Juliet F. Gainsborough

To Devolve or Not To Devolve? Welfare Reform in the States

This article analyzes variation in the degree to which states have responded to the devolution of welfare at the federal level by devolving authority over welfare policy to local government. I find that to the extent that states have devolved authority to lower levels of government, they tend to be states that already had a high degree of involvement of local government in welfare provision. In states without this record of local government involvement, the devolution that has occurred has not generated greater involvement of local government, but rather responsibility has been devolved to regional entities with ties to workforce development and with a substantial degree of business involvement. As states gain increasing authority over a redistributive policy, they may begin to treat it as a subset of a larger developmental policy—workforce development.

Bridging the City‐Suburb Divide: States and the Politics of Regional Cooperation

This article explores the politics of regional cooperation in Houston and in Los Angeles, focusing in particular on the role of the state in facilitating or inhibiting metropolitan-wide approaches to urban problems. In both California and Texas, the state can play a significant role in facilitating regional cooperation. However, important limits exist on the extent to which this happens. While generous annexation rules have facilitated regionalism in Houston, these rules are themselves only as strong as the political consensus to use and maintain them. Similarly, regional agencies in Los Angeles have been reluctant to fully utilize their powers in the face of strong political opposition from local governments. Finally, in both Houston and Los Angeles regionalism is more often defined in terms of systems maintenance functions rather than lifestyle functions. The use of state-level rules to promote regionalism may suffer from the same political liabilities as earlier attempts to form regional governments.

Voters in Context Cities, Suburbs, and Presidential Vote

Recent analysis of presidential politics has suggested that the attention to the rise of the suburban voter during the elections of the 1990s may have been misplaced. Researchers have argued that discussion of “soccer moms” misses the degree to which women differ in ways that have little to do with place, and that attention paid to suburbanites by Democrats misses the electoral importance of White, non-university-educated voters. This article argues that although these characteristics of voters are important for understanding their support for particular presidential candidates, so is their location. Holding individual characteristics constant, voters living in cities are more likely to support Democrats than their suburban counterparts. In addition, the relationship between policy preferences, party identification, and vote choice varies across cities and suburbs. City and suburban residents have different views on some issues and weight these views differently when deciding how to vote and which party to support.

Scandals, Lawsuits, and Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the U.S. States

In order to understand what factors drive child welfare policymaking, this research analyzes data on spending and legislation from the U.S. states over a three-year period. The key independent variables are scandal, litigation, federal oversight, and local discretion. While states that experience a scandal or a lawsuit do not increase their spending levels over previous years, they do enact more child welfare legislation. This raises the possibility that states engage in symbolic rather than substantive responses to child welfare crises. The administrative structure of the child welfare system also affects state policymaking.

VODYS: An Agent-Based Model for Exploring Campaign Dynamics

The literature on campaigns has considered a number of factors that affect whether and how someone votes, including demographics, campaign strategies, and social milieu. Understanding the dynamics of campaigns, however, is complicated by the fact that researchers cannot observe much of what happens during an election cycle. Typically, studies rely on voter recollections of conversations, contacts, and media exposure. In addition, because data are collected at discrete points in time, most models of voter turnout cannot capture the dynamic nature of an individual’s interactions during a campaign cycle. Agent-based models offer a way to overcome these data limitations by allowing us to model the dynamics of voter turnout over the course of many weeks as individuals move back and forth between home and work environments, interacting with neighbors and colleagues. In this article, the authors present an agent-based model of campaign dynamics, VODYS, and conduct three simulations to demonstrate the utility of agent-based models for exploring the effects of contact and context on political behavior.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES: CIVIC CULTURE AND PUBLIC POLICY IN MIAMI

ABSTRACT: In this article, I analyze civic culture in Miami and demonstrate the ways in which this civic culture shapes policy making in two different areas: economic development and public safety. I argue that racial, ethnic, and economic divisions shape conflict in both policy areas, although the divisions play out in different ways in each. At the same time, an elite-dominated power system and a reactive and fragmented decision-making system mean that policy outcomes generally reflect the preferences of economic interests in the city, even as demographic shifts have altered the composition of the local elite and the economic health of the city has improved significantly.

