Laura Langbein

The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Six, One, or None?

Abstract Aggregate indexes of the quality of governance, covering large samples of countries, have become popular in comparative political analysis. Few studies examine the validity or reliability of these indexes. To partially fill this gap, this study uses factor, confirmatory factor and path analysis to test both measurement and causal models of the six Worldwide Governance indicators. They purportedly measure distinct concepts of control of corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness, rule quality, political stability, and voice and accountability. Rather than distinguishing among aspects of the quality of governance, we find that they appear to be measuring the same broad concept.

Why Do White Americans Support the Death Penalty

This article explores the roots of white support for capital punishment in the United States. Our analysis addresses individual-level and contextual factors, paying particular attention to how racial attitudes and racial composition influence white support for capital punishment. Our findings suggest that white support hinges on a range of attitudes wider than prior research has indicated, including social and governmental trust and individualist and authoritarian values. Extending individual-level analyses, we also find that white responses to capital punishment are sensitive to local context. Perhaps most important, our results clarify the impact of race in two ways. First, racial prejudice emerges here as a comparatively strong predictor of white support for the death penalty. Second, black residential proximity functions to polarize white opinion along lines of racial attitude. As the black percentage of county residents rises, so too does the impact of racial prejudice on white support for capital punishment.

Money and Access: Some Empirical Evidence

Political scientists have pointed out that access is an important motivation for campaign contributions, but their evidence to date is based largely on case study observations, on the opinions of participants and observers, and on inferences from indirect quantitative evidence. This paper provides more direct quantitative evidence on the topic, using data from the Commission on Administrative Review of the House of Representatives in the 95th Congress. It uses tobit analysis to estimate the impact of PAC campaign contributions and several other independent variables, including indicators of a members tenure, legislative position, and electoral security, on the number of minutes that members spent in their office with representatives of organized interest groups during a typical workweek. The results suggest, but do not prove, that money does indeed buy access.

Economics, Public Service Motivation, and Pay for Performance: Complements or Substitutes?

ABSTRACT This article summarizes what we can learn from personnel economics about the likely empirical veracity of the statements regarding the efficacy of pay for performance in the public sector: If pay is based on public service performance, and if people work for pay, then pay for performance will align motivation and performance. I argue instead that the predominant conclusion from the economics literature, which focuses on the private sector, is that in many contexts usually thought to characterize public as well as private sector employment, motivation, pay, and performance are more likely to be substitutes at critical margins. The consequence is that performance pay may have unintended adverse consequences. It is not widely used in many complex private sector organizations and probably should not be widely used in similar public sector operations.

PACs, lobbies and political conflict: The case of gun control

Previous research has shown that PAC contributions from the National Rifle Association as well as letters and lobbying by Handgun Control, Inc. significantly affected Congressional voting on the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, holding constant ideology, party, constituency characteristics, and a proxy for prior position on the issue. Using data from that study, this paper shows that contributions have a somewhat different effect than lobbying. Contributions from NRA were primarily targeted at NRA supporters and had the net effect of making the progunners even more so. Contributions from Handgun Control, while they did not significantly reinforce the proclivities of the gun controllers, were directed only at that group. At least in this case, money appears to exacerbate conflict. By contrast, the police lobby directed its attention at both gun controllers and pro-gunners; the lobby effectively induced pro-gunners to moderate their position.These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that PACs associated with membership groups, which seek to retain members whose primary reason for joining is self-expression, are likely to allocate monies in such a way as to exacerbate policy conflict and to allocate lobbying activities so as to induce moderation. Nonetheless, because the gun issue is unidimensional, the finding that money fosters conflict implies only that Congress will be noisy, but not in disequilibrium.

Ownership, empowerment, and productivity: Some empirical evidence on the causes and consequences of employee discretion

Abstract This paper uses a sample of professional engineers employed in the public and private sector to investigate the effect of sector employment, indicators of task complexity, organization size, number of rules, importance, and attentiveness and agreement among various principals (customers or clients, peers, mid- and top-level management, and politicians) on both employee discretion and a subjective measure of employee productivity. The results show that disagreement among important and attentive proximate principals (mid-level managers) expands discretion, but disagreement among important and attentive distant principals (top executives and politicians) reduces discretion. Sector has no direct or indirect effect on discretion. When customers or clients and peers are important and attentive principals, discretion increases, and so does productivity. Monitoring by mid-level management has no effect on productivity. Because disagreement among distant principals is greater in the public sector, devolution of authority alone is unlikely to increase public sector productivity.

