Suchergebnisse

The combined effects of federalism & interest group pluralism pose particularly difficult problems for hazardous waste siting & cleanup decisions. Most national environmental groups have only limited involvement in local hazardous waste politics, while local grassroots advocates have very different interests & sometimes are pitted against one another. In the US, both the Environmental Protection Agency & the Dept of Energy recently have begun to use site-specific citizen advisory boards at cleanup sites. This approach appears to improve communications at some sites, but does not address the issues of "not in my back yard" politics & alleged inequitable exposure to hazardous wastes. 31 References. Adapted from the source document.

Examines the way in which state fiscal policy affects election results, and the role of party labels, partisan control, and voter expectations in these results; US.

I reformulate Mancur Olson's by-product theory of collective action as a theory of resource allocation by interest group managers. I then test alternative hypotheses about managers' objectives drawn from exchange theory and commitment theory. Financial data for 16 environmental citizen groups show that the production of public goods is subsidized by other activities, and revenues from member dues are not affected by spending on public goods. Spending on selective incentives and information generates revenues but also may contribute to the pursuit of collective goals. Estimated marginal revenues from fund-raising and selective incentives show that environmental citizen group managers are not preoccupied with maximizing revenues. Rather, they seek to maximize either spending on public goods or net resources available for influencing public policy and the environment, subject to a budget constraint.

Private, nonprofit organizations constitute a growing portion of the United States economy that has, until recently, escaped significant attention by many scholars interested in public policy. The papers in this symposium address four types of interactions between nonprofits and public policymakers—service provision and program implementation, policy advocacy, public policies toward nonprofits, and public/private partnerships. In addition, many private nonprofit organizations produce public goods that can supplement or substitute for government action.

Recent formal models of accountability allow us to make different conditional predictions about how transparency affects voters' willingness to re-elect incumbents and acceptance of higher taxes. We review two models and investigate empirical implications derived from or related to them, using panel data from 1972—2000 for U.S. state budget process transparency, gubernatorial elections, and tax increases in a small structural model. We do not find that budget transparency has a direct effect on incumbent retention, but we do find clear evidence that increased transparency dampens the negative effect of tax increases on retention of incumbent governors. Independent of this, we also find that increased transparency leads to greater fiscal scale. We suggest some possible directions for future models based on our results.

Recent formal models of accountability allow us to make different conditional predictions about how transparency affects voters' willingness to re-elect incumbents and acceptance of higher taxes. We review two models and investigate empirical implications derived from or related to them, using panel data from 1972-2000 for U.S. state budget process transparency, gubernatorial elections, and tax increases in a small structural model. We do not find that budget transparency has a direct effect on incumbent retention, but we do find clear evidence that increased transparency dampens the negative effect of tax increases on retention of incumbent governors. Independent of this, we also find that increased transparency leads to greater fiscal scale. We suggest some possible directions for future models based on our results. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]