John T. Scholz

Watershed Partnerships and the Emergence of Collective Action Institutions

This paper examines the emergence of local cooperative institutions--watershed partnerships-that resolve collective action problems involved in the management of natural resources. The political contracting approach to institutional supply suggests that watershed partnerships are more likely to emerge when potential benefits outweigh the transaction costs of developing and maintaining new institutions. We analyze the impact of social, political, economic, and ecological features of watersheds that affect benefits and transaction costs on the emergence of 958 watershed partnerships in the more than 2,100 watersheds in the United States. Our findings demonstrate that watershed partnerships are most likely to emerge in watersheds confronting severe pollution problems associated with agricultural and urban runoff, with low levels of command-and-control enforcement, and containing the resources to offset transaction costs.

Building Consensual Institutions: Networks and the National Estuary Program

Currently, many approaches to solving policy problems seek to create community-based, less coercive solutions that are creating the conditions for the birth of new regional governmental institutions. We argue that networks form the core of these emergent structures and that federal programs can play a positive role in developing local networks. Our empirical work compares networks in estuaries included in National Estuary Program with networks in comparable estuaries that were not. We find that the networks in NEP areas span more levels of government, integrate more experts into policy discussions, nurture stronger interpersonal ties between stakeholders, and create greater faith in the procedural fairness of local policy, thus laying the foundation for a new form of cooperative governance. A wide range of policy domains are characterized by political and administrative jurisdictions that are poorly suited for solving many emerging problems. This is particularly true in the area of environmental policy, where the physical boundaries of watersheds, airsheds, fishing grounds, and other natural systems typically cross local political and administrative boundaries. The need to deal with problems that transcend established governmental structures has intensified at the same time that the zeitgeist of American politics has increasingly spurned anything that smacks of “big government.” In turn, approaches that rely on hierarchical commandand-control are being replaced by policies that seek to create more community-based and less coercive solutions to policy problems. This has created the conditions for the birth of new regional governmental institutions that differ dramatically from traditional large-scale governmental organizations.

The “Criminology of the Corporation” and Regulatory Enforcement Strategies

Interviews mit staatlichen Aufsichtsamtern (regulatory agencies) und Wirtschaftsunternehmen in den USA fuhrten zu drei „Theorien“, warum Wirtschaftsunternehmen das Recht verletzen: wirtschaftliches Kalkul, grundsatzliche Ablehnung und Unkenntnis. Alle drei fuhren zu unterschiedlichen Steuerungsstrategien: Abschreckung, Verhandlung und Aufklarung. Durchsetzungsversuche, die nur auf einer der Theorien der Nichteinhaltung beruhen wurden, waren schadlich, wenn Abweichung aus einem der anderen Grunde erfolgt. Allerdings verhindern technische, burokratische und politische Zwange, das eine flexible Durchsetzung sich an den jeweiligen Nichteinhaltungs-Grunden orientiert.

Regulatory Enforcement in a Federalist System

Federal agencies integrate federal, state, and local political demands at the operational level of service delivery. They balance conflicting political demands and task requirements as they attempt to develop feasible enforcement routines capable of attracting support and resources in multiple arenas without undermining central support for budgetary resources and statutory authority. Our regression analysis of annual enforcement data from 1976 through 1983 for all 50 states indicates that even the relatively isolated enforcement procedures of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration respond significantly to state-level political and task differences. Enforcement activities responded most consistently to daily enforcement contacts with interest groups. State differences in task conditions—particularly workplace accident and unemployment rates—also elicited instrumental responses, while differences in the party and ideology of elected officials elicited more symbolic actions. State agencies, with their smaller size and greater flexibility, were even more responsive than the federal agency to political and task differences. This integrative function of bureaucracy needs further attention in democratic theory.

Cooperative Regulatory Enforcement and the Politics of Administrative Effectiveness.

Even when political interests control bureaucratic outputs, the control of policy outcomes is complicated by trade-offs between controllable versus effective implementation strategies. I use a nested game framework to explain why a cooperative strategy can increase enforcement effectiveness in the narrow administrative game and why principal-agent control problems and collective action problems associated with the strategy lead policy beneficiaries to oppose the effective strategy in the broader political games. Analyses of state-level Occupational Safety and Health Administration enforcement provide evidence that cooperation does enhance the impact of enforcement in reducing workplace injury rates but that policy beneficiaries oppose and sabotage cooperation. The interactions between administrative effectiveness and interest group politics in this and other implementation situations require that both be analyzed simultaneously, and the nested game framework can provide a systematic approach to such analyses.

