Policy with concentrated costs often faces intense localized opposition. Both private and governmental actors frequently use financial compensation to attempt to overcome this opposition. We measure how effective such compensation is for winning policy support in the arena of housing development. We build a novel survey platform that shows respondents images of their self-reported neighborhood with hypothetical renderings of new housing superimposed on existing structures. Using a sample of nearly 600 Bostonians, we find that compensating residents increases their support for nearby market-rate housing construction. However, compensation does not influence support for affordable housing. We theorize that the inclusion of affordable housing activates symbolic attitudes, decreasing the importance of financial self-interest and thus the effectiveness of compensation. Our findings suggest greater interaction between self-interest and symbolic politics within policy design than previously asserted. Together, this research signals opportunities for coalition building by policy entrepreneurs when facing opposition due to concentrated costs.

This study examines the impact of COVID-19-induced policy environments on civil servants’ public service motivation (PSM), a topic not yet adequately researched. Using a vignette survey experiment, we investigate how four types of COVID-19 policy environment information – 1) total deduction of annual leave compensation, 2) a significant increase in working hours, 3) positive assessments of government responses from domestic audiences, and 4) positive assessments of government responses from other advanced democracies – shape civil servants’ PSM during the pandemic. We analyze original data from over 4,000 South Korean civil servants in central and local governments, gathered as part of a representative survey. Results show that reducing compensation to prepare the disaster relief fund has a negative impact, whereas recognition by advanced democracies has a positive impact on PSM. Our analysis suggests the importance of policy environments in both motivating and demotivating civil servants during a pandemic crisis.

Do coalition governments really suffer from short time horizons in fiscal policymaking, as posited by standard political-economy models? This article focusses on coalitions that have created high levels of familiarity through shared governing experiences in the past and that are likely to cooperate again in future governing coalitions. I argue that such coalitions have incentives to internalise the future costs of debt accumulation and reach credible agreements to balance their constituencies’ fiscal preferences. Moreover, sustaining broad coalitions should have electoral advantages to implementing controversial economic reforms, thus resulting in lower debt increases compared not only with less durable coalitions but also with single-party governments. Comparing 36 economically advanced democracies between (up to) 1962 and 2013, I estimate the effects of coalitions’ cooperation prospects on the dynamics of public debt. The findings indicate that long time horizons can help coalitions to overcome intertemporal coordination problems and to reach specific policy goals.

This paper analyses the different cost bases in which public expenditure can be analysed as a policy problem related to the differing requirements of planning, authorising and controlling the various components of public expenditure. The analysis is applied to the United Kingdom, where in 1981 changes were announced in the method of making public expenditure decisions which had evolved over the previous two decades. The various components of public expenditure in the United Kingdom are described, and the decision-making process which led to the March 1981 Public Expenditure White Paper is outlined. The significance of the different price bases used in public expenditure (cash (at current or at expected prices), volume, cost, and constant) is then explored. The advantages and disadvantages for policy-makers of attempting to reduce the number of price bases used are analysed; it is shown that there is no cost-free route to reducing complexity. The significance of government's decision in 1981 to make greater use of the cash basis in decision-making is assessed. The analysis is applied specifically to the United Kingdom, but the issues raised are of policy relevance to the choice of price bases for public expenditure decision-making in any country in a time of inflation.

(A second paper in a future issue of the Journal will examine the political purposes behind gross or net measurement, the earmaking of receipts, and the more precise relationships between figures used in the planning of public expenditure, in macro-economic analysis and forecasting and in Parliamentary and local control.)

Changes in the regulatory state, the privatization of network industries in Europe and in air transport have led to a redefinition of how airports are regulated. The French model of state ownership and regulation of airports became progressively out of step with a broader European market-oriented frame of reference. A new French sectoral frame of reference was developed and became public policy in 2005. A cognitive analysis identifies the key factors and actors responsible for this shift. This article explores the nature of the changes made to adapt the French model to a European framework and examines the influence of foreign models of regulation on the design of the French model. Finally, it suggests that features of the European frame of reference for regulatory structures have been adapted within France.