Sports in School: Source of Amity or Antipathy?

Objectives. Previous research looks at the impact of school sports on participants’ delinquency, but not at the impact on delinquency in schools; further, it does not control for school size or for unobserved school‐level variables. This research fills that gap. It uses social capital theory to frame the impact of sports programs on both participants and nonparticipants. Social capital theory predicts that group cohesion will increase cooperative, pro‐social behavior among those in the group; however, it can also increase uncooperative, antisocial behavior among those not in the group—particularly when in‐group membership is seen as desirable. Social capital theory also predicts that larger schools will have more disturbances, but subgroups in large schools will reduce these adverse effects. Methods. The hypotheses were tested by looking at the relation between disturbances and interscholastic sports programs in Montgomery County, Maryland high schools. Using three years of data on each high school in the county, the study regresses disturbances on sports participation, holding constant demographic variables, school size, and a dummy variable for each school. Results. Larger schools have more disturbances, but bigger interscholastic sports programs mitigate these effects. Conclusions. The policy implications suggest that to foster cooperative behavior in high schools, it might be wise to limit school size, or to foster participation in varsity sports as school size increases.

Rethinking ward and at-large elections in cities: Total spending, the number of locations of selected city services, and policy types

This study shows why the conventional wisdom that cities with ward elections will spend more than cities with at-large elections is too simple and explains why the empirical findings have been so mixed. Ward vs. at-large elections will only affect the policy choices of city councils when the policy choice is one that is decided by the median legislator. When the policy is one that is decided by the rule of universalism, the relevant institutional determinant of choice is the number of legislators, and not whether they are elected at-large or by wards. Universalism is politically rational for divisible policies that all constituents deisre (“pork”); the majority rule equilibrium (at the median) is more rational for divisible policies that are generally desired, but only when they are not located too close to any one constituents home (“LULUs”). The expectation then is that larger city councils will provide more parks than smaller ones, and that election by wards or at-large will be irrelevant for these policy choices. By contrast, community centers and libraries are thought to be generally desireable, but not when they are in ones backyard. The size of the council is not predicted to be relevant for these decisions, but councils elected by wards are more likely to have a median legislator who represents geographically concentrated constituents, such as the minority poor; their preferences will have a bigger impact on councils elected by wards than on councils elected at large. Data from a sample of council-manager cities with weak mayors who have no veto uphold these hypotheses.

Implementation, Negotiation and Compliance in Environmental and Safety Regulation

Using a formal model of a regulated firms decision to comply with regulatory standards, we find that decisions to comply depend not only on the level of the standard, but also on how the regulatory agency implements the standards. Firms will avoid immediate compliance if they believe that it is likely to be cheaper to negotiate a compliance agreement with the enforcement agency. At the least, negotiation delays compliance costs; at best, it reduces compliance costs. The model reveals how the availability of negotiated compliance affects the relationship between a firms decision to comply and agency decisions to alter standards, fines, negotiation costs, targeting policies, and the amount of delay. It also demonstrates that determinations by a given firm to comply or not with regulations may be based on hidden benefits of participation in a regulatory regime, such as the receipt of information on new technology and management innovation. Negotiated enforcement is ubiquitous because it helps regulatory agencies as well as regulated firms. Benefit-cost analyses of regulatory policies that ignore negotiation costs and eventual compliance levels are likely to be misleading as a result.

Performance Management, High-Powered Incentives, and Environmental Policies in China

ABSTRACT China has a highly centralized bureaucracy that is no longer strictly monitored by political loyalty but by governance performance (e.g., economic growth), rewarded with promotion and monetary incentives. In the early 2000s, environmental criteria were added to this system. As part of this effort, a high-powered performance management system was introduced in 2006. It held high-level provincial officials, who are part of the nomenklatura, personally responsible for meeting specific emissions targets. Using data from China Statistics Yearbooks and several official news archives, the empirical results indicate that the implementation of the new performance management system reduced emissions only for air pollutants, which are the most publicly visible among the targeted pollutants. Water pollution, which is less visible but also a mandated target, was unaffected. Emissions of soot, an untargeted pollutant, were also unaffected. The findings imply that, even in centrally managed systems like China, compliance with a high-stakes reward for measured performance is not universal.