Robert C Lowry
Biographic Data
| ID | 1098192 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert C Lowry |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert C |
| FAMILY NAME | Lowry |
| SIGNATURE | LOWRY R C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1330-4762 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 571 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Subsidizing Institutions vs. Outputs vs. Individuals
Governments that want to subsidize goods or services can delegate responsibility for production to a public agency as part of its overall mission, subsidize production of specific outputs, or subsidize specific beneficiaries of excludable goods and services. For public postsecondary education, the corresponding funding mechanisms are operating appropriations that delegate authority to choose outputs and beneficiaries to public colleges and univer…
Analyzing Campaign Contributions in Context
Political campaign contributions are not made in a vacuum. Rather, contributions from individuals are affected by the political and legal environment experienced by potential donors. I study itemized contributions to candidates, parties, and political action committees (PACs) aggregated by congressional district for 1994-2006. The timing and competitiveness of presidential, congressional, and even state elections affect the expected benefits and …
Mobilizing Money
A great deal of research focuses on contributions by political action committees (PACs) to candidates, but PACs are also institutional mechanisms for mobilizing contributions by individuals. Restrictions on the ability of PACs sponsored by businesses, trade associations, and labor unions to solicit contributions and the private benefits of contributing imply that these PACs are likely to mobilize donors who do not otherwise contribute to politica…
Public Welfare Spending and Private Social Services in U.S. States
Social services in the United States are supplied by both the public and private sectors. Previous political science research has focused on public transfers or Medicaid; I study “Other Public Welfare” programs that include contracts and grants to private social services providers, focusing on the relationship between the two sectors. My results imply that an increase in either Other Public Welfare spending or private individual and family servic…
Transparency and Accountability
Recent formal models of accountability allow us to make different conditional predictions about how transparency affects voters’ willingness to re-elect incumbents and acceptance of higher taxes. We review two models and investigate empirical implications derived from or related to them, using panel data from 1972—2000 for U.S. state budget process transparency, gubernatorial elections, and tax increases in a small structural model. We do not fin…
Reauthorization of the Federal Higher Education Act and Accountability for Student Learning
An important feature of President George W. Bush's education policy was the promotion of accountability by requiring the collection and dissemination of data on student learning outcomes. In the case of primary-secondary education, this resulted in the No Child Left Behind act. When the Department of Education sought to initiate a rulemaking on measuring student achievement in postsecondary institutions, this was rebuffed by Congress in 2007 and …
Rules and Restraint
Journal Article Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions by David M. Primo Get access Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions by David M. Primo. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2007. 216 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $20.00. Robert C. Lowry Robert C. Lowry The University of Texas at Dallas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science…
The Political Economy of Public Universities in the United States
Scholars of state politics and policy have devoted little attention to the public universities where so many of them work. Public higher education is organized at the state level, and its funding and governance have been debated at length in many states in recent years. Moreover, these universities provide opportunities for contributions to a variety of theoretically-grounded research, including the decision to make or buy public services, princi…
Explaining the Variation in Organized Civil Society Across States and Time
I analyze the determinants of the numbers of tax-exempt cultural and historical, sports and recreation, civil rights, and environment and conservation organizations in American states circa 1990 and 1998. Controlling for state population, aggregate measures of educational attainment and religious affiliation have substantial and statistically significant effects across all four types of organizations and for both philanthropic and nonphilanthropi…
Organized Interests and the Politics of Federal Discretionary Grants
Despite their importance in theories of distributive spending, interest groups and other private and public organizations are largely absent from empirical research on the allocation of federal spending to subnational jurisdictions. We find that organized interests are significant determinants of the allocation of federal discretionary grants to states for 1991 through 1998 across seven policy areas. In contrast, we find only meager effects for s…
What Explains Credible Apologies? A Comment on Yap' ‘Non-Electoral Responsiveness Mechanisms