Many recorded roll calls in Congress each year are votes on bills that have no chance of becoming law, or are purely symbolic, or are procedural without policy content. Yet models of voting and measurement models of member preferences make assumptions that vote choices are largely about utility derived from policies. We consider the possibility that votes plausibly connected to policy and votes not plausibly connected to policy may have different data-generating processes and rely on different utility functions. Substantively, similarity across different contexts for policy change implies an importance of messaging over policy. Methodologically, similarity across these contexts is necessary to avoid biasing estimates of member preferences. We find that members’ voting patterns are highly stable across contexts in which policy change is credible and not credible. This indicates that existing measures of ideal points are likely not dramatically biased by the inclusion of policy-irrelevant votes.

Drawing on accounts of regulatory capture in which an industry’s influence activities pull regulation in its direction, apart from incentives or information, this article develops a formal model of capture as a shift in a policy-making agent’s preferences, due to costly actions by the industry. One type of action is rentseeking that produces only capture, whereas the other type also improves regulatory quality by producing information that reduces policy uncertainty. The model shows how the ability to capture the agent can incentivise the interest group to produce more information. Thus, aligning an agent’s preferences with a political principal’s and immunising him from capture is not generally optimal; instead, the principal prefers an agent who is susceptible to capture associated with quality improvements but also initially more opposed to the group than the principal. A comparison of two Securities and Exchange Commission rulemakings illustrates the logic of the model.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was intended to reduce inequalities in access to healthcare resources. However, a 2012 Supreme Court decision allowed states to opt out of a key component of the policy, leading to even greater variation in Medicaid’s implementation. Using this variation, we estimate the effect of the ACA Medicaid expansion and racial dynamics on federal Medicaid-CHIP transfers received by states at the county level. To do so, we use a difference-in-differences specification and allow the expansion effect to vary across counties with different population shares of Black Americans. We find that Medicaid expansion increases the funds that are sent to counties, but additional analyses show that the racial demographics of a county also serve to influence how federal resources are apportioned. Specifically, the analyses reveal a curvilinear relationship between the proportion of Black residents and the dispersal of funds.

In recent years, the movement of personnel from the public sector to interest groups has garnered considerable attention throughout Europe. Consequently, there has been an increased focus on the phenomenon of revolving door lobbyists within academic literature. This research contributes to this scholarly discussion by examining how the employment of such lobbyists facilitates access. We argue that interest groups gain advantages by recruiting individuals from the public sector in policy domains with limited mobilization, but this benefit decreases as more interest groups mobilize. Our analysis of survey data from seven European political systems supports these expectations, indicating that recruiting professionals with experience in the public sector enhances access, especially in policy areas with minimal lobbying activity. This highlights the potential for interest mobilization to counterbalance the advantages of hiring revolving door lobbyists.

Asylum seekers are often portrayed as “bogus refugees” who try to abuse a destination country’s generosity and protection. We scrutinise the use and effect of such a constructed abuse policy narrative in Swiss asylum referendums by examining the conveyance of this narrative by political elite actors (meso-level) and its effect on citizens’ opinion formation (micro-level). On the meso-level, our analysis shows that political organisations rely more strongly on the abuse policy narrative (1) if a referendum proposal contains more tightening as opposed to streamlining policies and (2) if their political ideology is to the right. While the first finding also applies at the micro-level, voters from both the right and the centre are likely to base their decision on the abuse policy narrative. The fact that this narrative is convincing for centrist voters is particularly important as they usually play a decisive role in the outcome of asylum referendums.

Public officials faced with difficult and technologically complex decisions often resort to decision rules that purport to aggregate disparate judgements. Such multicriterion decisions are only as good as the procedures used to perform such aggregation, however. We examine the use of one such decision-making tool, a variant of the Delphi technique, in the choice of a disposal technology for low-level radioactive waste for the Southeast Compact Commission in the United States. The case focuses on the danger when officials guess when they think they are choosing. Choosing occurs when all participants understand the implications, and sensitivities, of the technique used to aggregate judgement; guessing occurs when the participants choose randomly or without full knowledge of the properties of the process.