Government & Politics Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2775
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Item Brings the Politics Back in:Political Incentive and Policy Distortion in China(2009) Mei, Ciqi; Pearson, Margaret M.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores why some commendable policy goals set by the central government of China have been left unmet at the local levels. Observing the significance of policy behaviors of local officials in producing policy outcomes in their jurisdictions, it attributes the apparent policy distortion to the "incorrect" incentives that local officials face now. Different from those focusing on the new economic incentive offered by the new decentralization arrangement during the reform era, this study looks into the nature of political incentives embedded in the oldtop-down cadre management system to see how local officials are "incentivized" politically to produce distorted policy outcomes. By investigating formal rules governing local chiefs' turnovers and actual past turnovers of the prefectural chiefs in Zhejiang and Hubei provinces during the reform era, this study finds out that the top-down political incentive is unbalanced by nature in that promotion criteria for local chiefs slant heavily to local chiefs' achievements (zhengji) in promoting local economic growth while their performance in other policy issues are neglected at large. It argues that such unbalanced nature of top-down political incentive has induced local officials to divert more efforts to pursue "mindless" economic growth at the cost of other commendable goals; policy distortion therefore emerges as the consequence of unbalanced political incentive. This dissertation continues to explain why the apparent policy distortion has persisted. By investigating five cases illustrating the way the center deals with local policy distortion, it argues that the central government is unwilling, unable and ineffective to sanction policy distortion because of the innate conflict between the indirect management tool the center uses and the multiple governance goals it desires for. The unbalanced nature of current top-down political incentive is therefore predetermined and policy distortion persists. This dissertation contributes to the general discussion on central-local dynamics in China by bringing back the top-down political incentives as the most important institutional cause for policy outcome. Policy implication of this study is clear: the problem of policy distortion could not be solved without reshuffling the top-down political incentive system.Item Greening Export Promotion: A Comparative Study of Environmental Standard-Setting for Export Credit Agencies(2008-01-15) Schaper, Marcus; Schreurs, Miranda A; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Export credit agencies (ECAs), private banks and the World Bank are all institutions which facilitate the construction of infrastructure projects in developing countries, which often have significant environmental ramifications. However, although all three types of institutions have also been known to acquiesce to public pressure to consider the extent of the environmental impact of their projects, export credit agencies were able to resist this pressure for 25 years, implementing environmental rules in their operations much later than did the World Bank and private banks, which introduced similar reforms within a much shorter period of time. This dissertation explains why ECAs as public institutions were less responsive to public demands than an international organization and even private banks. The answer to this puzzle is advanced in two dimensions: one dealing with the rule-making process and the other addressing the harmonization of policies among ECAs. In a cost-benefit analysis approach covering both dimensions, the political costs and benefits of changes to existing rules as well as the regulatory costs of these changes are considered. Political costs and benefits are considered to result from the effects of these rules on competing groups combined with the power these groups wield in the rule-making process. Regulatory costs result from changes in rules and procedures. They are especially pronounced when adaptations go beyond changes to regulatory targets and include modifications in regulations or even challenge meta-regulatory principles engrained in regulatory cultures. Diverging speed and scope of reform among these institutions is the consequence of variations in the power of competing demands made on them and variations in the institutional contexts enabling, channeling, and constraining the power of the groups making the demands. Adopted rules reflect these power relationships. ECA harmonization involves changes to pre-existing regulations and compromises on meta-regulatory principles. This kind of agreement is very difficult to achieve - if achieved at all. Institutional incompatibility between rules proposed by the United States and continental European regulatory cultures was a decisive obstacle to harmonization.Item Social Policy and Social Services in Women's Pregnancy Decision-Making: Political and Programmatic Implications(2006-08-01) Hussey, Laura; Gimpel, James; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation empirically evaluates the argument that welfare state expansion will reduce abortion. Its central question concerns the extent to which women's economic needs and the degree to which social services meet them influence their abortion decisions. It also investigates the characteristics and political behavior of pro-life, pro-social welfare Americans, the most likely targets of any effort to reframe welfare as a pro-life issue. To these ends, this project employs individual-level data from the National Election Study, the Fragile Families Study, and a survey of clients at Baltimore abortion providers and pregnancy centers. Other main data sources include state welfare policies and abortion rates, and neighborhood-level Census data linked to directories of child care and abortion providers. This project represents perhaps the first rigorous, social-scientific investigation of the link between economic assistance and abortion decisions. Its findings contribute to the literature on policy compliance and policy tools, and carry implications for social welfare politics and the composition of party coalitions. In many ways, data analyzed in this study align with the status quo of abortion and welfare policy and politics. Political debates over welfare are largely independent of political debates over abortion. Likewise, the cases in which the root issues associated with low-income women's abortion decisions could be exclusively solved by welfare policy are rare. Welfare policy appears to be an effective capacity-building tool with respect to abortion decisions for some women, in some ways, and in combination with other supports. The pro-life movement's current dominant approach to abortion policy appears to meet the movement's goal of reducing abortions more efficiently than a capacity-building approach. Investment in capacity-building policy or in political messages of that tone holds promise for progress toward their