change from an environmental to an economic motivation for forest protection, whereas those who engaged in communal activities related to the project were less likely to change from an environmental to an economic motivation. These results, which indicate a substantial but conditional degree of motivational crowding, clarify the relationships between institutional change, incentives, and motivations and have important implications for the design of sustainable development interventions.

Despite the widespread use and extensive studies of collaborative governance in the United States, we still know too little about how the public at large evaluates the formal inclusion of private stakeholders in collaborative decision making. We examine this question by conducting a series of survey experiments about the function, composition, and power of a proposed regional transportation board. The survey results reveal that while our respondents generally favored collaborative governance (i.e., public officials with private stakeholders) over collaborative government (i.e., public officials only), it was largely due to the inclusion of private citizens, not the stakeholder group representatives. This finding is consistent with a populist framework that presumes that interest group influences tend to impede or distort the will of the electoral majority and that favors functionally delimited mandates and limited power for non-elected decision-making bodies. This has important implications for the design and public acceptance of future collaborative government arrangements.

Creating successful collaborative governance regimes is difficult, but can be especially hard when collaborations are externally generated by higher levels of government as opposed to self-generated by local agencies and stakeholders due to the lack of spontaneity. We analyze this problem as it applies to California's Integrated Regional Water Governance Program. Public administration theory indicates that a core element in a successful collaboration is empowering local leaders who share the collaboration's intended goal. However, the political concessions to local autonomy necessary to enact an externally generated collaboration can undermine its success. The tensions between maintaining local autonomy and creating a regional approach are inherently strong in a "layered collaborative governance" approach that acknowledges and accommodates local boundaries. Drawing on the concept of role differentiation, we hypothesize that the roles participants play in layered collaborative governance will frequently derive from their preexisting issue areas, geographic orientations, and power relations, but that program design incentives can influence which groups participate in the effort and how they engage. We test these hypotheses in the context of California's Integrated Regional Water Management (IRWM) program. We find evidence of role differentiation on grant leadership both with respect to the initial goal of regional collaboration as well as later efforts to address the water issues of disadvantaged communities.

We study the extent of political homophily—the tendency to form connections with others who are politically similar—in local governments' decisions to participate in an important form of intergovernmental collaboration: regional planning networks. Using data from a recent survey of California planners and government officials, we develop and test hypotheses about the factors that lead local governments to collaborate within regional planning networks. We find that local governments whose constituents are similar politically, in terms of partisanship and voting behavior, are more likely to collaborate with one another in regional planning efforts than those whose constituents are politically diverse. We conclude that political homophily reduces the transaction costs associated with institutional collective action, even in settings where we expect political considerations to be minimal.

Critics argue that direct legislation (initiatives & referendums) allows an electoral majority to undermine the interests & rights of racial & ethnic minorities. We assess this claim by examining outcomes of direct democracy in California since 1978. Our analysis indicates that critics have overstated the detrimental effects of direct democracy. Confirming earlier critiques, we find that racial & ethnic minorities -- particularly Latinos -- lose regularly on a small number of racially targeted propositions. However, these racially targeted propositions represent less than 5% of all ballot propositions. When we consider outcomes across all propositions, we find that the majority of Latino, Asian American, & African American voters were on the winning side of the vote. This remains true if we confine our analysis to propositions on which racial & ethnic minorities vote cohesively or to propositions on issues that racial & ethnic minorities say they care most about. 6 Tables, 47 References. Adapted from the source document.

Given the recent court rulings against racial gerrymandering, the effect of multimember district elections on minority representation is an important issue. We present a model of voting in double-member district elections with two majority candidates and one minority candidate and consider the voting equilibria under straight and cumulative voting. In straight voting, while an equilibrium always exists in which the two majority candidates are expected to win the two seats, minority candidates may be elected. In cumulative voting, minority candidate wins are also possible in equilibrium but are less likely when minority voters prefer one majority candidate over another. We then present experimental evidence showing that minority candidates win significantly more seats in cumulative than in straight voting elections. When minority voters perceive a substantial difference between the majority candidates, however, they are more likely to split their votes between the minority and majority candidates, winning fewer seats.