In a recent issue of this Journal Professor Yap asks whether and how governments in what she calls ‘less-democratic’ countries, that is those where elections are uncompetitive due to a lack of democratic safeguards or opposition parties, are held accountable for the effects of their policies on economic performance. She argues that governments in these countries have an interest in avoiding strife and inducing private actors to provide resources …
What Explains Credible Apologies? A Comment on Yaps Non-Electoral Responsiveness Mechanisms
In a recent issue of this Journal Professor Yap asks whether and how governments in what she calls ‘less-democratic’ countries, that is those where elections are uncompetitive due to a lack of democratic safeguards or opposition parties, are held accountable for the effects of their policies on economic performance. She argues that governments in these countries have an interest in avoiding strife and inducing private actors to provide resources …
Party Differences in State Budget Outcomes Are There After All
Alt and Lowry (2000) show that Democrats generally target more of state income for public budgets than do Republicans, though exact party positions vary from state to state, and unified governments adjust faster than divided. McAtee, Yackee, and Lowery (2003) question these results. However, their estimated revenue changes ignore income shares, usually set independent variables equal to sample rather than subsample means, and omit some fixed effe…
Governmental Structure, Trustee Selection, and Public University Prices and Spending
estimate the effects of multiple instruments for exercising political control over public university prices and spending. I find that public universities located in states with governmental structures that enhance political control and universities whose trustees are selected by nonacademic stakeholders charge significantly lower prices than universities located in states with decentralized systems
A Dynamic Model of State Budget Outcomes under Divided Partisan Government
This article analyzes the politics of fiscal adjustment in a bicameral system when parties prefer different scales of taxes and public spending. Data from 33 non-southern American states for the years 1952-1995 show that Democrats nearly everywhere target a larger share of state incomes for the public budget than Republicans, though exact party positions vary from state to state. Republicans react more strongly to budget surpluses by reducing rev…
Foundation Patronage toward Citizen Groups and Think Tanks
Private foundations are important patrons for nonprofit organizations engaged in research, education, and policy advocacy, but little is known about the allocation of grants to specific organizations. Company-sponsored foundations that fund environmental citizen groups and think tanks seek to purchase good will, while many independent foundations fund specific programs. Given foundation objectives, the allocation of grants depends on recipient or…
Religion and the demand for membership in environmental citizen groups
All Hazardous Waste Politics is Local
The combined effects of federalism and interest group pluralism pose particularly difficult problems for hazardous waste siting and cleanup decisions. Most national environmental groups have only limited involvement in local hazardous waste politics, while local grass‐roots advocates have very different interests and sometimes are pitted against one another. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy recently have begun…
Fiscal Policy Outcomes and Electoral Accountability in American States
Clear fiscal policy effects appear in American state gubernatorial and legislative elections between 1968 and 1992, independent of the effects of incumbency, coattails, term limits, and macroeconomic conditions. The results show that accountability is generally stronger following a period of unified party control than under divided government. Voter reactions to taxes and spending relative to the state economy are conditional on expectations, whi…
Setting National Priorities
This book will serve as a guide for understanding and evaluating proposals of the next Congress and the Clinton administration. Edited by Robert D. Reischauer, one of the nation's most noted budget experts, the book covers such critical issues as whether any measures to stimulate economic growth can also reduce the budget deficit, how to reduce domestic discretionary spending, how to restructure medicare, how much to lower the safety net, how to …
The Private Production of Public Goods
I reformulate Mancur Olson's by-product theory of collective action as a theory of resource allocation by interest group managers. I then test alternative hypotheses about managers' objectives drawn from exchange theory and commitment theory. Financial data for 16 environmental citizen groups show that the production of public goods is subsidized by other activities, and revenues from member dues are not affected by spending on public goods. Spen…
Economic Politics
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
The publication of the latest rating of doctoral programs by the National Research Council (NRC 1995) has sparked great interest among university faculties. For some, the results vindicated years of focused efforts to improve their department's capacity, performance, and image. For others, it generated frustration because of the small change in scores from previous NRC rankings. And for still others, the NRC report occasioned soul-searching or de…
