Evan J. Ringquist

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the American States, 1960-93

We construct dynamic measures of the ideology of a states citizens and political leaders, using the roll call voting scores of state congressional delegations, the outcomes of congressional elections, the partisan division of state legislatures, the party of the governor, and various assumptions regarding voters and state political elites. We establish the utility of our indicators for 1960-93 by (i) examining and, whenever possible, testing the assumptions on which they are based, (ii) assessing their reliability, (iii) assessing their convergent validity by correlating them with other ideology indicators, and (iv) appraising their construct validity by analyzing their predictive power within multivariate models from some of the best recent research in the state politics field. Strongly supportive results from each battery of tests indicate the validity of our annual, state-level measures of citizen and government ideology. Substantively, our measures reveal more temporal variation in state citizen ideology than is generally recognized.

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the U.S. States: A Re-appraisal:

Berry et al.s (1998) measures of U.S. state citizen and government ideology rely on unadjusted interest-group ratings for a states members of Congress to infer information about (1) the ideological orientation of the electorates that selected them or (2) state legislators and the governor from the same state. Potential weaknesses in unadjusted interest-group ratings prompt the question: Are the Berry et al. measures flawed, and if so, can they be fixed by substituting alternative measures of a members ideology? We conclude that a version of the Berry et al. state government ideology indicator relying on NOMINATE common space scores is marginally superior to the extant version. In contrast, we reaffirm the validity of the original state citizen ideology indicator and find that versions based on NOMINATE common space scores and adjusted ADA and COPE scores introduced by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999) are weaker.

Political Control and Policy Impact in EPA's Office of Water Quality

Theory: The theory of overhead democracy is supplemented with theoretical insights from public administration to produce a more complete picture of bureaucratic decision making. Hypotheses: Efforts at political control are less successful in altering agency goals, values, and the general direction of public policy than they are at altering bureaucratic outputs. Changes in bureaucratic activity over time depend upon external efforts at political control, agency resources, and the complexity and salience of the policy area. Methods: A series of multivariate transfer-function models is used to account for changes in EPA enforcement activity, total federal enforcement activity, and the expression of agency values in water-pollution control. Results: Executive and legislative efforts at political control did reduce enforcement activity. However, these efforts were ineffective at altering agency values, less effective at EPA than in most other agencies, and less effective in waterpollution control than in other areas of EPA enforcement. They also mobilized EPA clientele to produce lower levels of political control in the long run.

The Measurement and Stability of State Citizen Ideology

Does state political ideology change over time? Brace et al. (2004, 537) say no, based on their analysis of three longitudinal measures of state citizen ideology: Berry et al.s (1998) indicator that relies on election results and congressional roll call votes, and two indicators that Brace et al. construct from ideological self-placement items, one using GSS and ANES survey results, and the other employing surveys conducted by CBS/New York Times. The authors imply that the ideological stability they detect precludes the possibility that state citizen ideology influences state policy. However, this implication stems from Brace et al.s definition of meaningful ideological change as differences in the relative ideology of states over time rather than absolute changes in ideology within states. We contend that this argument is both logically and methodologically flawed. Brace et al. maintain that their CBS/New York Times and GSS/ANES indicators are valid measures of state citizen ideology, but that the Berry et al. indicator is not. To assess this claim, it is crucial to distinguish between ideological self-identification (or symbolic ideology) and policy mood (or operational ideology). We find that the Berry et al. measure is a valid indicator of policy mood, but that it is invalid as a measure of self-identification. In contrast, the CBS/New York Times and GSS/ANES measures are invalid as indicators of policy mood, and while they are valid indicators of self-identified ideology, they are highly unreliable. Although a measure of self-identified ideology can be useful for answering some research questions, we contend that an indicator of policy mood is more appropriate when studying the impact of public opinion on public policy, and we reiterate our confidence in using the Berry et al. (1998) measure for that purpose.

A Question of Justice: Equity in Environmental Litigation, 1974–1991

Substantial evidence suggests that minorities and the poor are exposed to disproportionately high levels of environmental risk. While there are numerous possible causes for inequities in the distribution of pollution, some researchers have identified actions of the federal judiciary as one element contributing to bias in environmental protection. Environmental justice advocates have suggested that penalties for violating environmental regulations are systematically lower in poor and minority areas, signaling that pollution is more acceptable in these areas. Using data from all civil cases filed under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act between 1974 and 1991, I test the proposition that penalties in these cases disadvantage poor and minority areas. The results from this analysis demonstrate that such penalties are not, in fact, smaller in these areas, suggesting that the judicial contributions to inequities in the distribution of environmental risk are negligible.

