Inequalities in terms of who participates in politics yield policy outcomes that fail to reflect the interests of the broader public. Because these processes fail to engage the full citizenry in political decision-making processes, they are also markers of an anemic civic culture. Advocates of participatory budgeting (PB) – a process implemented at the subnational level in thousands of cities in the United States and beyond that invites residents to participate directly in the process of allocating public resources for local projects – argue that it can alleviate these inequalities. They argue that features of the PB process make it ripe for engaging new participants in the political process and weaving a more inclusive social fabric. We examine the correlates of interest in participating in PB using a survey of Cook County residents. We also consider the extent to which the policy priorities of those who are interested in participating diverge from those who are less interested. Although we find evidence that the process is particularly appealing to younger respondents and those who identify as Latine or Black (as opposed to White), we also find that interest is higher among those with higher socioeconomic status and those who perceive conditions in their neighborhood to already be good. Our evidence also suggests that inequalities in who is interested in participating may not radically affect policy outcomes. However, those who decline to participate cannot reap the broader social and political benefits advocates hope the PB process can foster.

Emerging health crises challenge and overwhelm federal political systems (Greer et al. 2020, Global Public Health 15: 1413–6). Within the context of COVID-19, states and governors took charge in the absence of a coordinated federal response. The result was uneven policy responses and variance in health-related and economic outcomes. While existing research has explored public evaluations of state COVID-19 policies, we explore primary care physicians’ trust in state government for handling the pandemic, as well as their evaluations of their state government’s treatment responsibility for the pandemic and their state’s policy response. We find that general preferences for the role of the federal/state government in addressing the pandemic are shaped by individual-level physician partisanship. Specific evaluations of state policy responsiveness are influenced by whether physicians’ partisan preferences matched their governor. We also find, however, that Republican physicians were critical of Republican governors and physicians were less partisan than the general public. At least within public health, there are limits to the influence of partisan identity on expert (physician) political evaluations.

The US has experienced runaway economic inequality since the 1970s, yet there is no strong public support for government efforts that serve to narrow the growing disparities between citizens. Why? I point to the role of rising racial diversity. I argue Americans believe in conditional equality, where they support equalizing policies as long as they perceive the beneficiaries as people like themselves. However, as the country grows more diverse, citizens are less likely to perceive those around them as people like themselves. Using time-series cross-sectional data of the American states, I demonstrate that as racial diversity increases, the likelihood the public will respond to increasing inequality by supporting bigger government declines. This study provides evidence for the mechanism usually implied but rarely tested by studies of diversity and policy: mass preferences.

We examine the influence of national politics and changing racial demographics on school board elections. We identify the districts where candidates campaigned on Critical Race Theory, COVID response, or parent control/transparency (what we call “conflict elections”) and examine two related questions. First, what characteristics define school districts that had elections involving these issues? Second, in the places that had conflict elections, how frequently did “conflict candidates” win, and what factors influenced their odds of winning? Utilizing a unique dataset of all school board elections in Wisconsin in 2022, we find that Republican presidential vote share is positively related to both the probability that a school district had a conflict election and that a conflict candidate won. We also find that in communities where the white population declined between 2010 and 2020, there was a higher likelihood that a conflict candidate won compared to communities where the size of the white population grew. Overall, our analysis confirms that school board elections are increasingly mirroring nationalized trends in other elections.

Many studies of policy diffusion focus on what factors affect a policy’s adoption. Few studies specifically test the mechanism and two of the most common explanations – learning and emulation – have not been tested outside of legislatures. While judicial scholars have applied policy diffusion to several types of laws, we know little about the motivation behind why policies spread from court to court. One unexplored area is the relationship between courts. This short article analyzes the two mechanisms most likely to affect peer institutions: learning and emulation. Using network analysis methods on an original dataset of state supreme court citations from 1960 to 2010, I provide evidence that courts are learning from and not emulating each other, but the mechanism is policy-specific.