Nonprofit Organizations and Public Policy
Private, nonprofit organizations constitute a growing portion of the United States economy that has, until recently, escaped significant attention by many scholars interested in public policy. The papers in this symposium address four types of interactions between nonprofits and public policymakers-service provision and program implementation, policy advocacy, public policies toward nonprofits, and public/private partnerships. In addition, many p…
Divided Government, Fiscal Institutions, and Budget Deficits
Does partisan control of American state government have systematic effects on state spending and taxing levels? Does divided control affect the government's ability to make hard decisions? Do institutional rules like legal deficit carryover restrictions matter? Using a formal model of fiscal policy to guide empirical analysis of data covering the American states from 1968 to 1987, we conclude that (1) aggregate state budget totals are driven by d…
Divided Government, Fiscal Institutions, and Budget Deficits
Does partisan control of American state government have systematic effects on state spending and taxing levels? Does divided control affect the government's ability to make hard decisions? Do institutional rules like legal deficit carryover restrictions matter? Using a formal model of fiscal policy to guide empirical analysis of data covering the American states from 1968 to 1987, we conclude that (1) aggregate state budget totals are driven by d…
Fiscal Policy Outcomes and Electoral Accountability in American States
Clear fiscal policy effects appear in American state gubernatorial and legislative elections between 1968 and 1992, independent of the effects of incumbency, coattails, term limits, and macroeconomic conditions. The results show that accountability is generally stronger following a period of unified party control than under divided government. Voter reactions to taxes and spending relative to the state economy are conditional on expectations, whi…
A Dynamic Model of State Budget Outcomes under Divided Partisan Government
This article analyzes the politics of fiscal adjustment in a bicameral system when parties prefer different scales of taxes and public spending. Data from 33 non-southern American states for the years 1952-1995 show that Democrats nearly everywhere target a larger share of state incomes for the public budget than Republicans, though exact party positions vary from state to state. Republicans react more strongly to budget surpluses by reducing rev…
Governmental Structure, Trustee Selection, and Public University Prices and Spending
estimate the effects of multiple instruments for exercising political control over public university prices and spending. I find that public universities located in states with governmental structures that enhance political control and universities whose trustees are selected by nonacademic stakeholders charge significantly lower prices than universities located in states with decentralized systems
Organized Interests and the Politics of Federal Discretionary Grants
Despite their importance in theories of distributive spending, interest groups and other private and public organizations are largely absent from empirical research on the allocation of federal spending to subnational jurisdictions. We find that organized interests are significant determinants of the allocation of federal discretionary grants to states for 1991 through 1998 across seven policy areas. In contrast, we find only meager effects for s…
Transparency and Accountability
Recent formal models of accountability allow us to make different conditional predictions about how transparency affects voters’ willingness to re-elect incumbents and acceptance of higher taxes. We review two models and investigate empirical implications derived from or related to them, using panel data from 1972—2000 for U.S. state budget process transparency, gubernatorial elections, and tax increases in a small structural model. We do not fin…
Foundation Patronage toward Citizen Groups and Think Tanks
Private foundations are important patrons for nonprofit organizations engaged in research, education, and policy advocacy, but little is known about the allocation of grants to specific organizations. Company-sponsored foundations that fund environmental citizen groups and think tanks seek to purchase good will, while many independent foundations fund specific programs. Given foundation objectives, the allocation of grants depends on recipient or…
Explaining the Variation in Organized Civil Society Across States and Time
I analyze the determinants of the numbers of tax-exempt cultural and historical, sports and recreation, civil rights, and environment and conservation organizations in American states circa 1990 and 1998. Controlling for state population, aggregate measures of educational attainment and religious affiliation have substantial and statistically significant effects across all four types of organizations and for both philanthropic and nonphilanthropi…
The Private Production of Public Goods
I reformulate Mancur Olson's by-product theory of collective action as a theory of resource allocation by interest group managers. I then test alternative hypotheses about managers' objectives drawn from exchange theory and commitment theory. Financial data for 16 environmental citizen groups show that the production of public goods is subsidized by other activities, and revenues from member dues are not affected by spending on public goods. Spen…