Assessing the Assumptions: A Critical Analysis of Agency Theory

Principal-agent (agency) theory dominates the bureaucratic politics literature. Yet there has been very little effort devoted to assessing the assumptions of agency theory since the model was imported from economics. This article examines five major assumptions underlying agency theory. The authors suggest that the effort to translate and apply assumptions from economics to the study of bureaucratic politics misses much that is important. They offer modifications to agency theory and a new direction for research.

Judicial Policymaking in Published and Unpublished Decisions: The Case of Environmental Civil Litigation

While recent research has improved dramatically our understanding of appellate judicial behavior in constitutional and criminal law, we know comparatively little about the majority of the decisions made by the federal judiciary: civil case decisions in federal district courts. Moreover, by relying upon published cases exclusively, this research may misrepresent those forces influencing the majority of judicial decisions. We address these shortcomings by outlining an integrated model of judicial policymaking and using this model to explain civil penalty severity in all environmental protection cases (published and unpublished) concluded in federal district courts from 1974-91. Additive and interactive heteroskedastic unit effect regression models demonstrate that penalty severity in environmental cases is affected by case and defendant characteristics, judicial policy preferences, the surrounding political context, and federal institutional actors. These models also demonstrate that political considerations are especially influential in published case decisions.

ISSUE DEFINITION AND THE POLITICS OF STATE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE POLICY ADOPTION

ABSTRACT The past decade has witnessed an explosion of research regarding environmental justice. Nearly all of this research, however, focuses on documenting the proximity and exposure of poor and minority communities to sources of environmental risk. Researchers have yet to assess systematically governmental responses to inequities in the distribution of this risk. Our paper begins to fill this gap by examining the policy responses of state governments to charges of environmental injustice. First, we provide a brief overview of environmental justice policy activity at all levels of government. Second, we discuss how issue definition may help determine the politics of policy adoption in the area of environmental justice, and develop a theory to explain these policy adoptions. Third, we model state policy activity using probit and ordered probit analysis, testing to see whether these responses are best explained by the severity of the environmental justice problem in the state, state racial diversity, state political capacity, or state administrative capacity and evaluating whether these results are more consistent with redistributive or protective regulatory policy. We close by discussing what our results imply for issue definition in environmental justice and the prospects of adequate state policy responses to inequities in the distribution of environmental risk.

A New Measure of State Government Ideology, and Evidence that Both the New Measure and an Old Measure Are Valid

We modify Berry et al.’s congressional-delegation-based measure of state government ideology to construct a new measure—which we call the state-legislative-based state government ideology measure—by relying on Shor and McCarty’s National Political Awareness Test common space estimates of the ideal points of U.S. state legislators. We conduct tests of convergent and construct validity for the two measures. We find that they correlate highly in each year for which the state-legislative-based indicator is available (1995–2008), and when observations are pooled across all years. We also replicate numerous published studies assessing the impact of state government ideology using each indicator of ideology and find that the two measures nearly always yield similar conclusions about the effect of government ideology. Because the state-legislative-based measure is based on more direct estimates of the ideal points of state legislators than is the congressional-delegation-based measure—which uses estimates of ideal points for members of Congress from the same state as a proxy—we believe the state-legislative-based measure is superior, and we recommend that scholars use it when it is available for the state-years being studied. Because our empirical evidence indicates that Berry et al.’s congressional-delegation-based measure is also valid—and it is available for a much longer period (annually beginning in 1960)—we advise that it be used when the state-legislative-based measure is not available.

Implementing Water Pollution Policy in the United States: Total Maximum Daily Loads and Collaborative Watershed Management

This article builds on a growing literature about collaborative environmental policymaking and assesses its use in relation to a major element of American water pollution policy—the total maximum daily load (TMDL) program. It extends current literature by tying collaborative policymaking to a key element of the federal Clean Water Act and by compiling information on the implementation of actions recommended in TMDL reports. We find that recommendations contained in TMDL reports are being implemented in many—but not all—of the TMDL-limited watersheds in Ohio and West Virginia. In addition, we find that the presence of a collaborative watershed group is positively associated with perceived progress in TMDL implementation. However, we also find that current efforts are far from sufficient, and we suggest that future efforts to understand collaborative watershed management should take account of TMDL processes and the federal policy structures in which they are embedded.