Cost-share contracts, offered through working lands programs, are instrumental in addressing environmental externalities from agriculture and generating ecosystem services. However, the persistent trend of noncompliance with cost-share contractual terms has become a problem for funding agencies and policymakers. This paper aims to study noncompliance issues within the US working lands programs using historical county-level panel data (1997–2019) from Louisiana. The results show that noncompliance is attributed more to cancellations than terminations due to flexible provisions within the cancellation option. The significant incentive effect of payment obligations reveals that revisiting payment rates could reduce contract noncompliance and mitigate moral hazard.

Even in the best-designed experiment, noncompliance can complicate analysis. While the intent-to-treat effect remains identified, randomization alone no longer identifies the complier average causal effect (CACE). Instrumental variables approaches, which rely on the exclusion restriction, can suffer from high variance, particularly when the experiment has a low compliance rate. We provide a framework which broadens the set of design and analysis techniques political science researchers can use when addressing noncompliance. Building on the growing literature about the advantages of ex-ante design decisions to improve precision, we show blocking on variables related to both compliance and the outcome can greatly improve all the estimators we propose. Drawing on work in statistics, we introduce the principal ignorability assumption and a class of principal score weighting estimators, which can exhibit large gains in precision in low compliance settings. We then combine principal ignorability and blocking with a simple estimation strategy to derive a more efficient estimation strategy for the CACE. In a re-evaluation of a study on the effect of GOTV on turnout, we find that the principal ignorability approaches result in confidence intervals roughly half the size of traditional instrumental variable approaches.

Reification – the act of treating something socially created as if it were real – is often described as a problem in the study of international norms. Critical and post-colonial scholars argue that reification silences alternative worldviews, whereas practice-oriented scholars argue it diminishes agency and practical innovation. In his article ‘From Norms to Normative Configurations,’ Simon Pratt proposes a solution to the problem of reification, reconceiving norms as a configuration of interrelated social practices. In this piece, I argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Reification is an essential part of how norms are constructed, contested, and surmounted in international politics. I revisit the foundational figures in norms research to highlight problems in Pratt's analysis, and prove the value of reification, both analytically and methodologically. Then, I use these insights to amend the concept of normative configuration, redefining it as a complex network of discrete norms tied together through common social practices. Along the way, I offer directions for future research on the relationship between norms and practices.

Political scientists commonly use survey experiments–often conducted online–to study the attitudes of the mass public. In these experiments, compensation is usually small and researcher control is limited, which introduces the potential for low respondent effort and attention. This lack of engagement may result in noncompliance with experimental protocols, threatening causal inferences. However, in reviewing the literature, we find that despite the discipline’s general familiarity with experimental noncompliance, researchers rarely consider it when analyzing survey experiments. This oversight is important because it may unknowingly prevent researchers from estimating their causal quantities of greatest substantive interest. We urge scholars to address this particular manifestation of an otherwise familiar problem and suggest two strategies for formally measuring noncompliance in survey experiments: recording vignette screen time latency and repurposing manipulation checks. We demonstrate and discuss the substantive consequences of these recommendations by revisiting several published survey experiments.

The goals of this article are: (i) to understand how individual characteristics affect the likelihood of patients defaulting their pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) treatment regimens; (ii) to quantify the predictive capacity of these risk factors; and (iii) to quantify and map spatial variation in the risk of defaulting. We used logistic regression models and generalized additive models with a spatial component to determine the odds of default across continental Portugal. We focused on new PTB cases, diagnosed between 2000 and 2013, and included some individual information (sex, age, residence area, alcohol abuse, intravenous drug use, homelessness, HIV, imprisonment status). We found that the global default rate was 4·88%, higher in individuals with well-known risk profiles (males, immigrants, HIV positive, homeless, prisoners, alcohol and drug users). Of specific epidemiological interest was that our geographical analysis found that Portugal's main urban areas (the two biggest cities) and one tourist region have higher default rates compared to the rest of the country, after adjusting for the previously mentioneded risk factors. The challenge of treatment defaulting, either due to other individual non-measured characteristics, healthcare system failure or patient recalcitrance requires further analysis in the spatio-temporal domain. Our findings suggest the presence of significant within-country variation in the risk of defaulting that cannot be explained by these classical individual risk factors alone. The methods we advocate are simple to implement and could easily be applied to other diseases.

The essay agues that there is little scope for ideal theory in political philosophy, even under Rawls’s conception of its aims. It begins by identifying features of a standard example of ideal theory in physics — the ideal gas law, PV=NRT and draws attention to the lack of these features in Rawls’s derivation of the principles of justice from the original position. A. John Simmons’s defense of ideal theory against criticisms of Amartya Sen is examined, as are further criticisms of both by David Schmidtz. The essay goes on to develop a conception of the domain of social relations to be characterized by justice that suggests that as a moving target it makes ideal theory otiose. Examination of Rawls’s later views substantiate the conclusion that ideal theory as propounded in A Theory of Justice is a mistaken starting point in the enterprise of political philosophy. Differences between the domains of ideal theory in mathematics, physics, and economics on the one hand, and political philosophy on the other, reinforce this conclusion.

Providing medical treatment for unaccompanied foreign minors can prove particularly demanding when a patient is not fully compliant. This report describes the case of a 13-year-old boy from Sub-Saharan Africa brought to Italy to receive treatment for a neoplasm. Right from the start, he showed strong oppositional reactions, with aggressive and self-harming behavior. This made it necessary to activate various different psychological, psychiatric, and social-support resources, and to adapt the proposed treatments to the patient's willingness and ability to cooperate. Here we outline the assessments and actions (also from the economic and organizational standpoint) that need to be implemented in any scheme to bring young foreign orphans to Italy for specialist medical care.

Two main drivers of global trends in noncompliance of marine protected areas regulations are food and income security. Declines in fish stocks have resulted in greater concerns for food security, especially in developing and coastal areas, and calls for environmental conservation are growing. Planning of marine protected areas has traditionally been based on biological and ecological data, only recently focusing on the human communities that are significantly dependent on coastal resources. The hypothesis that marine resource use is determined by socioeconomic factors (such as food security and income) and livelihood options was tested in two communities on the island of Rodrigues (Western Indian Ocean). As livelihood development can be a response to fisher displacement by protected areas, willingness towards alternative livelihood options and the differences in this between fisher demographic groups were also examined. Using semi-structured interviews, 72 fishers were surveyed on topics such as fishery and marine protected area (MPA) regulation noncompliance, current livelihoods and willingness to consider alternative livelihoods. Fishers believed Rodrigues fisheries suffer from high levels of noncompliance, owing mainly to a lack of livelihood alternatives and depleted stocks. Rodriguan fishers had low mobility, both within the fishery (for example gear types used and target species) and in movement to occupations outside the fishery. The fishers were generally willing to consider alternate livelihoods. Age was significantly correlated with overall willingness to consider alternative work, while gender and village were found to have a significant relationship with types of work that an individual was willing to consider. Policy makers and marine resource managers need to identify drivers of noncompliant behaviour and examine livelihood preferences at different scales (individual, within and between communities) prior to users being affected by MPA created displacement to more effectively address marine conservation and food security goals. The findings offer new empirical evidence to strengthen support for arguments that could be made by policy makers to demand more balanced consideration of the effects of MPAs on socioeconomic factors along with environmental considerations in communities highly dependent on access to the marine areas that will be affected by MPAs.