Does regulatory enforcement work? A panel analysis of OSHA enforcement

This study tests the impact of OSHA enforcement on workplace injuries. Using data on injuries and OSHA inspections for a panel of 6,842 large manufacturing plants between 1979 and 1985, we find significant specific deterrence effects. Inspections imposing penalties induce a 22% decline in injuries in the inspected plant during the following few years. We suggest that narrow deterrence perspectives have led to unduly pessimistic assumptions about enforcement effectiveness and that a managerial attention model is more consistent with our findings. In a technical appendix we describe the Chamberlain technique, a powerful analytic approach for panel data that provides tests and corrections for potential biases endemic in enforcement studies, including unmeasured heterogeneity among units, serially correlated dependent variables, and endogeneity of inspections. We argue that more empirical studies of enforcement impacts are necessary to provide an appropriate perspective for descriptive and analytic studies appraising regulatory behavior.

Do Networks Solve Collective Action Problems? Credibility, Search, and Collaboration

Two competing theories suggest different ways in which networks resolve collective action problems: small, dense networks enhance credible commitments supportive of cooperative solutions, while large boundary-spanning networks enhance search and information exchange supportive of coordinated solutions. Our empirical study develops and tests the competing credibility and search hypotheses in 22 estuary policy arenas, where fragmentation of authority creates collective problems and opportunities for joint gains through collaboration. The results indicate that search rather than credibility appears to pose the greater obstacle to collaboration; well-connected centrally located organizations engage in more collaborative activities than those embedded in small, dense networks.

OSHA Enforcement and Workplace Injuries: A Behavioral Approach to Risk Assessment

We develop a model of risk assessment that incorporates assumptions from the behavioral theory of the firm into conventional expected utility models of compliance, and test the model using data on injuries and OSHA inspections for 6842 manufacturing plants between 1979 and 1985. Four hypotheses are supported-the specific deterrence effect of an inspection, the importance of lagged effects of general deterrence, the asymmetrical effects of probability and amount of penalty on injuries, and the tendency of injury rates to self-correct over a few years. The model estimates that a 10% increase in enforcement activities will reduce injuries by about 1% for large, frequently inspected firms. Prior analyses reporting lower impacts (Smith, 1979; Viscusi, 1986a) are replicated to distinguish between sampling and modeling differences. The results suggest that further compliance theory needs more detailed models of risk-assessment processes to be tested on samples of firms most affected by enforcement.

Street-Level Political Controls Over Federal Bureaucracy.

Local partisan activities of legislators and their electoral coalitions systematically influence field office activities of federal bureaucracies in their electoral districts. This alternative to centralized democratic controls over bureaucracy occurs because discretionary policy decisions made at the field office level are influenced by local resources generated through partisan activities. Our study of county-level Occupational Safety and Health Administration enforcement in New York (1976–85) finds that county, state, and federal elected officials influence local enforcement activities, with liberal, Democratic legislators associated with more active enforcement. The county political parties are most influential for activities with the most local discretion, while members of Congress are more influential for local activities more readily controlled by the national office.

Adaptive Political Attitudes: Duty, Trust, and Fear as Monitors of Tax Policy

Theory: Attitudes toward collective obligations adapt in ways that enhance both individual and social well-being. A citizens trust and duty toward the collective and fear of retribution change in response to changes in costs or benefits associated with the collective. Compliance with collective obligations (e.g., paying taxes) varies with these attitudes, producing an unexploitable strategy capable of maintaining cooperative solutions despite the conflict between collective benefits and individual incentives to free-ride. Hypothesis: Citizens monitor the net benefits gained from collectives by altering their attitudes of trust, duty, and fear. Method: We analyze the natural experiment created by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 to estimate the impact of individual tax changes on attitudes of upper-income taxpayers, using tax returns and two waves of survey data from a national panel of 292 taxpayers. Findings: Trust, duty, and fear increase significantly when taxes decrease, and decrease when taxes increase, thereby adapting as predicted to changes in net benefits. The magnitude of change suggests a modest rate of adaptation that may enhance the stability of cooperative equilibria.