Suchergebnisse

Examines data from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program across 46 states from 1965-94, focusing on grant increases and decreases from the federal government to states and localities.

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The privatization of government services tends to bring about a more rapid adoption of innovative policies due to the competitive pressures of the market. In federal systems, however, the diffusion of innovations across subnational governments may offset such benefits of privatization. In this study, we test whether county governments that have privatized their provision of foster care services are more or less likely to adopt policy innovations and more or less likely to learn from the policies of other counties than are those that have resisted privatization. We explore the diffusion of four innovative foster care policies across 384 counties in five states between 1995 and 2006. We find that the initial innovativeness arising from the market competition of privatization is counterbalanced by learning across public diffusion networks. Adapted from the source document.

In this article, we seek to explain when and why political parties pressure their members to vote with the party. We model party cohesion as an endogenous choice of preference alignment by party members. Couched in Krehbiel's (1996, 1998) pivotal politics model, the formal theory advanced here shows party cohesion to be related to the initial preference alignment of party members, the divergence in preferences between parties, the cohesion of the opposing party, the party's size, and the party's majority or minority status. We solved the model analytically for generalized‐partial equilibrium results and further analyzed it through computer simulations. We tested the model's predictions in the U.S. Senate using Rice party cohesion scores from the 46th through 104th Congresses. The data analyses show strong support for this theory of endogenous choice of party pressure.