All Hazardous Waste Politics is Local
The combined effects of federalism and interest group pluralism pose particularly difficult problems for hazardous waste siting and cleanup decisions. Most national environmental groups have only limited involvement in local hazardous waste politics, while local grass‐roots advocates have very different interests and sometimes are pitted against one another. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy recently have begun…
Party Differences in State Budget Outcomes Are There After All
Alt and Lowry (2000) show that Democrats generally target more of state income for public budgets than do Republicans, though exact party positions vary from state to state, and unified governments adjust faster than divided. McAtee, Yackee, and Lowery (2003) question these results. However, their estimated revenue changes ignore income shares, usually set independent variables equal to sample rather than subsample means, and omit some fixed effe…
Reauthorization of the Federal Higher Education Act and Accountability for Student Learning
An important feature of President George W. Bush's education policy was the promotion of accountability by requiring the collection and dissemination of data on student learning outcomes. In the case of primary-secondary education, this resulted in the No Child Left Behind act. When the Department of Education sought to initiate a rulemaking on measuring student achievement in postsecondary institutions, this was rebuffed by Congress in 2007 and …
Subsidizing Institutions vs. Outputs vs. Individuals
Governments that want to subsidize goods or services can delegate responsibility for production to a public agency as part of its overall mission, subsidize production of specific outputs, or subsidize specific beneficiaries of excludable goods and services. For public postsecondary education, the corresponding funding mechanisms are operating appropriations that delegate authority to choose outputs and beneficiaries to public colleges and univer…
Mobilizing Money
A great deal of research focuses on contributions by political action committees (PACs) to candidates, but PACs are also institutional mechanisms for mobilizing contributions by individuals. Restrictions on the ability of PACs sponsored by businesses, trade associations, and labor unions to solicit contributions and the private benefits of contributing imply that these PACs are likely to mobilize donors who do not otherwise contribute to politica…
Religion and the demand for membership in environmental citizen groups
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
The publication of the latest rating of doctoral programs by the National Research Council (NRC 1995) has sparked great interest among university faculties. For some, the results vindicated years of focused efforts to improve their department's capacity, performance, and image. For others, it generated frustration because of the small change in scores from previous NRC rankings. And for still others, the NRC report occasioned soul-searching or de…
Analyzing Campaign Contributions in Context
Political campaign contributions are not made in a vacuum. Rather, contributions from individuals are affected by the political and legal environment experienced by potential donors. I study itemized contributions to candidates, parties, and political action committees (PACs) aggregated by congressional district for 1994-2006. The timing and competitiveness of presidential, congressional, and even state elections affect the expected benefits and …
Setting National Priorities
This book will serve as a guide for understanding and evaluating proposals of the next Congress and the Clinton administration. Edited by Robert D. Reischauer, one of the nation's most noted budget experts, the book covers such critical issues as whether any measures to stimulate economic growth can also reduce the budget deficit, how to reduce domestic discretionary spending, how to restructure medicare, how much to lower the safety net, how to …
Nonprofit Organizations and Public Policy
Private, nonprofit organizations constitute a growing portion of the United States economy that has, until recently, escaped significant attention by many scholars interested in public policy. The papers in this symposium address four types of interactions between nonprofits and public policymakers-service provision and program implementation, policy advocacy, public policies toward nonprofits, and public/private partnerships. In addition, many p…
Divided Government, Fiscal Institutions, and Budget Deficits
Does partisan control of American state government have systematic effects on state spending and taxing levels? Does divided control affect the government's ability to make hard decisions? Do institutional rules like legal deficit carryover restrictions matter? Using a formal model of fiscal policy to guide empirical analysis of data covering the American states from 1968 to 1987, we conclude that (1) aggregate state budget totals are driven by d…
Nonprofit Organizations and Public Policy
Private, nonprofit organizations constitute a growing portion of the United States economy that has, until recently, escaped significant attention by many scholars interested in public policy. The papers in this symposium address four types of interactions between nonprofits and public policymakers-service provision and program implementation, policy advocacy, public policies toward nonprofits, and public/private partnerships. In addition, many p…
