Sean Nicholson-Crotty

Ideology and Learning in Policy Diffusion

Scholarly research on the diffusion of policies across state governments focuses predominantly on the pathways of information between the states. Absent from this research is a thorough discussion of the content of the information state governments use when deciding whether or not to adopt an innovative policy. Given the importance of information in decision making, we develop a model that focuses attention on one type of information, namely, the ideological position of previous adopters. Although not the only piece of relevant information, we believe that states look to the previous adopters in an effort to minimize the uncertainty about how issues fit in the liberalconservative policy space. We test this theory in three different policy areas, finding consistent evidence that ideological cues help states learn about policy innovations while replicating important findings from previous research.

Managing upward, downward and outward: Networks, hierarchical relationships and performance

It is particularly difficult, but also valuable, to try to estimate the relative contributions of different managerial functions to the outcomes of public programs. Building from a formal treatment of public management and performance, this study explores this research task with empirical analyses of several hundred public organizations and their top managers over a five-year period. Using Moores distinction among managing upward toward political principals, downward toward organizational agents and outward toward the networked environment, we examine managerial impacts on ten different performance criteria. Findings validate the points that these three functions are distinct, public management has performance-relevant impacts and managerial networking outward can be an important contributor to the achievement of public objectives.

The Politics of Diffusion: Public Policy in the American States

Numerous studies have investigated the diffusion of public policies, often focusing on the ways in which learning among governments influences that process. We know relatively little, however, about those policies that diffuse very rapidly, rather than in the familiar S-shaped distribution associated with policy learning, or about what causes variation in temporal diffusion patterns. This study focuses on policy characteristics as a way to develop a priori expectations about the diffusion patterns of public policies. It argues that the salience and complexity of an issue condition lawmakers’ willingness to discount long-term consequences in favor of short-term electoral gain and, thus, to forgo policy learning in favor of immediate adoption. It tests those expectations in an analysis of 57 previously studied policies that diffused between 1850 and 2001 and finds evidence that salience increases the likelihood of rapid diffusion, particularly in noncomplex policies. The paper also explores the causal mechanisms behind these empirical findings in a case study of two policy adoption decisions in California.

Size doesn't matter: In defense of single-state studies

Despite the bias against such studies in our discipline, we argue that research designs focusing on a single state are sometimes preferable to those employing data from all 50 states. Single state studies are appropriate when the researcher wishes to generalize to a unit of analysis other than the states themselves, when conditions in a given state provide a unique opportunity for the most rigorous test of a hypothesis, and when the measurement advantages of a single-state study outweigh the costs of limited generalization. We draw on a range of literature to reinforce our primary contention, that it is soundness of theory and rigor of analysis, rather than the number of states, that makes research valid and important.

Estimating the Effects of No Child Left Behind on Teachers' Work Environments and Job Attitudes.

Several recent studies have examined the impacts of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on school operations and student achievement. We complement that work by investigating the law’s impacts on teachers’ perceptions of their work environments and related job attitudes, including satisfaction and commitment to remain in teaching. Using four waves of the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey, which cover the period from 1994 to 2008, we document overall trends in teacher attitudes across this time period and take advantage of differences in the presence and strength of prior state accountability systems and differences in likely impacts on high- and low-poverty schools to isolate NCLB effects. Perhaps surprisingly, we show positive trends in many work environment measures, job satisfaction, and commitment across the time period coinciding with the implementation of NCLB. We find, however, relatively modest evidence of an impact of NCLB accountability itself. There is some evidence that the law has negatively affected perceptions of teacher cooperation but positively affected feelings of classroom control and administrator support. We find little evidence that teacher job satisfaction or commitment has changed in response to NCLB.

The Impact of Sentencing Guidelines on State-Level Sanctions: An Analysis Over Time

This article argues that the conclusions of previous research on the impact of sentencing guidelines may be misleading due to the cross-sectional methodologies employed in these studies. This study will suggest that a theoretically driven longitudinal analysis of mandatory guidelines offers a more appropriate way to study these policies. Specifically, the author proposes that over time, guidelines that link sentencing decisions to correctional resources help to mitigate prison populations, while those that do not tend to contribute to growth in that area. An analysis of prison populations in the American states between 1975 and 1998 confirms this proposition. The results suggest that mandatory guidelines have increased both commitment and incarceration rates in states where sentencing decisions are not resource driven. Alternatively, when mandatory guidelines are linked to capacity and expenditures, these policies have had either a negative or an insignificant impact on prison populations.

Bureaucratic Representation, Distributional Equity, and Democratic Values in the Administration of Public Programs

Work on bureaucratic representation suggests that minority citizens benefit when the programs that serve them are administered by bureaucrats with similar characteristics. This literature has not sufficiently dealt with the long-standing concern that minority benefits may come at the expense of citizens from other groups, which some critics argue makes representative bureaucracy irreconcilable with democratic values. This article suggests distributional equity as a potential moderator of bureaucratic representation and as a potential source of reconciliation. It tests for the effects of representation under different distributional conditions in a policy area in which outcomes approach a zero-sum game. Analyses of a nationally representative sample of public organizations find a relationship between bureaucratic representation and citizen outcomes only in those instances where program benefits are being inequitably distributed to the relevant group. The article concludes with a discussion of the significa...

Industry Strength and Immigrant Policy in the American States

Despite the negative rhetoric surrounding the immigration issue, recent policy in many states has provided significant benefits to both legal and undocumented immigrants. Previous scholarship on state-level immigrant policy suggests that differences in the degree of public animosity toward this group may help to explain variation in state policy, but that work largely neglects the influence that industries that employ immigrants may have on state policy decisions. This essay develops the argument that industries that employ immigrants have a substantial impact on policy decisions in some states. It also suggests that the response of state policy makers to public pressure for more restrictive immigrant policy may be moderated by the political and economic importance of those industries. The authors test specific assertions drawn from this argument in an analysis of immigrant policy making in the American states between 2005 and 2007.

Fiscal Federalism and Budgetary Tradeoffs in the American States

Despite the massive scale of state-level budgeting, there currently exists no theoretically grounded and empirically sound examination of budgetary tradeoffs at this level of government. In order to provide such an examination, we extend a well-accepted approach to tradeoffs at the federal level in order to accommodate the unique intergovernmental aspects of state-level budgeting. We develop expectations that need for a good, ideology of state-level decisionmakers, and the relative amounts of federal grants received in each expenditure category all influence tradeoff decisions. We test these hypotheses in an analysis of budgetary decisions in all 50 states between 1971 and 1996.

The Many Faces of Span of Control: Organizational Structure Across Multiple Goals

As an extension of the existing literature on span-of-control relationships, we propose that public bureaucracies are typically faced with multiple goals creating potential conflicts due to structural choices. In other words, optimal span of control for one goal may not be optimal for another. Findings from an analysis of nearly 600 public bureaucracies provide some evidence that structural changes designed to improve performance on one goal may hinder performance on others. The results from our analysis also demonstrate a functional form for the span-of-control relationship that is very different from the one suggested by recent theoretical work.