respective policy and political goals. On the other hand, expected gain is modest considering both of these efforts would stretch the limits of the possible in American politics.Item Principals, Agents, and Distant Markets: The Role of Information in Non-State Market-Driven Public Policy(2006-04-18) Cousins, Ken; Conca, Ken; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although non-state market-driven (NSMD) policies are increasingly promoted as more efficient and effective alternatives to state-based regulation, there have been few comparative studies of the two approaches, and none that focus on their relative reliability as a means of policy delivery. To facilitate comparison of state and non-state policy systems, I develop a two-part comparative framework that highlights key structural features expected to produce slippage (i.e., a divergence of principals' expectations and agents' actions). The first integrates new insights about principal-agent theory with formal network analysis, emphasizing internal structural factors that can be expected to impact communication between policymakers those to whom they delegate implementation responsibilities (i.e., structural complexity). The second focuses on exogenous factors; namely the tendency for communication errors to increase as people are separated by culture and experience (i.e., social distance). I apply this framework to compare state forest laws and two NSMD systems currently operating in Chile. Since NSMD authority - and persistence as market alternatives - are predicated on informed demand, I analyze media content throughout the global products chain, controlling for geography, culture, and epistemic community. I conclude that an important NSMD instrument (the chain-of-custody) weakens the reliability of such models as means of implementing public policy. Moreover, since the quality of communication about NSMD systems strongly declines with geographical distance, this suggests we may be replacing governmental systems of safeguarding public goods (however flawed) with alternatives that are likely to be less effective in the long run.Item Instrumental and Induced Cooperation: Environmental Politics in the South China Sea(2005-12-07) Chen, Sulan; Conca, Ken; Schreurs, Miranda; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the development of environmental cooperation in the South China Sea from the late 1970s when the first modest cooperative activities emerged among the small number of members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Since the 1990s, the membership of the community has broadened and its efforts have become more focused and energetic. Through a study of the interactions among the three main actors engaged in regional seas cooperation, namely the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), ASEAN, and China, this dissertation seeks to explain the evolution of cooperation in the highly contentious South China Sea; the changing motivations, strategies and roles of the main actors; and the level of success with environmental politics in the region. The study is driven by an intriguing puzzle. While the South China Sea remains one of the most volatile, dangerous and intractable areas, environmental cooperation has developed rapidly since 1990s. This is particularly puzzling when the geopolitical context, the large number of littoral states with a history of hostility among them, the domestic priorities these countries place on development, and their diplomatic preferences are taken into account. The key to the puzzle lies in UNEP's strategizing. UNEP utilized the United Nation's potential power of legitimization, independence and knowledge in areas that were not limited to the environment per se to induce cooperation among the littoral countries of this highly contentious region. UNEP has played both inductive and instrumental roles in promoting environmental cooperation in the South China Sea. On the one hand, by framing environmental protection as a neutral, non-political and "low politics issue", UNEP has been able to draw the littoral countries to the negotiating table. This has internationalized environmental protection in the South China Sea, making non-participation in these cooperative efforts problematic since it could reduce the international prominence of a country's territorial claims. In this sense, UNEP has been able to induce cooperation. On the other hand, UNEP has played an instrumental role in promoting regional cooperation by helping countries to address common marine environmental problems and promoting confidence building measures between ASEAN countries and China.Item Interjurisdictional Competition and Urban Area Fragmentation(2005-05-26) Aylward, Stephen Richard; Oppenheimer, Joe A.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The collective action problem in political science examines the circumstances under which groups can be successfully formed and maintained. While earlier generations of political scientists believed that groups developed in democracies because of the nature of democratic culture and procedures, Mancur Olson (The Logic of Collective Action, 1965) demonstrated that free-riding doomed many attempts at collective action unless selective benefits were granted to members--hence automobile association members receive free travel services, for example. Subsequent theories posited other reasons for successful collective action, such as communication, leadership and anticipated returns from joining. Tests of these hypotheses have taken place primarily in laboratory experiments. This study conducts a real-world natural experiment, examining interjurisdictional competition (IJC)--a government's offer of incentives for businesses to locate within its environs as opposed to the territories of others--in the setting of urbanized areas of various degrees of fragmentation (political organization as one, several or many local governments). If the free-rider hypothesis is true, IJC would increase with higher fragmentation. As the "free-rider" title suggests, IJC has been portrayed in game theory as a prisoners' dilemma. However, more detailed analysis in this study reveals several possible games, each posing a related collective action problem. Methodologically, additive indices from a nationwide survey of economic development practices measure the intensity of IJC effort. Urban area fragmentation is represented by indices using the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index method. The major hypothesis--IJC is a function of fragmentation--is analyzed using OLS regression. The regressions refute the free-rider hypothesis. The statistical analysis then examines the subsequent explanations of collective action. Anticipated returns cannot be substantiated; however, civil society-based indicators show communication and leadership to be causes of successful collective action. Finally, a case study of Hampton Roads (the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, Virginia metropolitan area) provides a historical narrative of the efficacy of communication and leadership in successful collective action as well as a possible example of game transition from the prisoners' dilemma to an assurance game.