Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Research on political control over government bureaucracy has primarily focused on direct exercises of power such as appointments, funding, agency design, and procedural rules. In this analysis, we extend this literature to consider politicians who leverage their institutional standing to influence the decisions of local field officials over whom they have no explicit authority. Using the case of the US Forest Service (USFS), we investigate whether field-level decisions are associated with the political preferences of individual congressional representatives. Our sample encompasses 7,681 resource extraction actions initiated and analyzed by 107 USFS field offices between 2005 and 2018. Using hierarchical Bayesian regression, we show that under periods of economic growth and stability, field offices situated in the districts of congressional representatives who oppose environmental regulation initiate more extractive actions (timber harvest, oil and gas drilling, grazing) and conduct less rigorous environmental reviews than field offices in the districts of representatives who favor environmental regulation. By extending existing theories about interactions between politicians and bureaucrats to consider informal means of influence, this work speaks to (1) the role of local political interests in shaping agency-wide policy outcomes and (2) the importance of considering informal and implicit means of influence that operate in concert with explicit control mechanisms to shape bureaucratic behavior.

Abstract
Local governments consider a wide range of policies to increase resilience in the face of myriad risks and employ a variety of tactics to communicate about these policies to external actors. An important platform to signal resilience as a policy priority is through the budget process wherein local communities decide "who gets what, when, and how." Using computational text mining techniques, we assess how county governments in California signal efforts toward resilience in their budgets during the 2012–2017 fiscal years, as well as whether and how those signals are received by the capital market. Comparable budget documents are available for 38 counties across the state for a total of 161 county-year observations. To test the relationship between local government resilience signals and capital market outcomes, we focus on county underlying credit ratings issued by counties. Empirical results show that county underlying credit ratings are insensitive to resilience signals in local government budgets. By examining the efficacy of resilience signals and their effects on the capital market, we offer evidence on the link between policy signaling and financial outcomes at the local government level.

AbstractSea‐level rise is a "nascent subsystem" with policy actors actively developing initial policy preferences through participation across multiple policy forums in a polycentric system. This paper uses item‐response models to empirically analyze how actors, perceived problems, and preferred policy solutions are related in a latent "policy space". We focus on California's San Francisco Bay region, where in the last decade, sea‐level rise emerged to become one of the most salient climate adaptation issues. We find that actors and policy preferences are arranged in a two‐dimensional space, with highly engaged actors more likely to consider environmental justice and ecological aspects of sea level rise. Our findings have implications for theories of nascent subsystems within the Advocacy Coalition Framework, and for understanding how a local policy subsystem develops to address and prioritize the multi‐faceted impacts of climate change.

Abstract
Large-scale (e.g., > 1 megawatt capacity) wind and solar energy (hereafter, LSWS) developments are increasing to aid decarbonization. However, LSWS can also negatively affect biodiversity. Planners and other interested parties' perceptions about the impact of LSWS on biodiversity will thus affect how trade-offs are managed during planning and buildout. We present a survey of professionals (n = 116) working at the intersection of LSWS and biodiversity protection across the United States concerning: (1) perceived environmental impacts from LSWS expansion; and (2) how these impacts compare to other land-use and land-cover change drivers. We find that practitioners perceive LSWS to impact biodiversity negatively but less so than other land-cover change drivers, including fossil fuels and agriculture. This highlights the need for increased attention to the role of practitioners in advancing renewable energy and biodiversity conservation.