Business Organizations as Regional Actors: The Politics of Regional Cooperation in Metropolitan America

This paper assesses the role of business organizations in the creation of informal attempts at achieving regional cooperation in metropolitan areas, focusing in particular on coalition-building efforts in Los Angeles and Houston. To the extent that regional cooperation is seen as a necessary precondition to economic health in a metropolitan area, business interests are likely to provide support for regionalism and local political leaders are likely to look to business as an important coalition partner in any attempts at regional cooperation. Furthermore, to the extent that important regional businesses are often located in the city, business involvement may ensure that the regional approach places a heavy emphasis on center city health. At the same time, this vision of center city health embedded in regionalism is likely to reflect the traditional biases of business-centered urban policy. In addition, the role business plays will depend on the structure of the relevant business interests, the structure of other interests and institutions in the region, and the history of business involvement in the region.

RESILIENCE AND MIMETIC BEHAVIOR: ECONOMIC VISIONS IN THE GREAT RECESSION

ABSTRACT: The Great Recession was a moment of challenge for many regions and required that leaders reflect on their economic development strategies. Given the propensity of regions to adopt ideas and strategy “fads” that then inform policy debate, we seek to understand how two very different regions with different histories framed their responses to the recession. How did they conceptualize the economic challenge in their region? What did they envision as appropriate responses to this challenge? How did these visions relate to mimetic behavior of the past, in which largely uniform visions are adopted across diverse locations? Our findings show that economic development leaders in the Buffalo and Orlando regions advocated similar high-tech/biomedical strategies as a way to diversify their economies and make them more resilient or less vulnerable to future shocks. By conceptualizing economic diversification in such similar ways, despite substantial regional differences, this pursuit of resilience or decreased vulnerabilities through economic diversification appears highly similar to prior mimetic behaviors. We consider the implications of this finding for theories of adaptive resilience in which the focus is on economic diversification as part of resilient processes and behaviors, rather than as a fixed characteristic or end state of regions. As practiced in our case studies, diversification for the purpose of resilient outcomes differs substantially from theoretical arguments explaining adaptive resilience as both behavior and process. We caution that policy and planning visions of resilience may therefore represent yet another fad to be mimicked ad infinitum. Nevertheless, adaptive resilience as defined in the literature may still offer promise as a practical strategy—just not one that we yet observe in practice.

CAPACITY AND EQUITY: FEDERAL FUNDING COMPETITION BETWEEN AND WITHIN METROPOLITAN REGIONS

ABSTRACT: Major federal grant programs in areas such as transportation, neighborhood development, and education increasingly rely on competition to award funds. Yet the capacity to develop a competitive application for funds can vary widely, with some places lacking civic resources that contribute to successful grant applications. Moreover, not all civic actors and priorities have similar levels of involvement in grant seeking; in particular, low-income communities may be left out of the process. Our research examines how two forms of capacity—civic and equity advocacy—affect the distribution of federal transportation grants between and within metropolitan regions. We use multiple methods of analysis, including comparative case studies of transportation projects in Miami and Orlando, as well as a cross-sectional quantitative analysis of competitive transportation grants. First, we assess how civic capacity affects whether a region secured federal transportation funding and find that civic capacity is positively associated with receiving competitive transportation grants in both the case studies and quantitative analysis. Second, we examine whether equity advocacy capacity within a region is associated with grant project benefits for low-income communities. Based on the case studies, we find that equity advocacy capacity may be a key condition in order for grants to benefit low-income communities, and our exploratory quantitative analysis further supports for this finding. Overall our findings substantiate concerns that competition for federal awards could exacerbate disparities between and within regions.

Ballot box planning: Rail referenda implementation

Metropolitan areas in the United States frequently finance new rail lines with local option taxes, and, as a result, rail plans and associated taxes often come before voters as ballot measures. Existing research finds that rail ballot measures are more likely to pass when taxes are linked to specific projects and planning has broad stakeholder involvement. Such studies, however, have not examined to what extent agencies implement voter-approved projects. This research fills this gap and finds the interrelated variables of ballot measure provisions, campaign supporters and strategies, and planned rail projects contribute to varied progress toward implementation in Denver, Houston, and Miami. In addition, a fourth variable, transit agency capacity, is critical for implementation and for securing federal support. Because electoral strategies may contribute to or mitigate implementation challenges, rail and regional advocates should weigh the long-term consequences of ambitious rail plans and consider transit agency capacity.