Economic Politics
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
The publication of the latest rating of doctoral programs by the National Research Council (NRC 1995) has sparked great interest among university faculties. For some, the results vindicated years of focused efforts to improve their department's capacity, performance, and image. For others, it generated frustration because of the small change in scores from previous NRC rankings. And for still others, the NRC report occasioned soul-searching or de…
Setting National Priorities
This book will serve as a guide for understanding and evaluating proposals of the next Congress and the Clinton administration. Edited by Robert D. Reischauer, one of the nation's most noted budget experts, the book covers such critical issues as whether any measures to stimulate economic growth can also reduce the budget deficit, how to reduce domestic discretionary spending, how to restructure medicare, how much to lower the safety net, how to …
The Private Production of Public Goods
I reformulate Mancur Olson's by-product theory of collective action as a theory of resource allocation by interest group managers. I then test alternative hypotheses about managers' objectives drawn from exchange theory and commitment theory. Financial data for 16 environmental citizen groups show that the production of public goods is subsidized by other activities, and revenues from member dues are not affected by spending on public goods. Spen…
Religion and the demand for membership in environmental citizen groups
All Hazardous Waste Politics is Local
The combined effects of federalism and interest group pluralism pose particularly difficult problems for hazardous waste siting and cleanup decisions. Most national environmental groups have only limited involvement in local hazardous waste politics, while local grass‐roots advocates have very different interests and sometimes are pitted against one another. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy recently have begun…
Fiscal Policy Outcomes and Electoral Accountability in American States
Clear fiscal policy effects appear in American state gubernatorial and legislative elections between 1968 and 1992, independent of the effects of incumbency, coattails, term limits, and macroeconomic conditions. The results show that accountability is generally stronger following a period of unified party control than under divided government. Voter reactions to taxes and spending relative to the state economy are conditional on expectations, whi…
Foundation Patronage toward Citizen Groups and Think Tanks
Private foundations are important patrons for nonprofit organizations engaged in research, education, and policy advocacy, but little is known about the allocation of grants to specific organizations. Company-sponsored foundations that fund environmental citizen groups and think tanks seek to purchase good will, while many independent foundations fund specific programs. Given foundation objectives, the allocation of grants depends on recipient or…
A Dynamic Model of State Budget Outcomes under Divided Partisan Government
This article analyzes the politics of fiscal adjustment in a bicameral system when parties prefer different scales of taxes and public spending. Data from 33 non-southern American states for the years 1952-1995 show that Democrats nearly everywhere target a larger share of state incomes for the public budget than Republicans, though exact party positions vary from state to state. Republicans react more strongly to budget surpluses by reducing rev…
Governmental Structure, Trustee Selection, and Public University Prices and Spending
estimate the effects of multiple instruments for exercising political control over public university prices and spending. I find that public universities located in states with governmental structures that enhance political control and universities whose trustees are selected by nonacademic stakeholders charge significantly lower prices than universities located in states with decentralized systems
Party Differences in State Budget Outcomes Are There After All
Alt and Lowry (2000) show that Democrats generally target more of state income for public budgets than do Republicans, though exact party positions vary from state to state, and unified governments adjust faster than divided. McAtee, Yackee, and Lowery (2003) question these results. However, their estimated revenue changes ignore income shares, usually set independent variables equal to sample rather than subsample means, and omit some fixed effe…
Organized Interests and the Politics of Federal Discretionary Grants
Despite their importance in theories of distributive spending, interest groups and other private and public organizations are largely absent from empirical research on the allocation of federal spending to subnational jurisdictions. We find that organized interests are significant determinants of the allocation of federal discretionary grants to states for 1991 through 1998 across seven policy areas. In contrast, we find only meager effects for s…
What Explains Credible Apologies? A Comment on Yap' ‘Non-Electoral Responsiveness Mechanisms
In a recent issue of this Journal Professor Yap asks whether and how governments in what she calls ‘less-democratic’ countries, that is those where elections are uncompetitive due to a lack of democratic safeguards or opposition parties, are held accountable for the effects of their policies on economic performance. She argues that governments in these countries have an interest in avoiding strife and inducing private actors to provide resources …
