This study builds an interactive, quantitative model to explain U.S. foreign aid allocations. We develop an explanation based on Kingdon's multiple streams model to argue that aid decisions are the result of trade ties, socialist orientation, human needs, and the political ideologies of the administration and the senate interacting with adjustments to baseline funding. We find that there are significant conditional relationships between economic and security‐related assistance and our external and domestic variables with external variables generally being more important. The findings have implications for the study of public policy, the future of the foreign aid program, and theoretical attempts to develop more generalizable explanations of policy that encompass foreign and domestic issues.
The Clean Water State Revolving fund (CWSRF) program provides states with significant discretion to design, implement, and administer the program to meet their water quality needs. An important aspect of the program is the decision whether to leverage existing funds to generate additional capital for loans. This article seeks to explain the leveraging decision process, using three models as explanators. We conceive leveraging as a two-stage process-(1) the decision to leverage and (2) the decision of how much to leverage. By employing regression techniques, we find that the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) stated reasons for leveraging-environmental needs and demand for loansare not significant in the decision to leverage, although needs are significant at the second stage. Likewise, there is limited support for Lester's (1994) "capacity/commitment" model of environmental implementation. A third model employing a larger range of independent variables is the best predictor of both the decision to leverage and the amount of leveraging. Furthermore, the factors important at each stage of the decision process differ substantially, reinforcing our conception of a two-stage decision process.
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This paper examines the choices made by states in the implementation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Commonly known as TANF, the legislation gives states substantial control over the choices of benefits and sanctions they impose on program recipients. Using the models and theoretical explanations offered by Soss et al. (2001) and tested in a 49-state model, we test the degree to which these explanations hold when applied to a regional analysis of southern states. We find that the southern states are similar to the rest of the country when it comes to setting TANF benefit choices, although social control explanations are more important for southern states than for the rest of the nation.
Objective. The passage of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 has been one of the most hotly debated policy issues in recent memory. Southern state politicians seem particularly opposed to the law, but data suggest that citizens of southern states would benefit from the law. This article explores the choices made by states in terms of their acceptance and implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Healthcare Act (PPACA). Methods. Employing standard explanators of state policy choices, coupled with common indicators of public health, we examine a cross-sectional, 50-state regression model to determine whether southern states are different from other states in their policy choices in this arena. Results. We find that southern state choices are driven by control of the governor's mansion, while other factors drive non-South state choices. Conclusion. Our findings lend support to the notion of southern distinctiveness-southern states are driven more by politics, while non-South states are driven more by state circumstances.
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