The nation’s governors took strong and decisive action in responding to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, often directly affecting their local governments. These actions allow us to examine this question: Will governors’ actions in an unprecedented emergency situation centralize the authority of the state or rely on local governments to deal with localized problems? Additionally, what factors affect those decisions? We examine all governors’ executive orders affecting local governments in the first five months of the 2020 pandemic. We find that preemption did occur, especially in the early months of the pandemic. States that gave their localities more autonomy were associated with preemption throughout the pandemic; the governor’s party affiliation and her ideological match with local officials were associated with greater preemption in some phases of the pandemic but not others.
Voters often have difficulty making choices on the myriad state constitutional amendments they vote on each year. Without partisan cues, they turn to other sources for these low-salience, high complexity measures. One such source is newspaper endorsements. In this article, we look at newspaper endorsements of ballot measures in Florida over 20 years both on “no” votes and roll-off. We argue that endorsements' effect on “no” votes and roll-off differs in ways not previously appreciated. Newspaper endorsements have a positive impact on no votes, as expected from the information theory of voter participation. Endorsements have little impact on roll-off, which we posit is because roll-off voters are not likely to seek information from newspapers. Thus, newspaper endorsements serve to persuade, but not entice, voters to vote for ballot measures.
Agencies vary over which individuals have final authority to make decisions. But this authority differs in two important ways. While officials with final authority can be either political appointees or civil servants they can also be located anywhere within the agency's hierarchy. This begs the question of whether it is the nature of political appointees or the workflow of actions through an agency that are more responsible for inserting politics into agency decisions. This study addresses this question by employing new institutional data on all state and local air agencies to examine how decision-making authority competes or reinforces political appointee's efforts to shape agency actions. Our empirical exercise centers on the regulation of 16,000 major air pollution sources under the U.S. Clean Air Act. Our results suggest that while political appointees may influence regulatory output, centralized workflow, regardless of party, impedes output.
What determines social capital? Prior scholarship has examined what causes social capital to change contemporaneously but has yet to assess how history influenced social capital’s development. Building on previous research, which posits that former slaveholding regions exhibit lower levels of social capital, I test two competing explanations of how social capital developed. The inequality hypothesis argues that a reliance on plantation slavery created economic inequality, which in turn diminished modern social capital; the attitudinal hypothesis argues that the abolition of slavery influenced mass political attitudes, which have transmitted over generations and diminished modern social capital. To test which is correct, I examine slavery’s impact on social capital, measured as interpersonal trust, in two countries—the United States and Brazil. I find evidence that slavery is negatively associated with social capital; an individual’s support for interpersonal trust can decrease by as much as 18 percent in regions with high levels of former slavery. Moreover, it is the attitudinal hypothesis—not economic inequality—which associates with social capital’s decline.
Intergovernmental health policy has seen centralization and decentralization over the past forty years. The negotiations—and who wins and who loses—often depend on politics more than rational sorting of intergovernmental responsibilities. As in other policies, politics often trumps health policy—even where governors and state legislatures are of the same party as national leadership. Political rhetoric in 2017 once again calls for a larger role for states in possible reform of the nation’s health system, but nation-centered federalism persists. Congressional inaction, executive uncertainty, and partisan polarization can provide states the opportunity for leadership and innovation in health policy.
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