What Explains Credible Apologies? A Comment on Yaps Non-Electoral Responsiveness Mechanisms
In a recent issue of this Journal Professor Yap asks whether and how governments in what she calls ‘less-democratic’ countries, that is those where elections are uncompetitive due to a lack of democratic safeguards or opposition parties, are held accountable for the effects of their policies on economic performance. She argues that governments in these countries have an interest in avoiding strife and inducing private actors to provide resources …
Explaining the Variation in Organized Civil Society Across States and Time
I analyze the determinants of the numbers of tax-exempt cultural and historical, sports and recreation, civil rights, and environment and conservation organizations in American states circa 1990 and 1998. Controlling for state population, aggregate measures of educational attainment and religious affiliation have substantial and statistically significant effects across all four types of organizations and for both philanthropic and nonphilanthropi…
The Political Economy of Public Universities in the United States
Scholars of state politics and policy have devoted little attention to the public universities where so many of them work. Public higher education is organized at the state level, and its funding and governance have been debated at length in many states in recent years. Moreover, these universities provide opportunities for contributions to a variety of theoretically-grounded research, including the decision to make or buy public services, princi…
Rules and Restraint
Journal Article Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions by David M. Primo Get access Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions by David M. Primo. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2007. 216 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $20.00. Robert C. Lowry Robert C. Lowry The University of Texas at Dallas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science…
Reauthorization of the Federal Higher Education Act and Accountability for Student Learning
An important feature of President George W. Bush's education policy was the promotion of accountability by requiring the collection and dissemination of data on student learning outcomes. In the case of primary-secondary education, this resulted in the No Child Left Behind act. When the Department of Education sought to initiate a rulemaking on measuring student achievement in postsecondary institutions, this was rebuffed by Congress in 2007 and …
Transparency and Accountability
Recent formal models of accountability allow us to make different conditional predictions about how transparency affects voters’ willingness to re-elect incumbents and acceptance of higher taxes. We review two models and investigate empirical implications derived from or related to them, using panel data from 1972—2000 for U.S. state budget process transparency, gubernatorial elections, and tax increases in a small structural model. We do not fin…
Public Welfare Spending and Private Social Services in U.S. States
Social services in the United States are supplied by both the public and private sectors. Previous political science research has focused on public transfers or Medicaid; I study “Other Public Welfare” programs that include contracts and grants to private social services providers, focusing on the relationship between the two sectors. My results imply that an increase in either Other Public Welfare spending or private individual and family servic…
Mobilizing Money
A great deal of research focuses on contributions by political action committees (PACs) to candidates, but PACs are also institutional mechanisms for mobilizing contributions by individuals. Restrictions on the ability of PACs sponsored by businesses, trade associations, and labor unions to solicit contributions and the private benefits of contributing imply that these PACs are likely to mobilize donors who do not otherwise contribute to politica…
Subsidizing Institutions vs. Outputs vs. Individuals
Governments that want to subsidize goods or services can delegate responsibility for production to a public agency as part of its overall mission, subsidize production of specific outputs, or subsidize specific beneficiaries of excludable goods and services. For public postsecondary education, the corresponding funding mechanisms are operating appropriations that delegate authority to choose outputs and beneficiaries to public colleges and univer…
Analyzing Campaign Contributions in Context
Political campaign contributions are not made in a vacuum. Rather, contributions from individuals are affected by the political and legal environment experienced by potential donors. I study itemized contributions to candidates, parties, and political action committees (PACs) aggregated by congressional district for 1994-2006. The timing and competitiveness of presidential, congressional, and even state elections affect the expected benefits and …
Political science (24 works) · Economics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Public Administration (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Public Administration (13 works) · Public economics (13 works) · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy (8 works) · Business (7 works)