Molly Mullin
Biographic Data
| ID | 154257 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Molly Mullin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Molly |
| FAMILY NAME | Mullin |
| SIGNATURE | MULLIN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1936-802X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 640 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Social Class Targeting of Property Buyouts
As local governments face the burden of responding to climate-related hazards, their actions layer on top of existing class inequalities. This article reports on a survey experiment examining the responses of elected city and county officials to a proposed voluntary buyout of properties at risk from climate impacts. An experiment embedded in the survey tests whether politicians’ responses to a buyout proposal depend on identification of recipient…
Local News Reporting and Mass Attitudes on Infrastructure Investment
A growing body of research documents how shrinking local newsrooms undermine political accountability and local fiscal and policy performance in the United States. We extend this work to examine political impacts from the level of information content in local news, which has been jeopardized by reductions in newsroom staffing. To understand how information content affects public response to news coverage of a local issue, we focus on the case of …
US Partisan Polarization on Climate Change: Can Stalemate Give Way to Opportunity
The rise of climate change on the global political agenda coincided with the growth of partisan polarization in US politics and, in many ways, their trajectories mirror one another. When the climate crisis first began to attract political attention 30 years ago, Republicans and Democrats responded with similar levels of interest and concern. Today, partisan division overwhelms all other aspects of climate-change politics and environmental politic…
Delivering on Environmental Justice? U.S. State Implementation of the Justice40 Initiative
President Biden has committed to a “whole of government approach” to address environmental and climate justice, which includes directing resources to historically underserved and overburdened populations. The Justice40 program is one of the signature programs in these efforts, requiring that 40 percent of the benefits of designated programs be targeted to disadvantaged communities. Because many federal spending programs that are part of the Justi…
Local News and the Electoral Incentive to Invest in Infrastructure
Despite broad public support, investment in US infrastructure has not kept pace with growth, population shifts, and rising exposure to climate change risks. One explanation lies in politicians' electoral incentives: because, in the short term, voters see only the costs of investment and not its benefits, politicians have incentive to pander and spend less than what they or their fully informed constituents would prefer. Local newspapers could hel…
Buyouts with rentbacks: A policy proposal for managing coastal retreat
The discussion of adaptation to climate change in coastal areas has focused on short-term risk reduction and climate-proofing, but there is growing recognition that—at some point in the future—relocation to less vulnerable geographical areas will become necessary for large numbers of residents in many coastal communities. Spontaneous relocations that occur after catastrophic events can entail high costs, both for those who resettle elsewhere and …
Avoiding Punishment? Electoral Accountability for Local Fee Increases
Do voters punish incumbent legislators for raising service costs? Concern about electoral punishment is considered a leading obstacle to increasing taxes and fees to fund service provision, but empirical evidence of such backlash is surprisingly sparse. This paper examines whether voters hold local elected officials accountable for raising water service costs. Using 10 years of panel data on municipal elections and water rates in North Carolina, …
Ascendant Public Opinion
Here we document an under-studied but important phenomenon that we call ascendant public opinion, which emerges when a new concern is framed as an instance of a broader issue and gains ascendancy over that issue in the public’s mind. We focus on the ever-increasing role climate change has come to play over the past three decades in shaping how Americans think about broader environmental concerns. We show that news coverage of the environment has …
External drivers of participation in regional collaborative water planning
What drives participation in collaborative planning? How does this vary across different institutional contexts? Public managers must navigate emerging challenges in public service provision; perceived risk and capacity to act can play a pivotal role, shaping managerial behavior. In water management, for example, issues stemming from climate change and water‐intensive growth create new concerns about continued water supply. Strategic decisions ma…
Learning from Local Government Research Partnerships in a Fragmented Political Setting
Research partnerships between scholars and local governments offer promise to advance scholarly understanding of local public administration and to improve the lives of people living and working in local communities. Yet political fragmentation complicates the prospect of broader learning from these partnerships and creates the risk that research partnerships will amplify disparities in local government performance. If scholars and practitioners …
Is coastal adaptation a public good? The financing implications of good characteristics in coastal adaptation
Sea level rise poses a crisis for coastal communities. Many local governments have identified strategies to prepare for the impacts of sea level rise but often lack funding mechanisms. To date, the assumption that coastal adaptation is a public good has limited the tools used to finance responses to sea level rise. We argue that good characteristics - subtractability, excludability, heterogeneity, joint production, and capital intensity - combine…
Climate Planning and Implementation in Metropolitan Transportation Governance
Even with expected changes in fuel, transportation will produce significant greenhouse gas emissions long into the future. We conduct the first evaluation of the performance of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in planning and implementing strategies for emission reduction. By coding regional transportation plans in three U.S. states, we find a reasonably high level of plan conformance: MPOs that express commitment to climate change miti…
Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered
Collaboration Risk and the Choice to Consolidate Local Government Services
Collaboration among local governments occurs through a range of mechanisms, which vary in degree of formality from contracts and ad hoc agreements to full consolidation. Prior work indicates that local decision makers favor formal mechanisms when expected gains from less formal collaboration may not be realized. This article explicates the concept of collaboration risk, treating it as a product of the likelihood that collaboration fails and the s…
Multilevel Instruments for Infrastructure Investment: Evaluating State Revolving Funds for Water
In recent decades, the federal government has introduced complex, multilevel state‐operated revolving loan fund programs as an instrument for promoting state and local investment in national infrastructure priorities while limiting direct federal involvement in implementation. A federally funded state revolving fund (SRF) program combines features of a categorical matching grant to states and a subsidized loan program to localities, both of which…
Climate Change: US Public Opinion
A review of research findings and polling data about Americans’ attitudes on climate change reveals a lack of meaningful long-term change in mass opinion. Instead, the structure of Americans’ attitudes toward belief in climate change's existence, concern about its consequences, and demand for policy response is similar to that regarding many other issues in contemporary US politics: stability in aggregate opinion that masks partisan and ideologic…
Local Response to Water Crisis: Explaining Variation in Usage Restrictions During a Texas Drought
What explains local policy response to extreme events? This question takes on growing importance as climate change increases the frequency of droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires, and severe storms. Emergency events like these often require local officials to make decisions that trade off short-term risk reduction against longer-term political costs. Policies that promote community-wide safety and resilience may face opposition because they re…
Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889
Journal Article Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879–1889 Get access Jon K. Lauck. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. xx, 281 pp. $32.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Page 1291, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav109 Published: 01 March 2015
State Agency Discretion in a Delegated Federal Program: Evidence from Drinking Water Investment
This article examines the use of discretion by state agencies in the context of multilevel policy. Research on agency discretion assumes that discretion represents a departure from legislative intent. However, Congress may delegate authority to promote policy innovation. Using data on investment in drinking water infrastructure from 2000 to 2008, we examine the relationship between agency discretion and functional expertise in implementing the Dr…
Committees of Apsa
The administrative committee consists of the president, president-elect, treasurer, and four other council members whose main duties include preparing agendas for council meetings and annual business meetings and acting on behalf of the council to dispose of policy issues deemed of insufficient weight to require decisions by the council
Turning Personal Experience into Political Attitudes: The Effect of Local Weather on Americans’ Perceptions about Global Warming
How do people translate their personal experiences into political attitudes? It has been difficult to explore this question using observational data, because individuals are typically exposed to experiences in a selective fashion, and self-reports of exposure may be biased and unreliable. In this study, we identify one experience to which Americans are exposed nearly at random—their local weather—and show that weather patterns have a significant …
Get Out the Vote-by-Mail? A Randomized Field Experiment Testing the Effect of Mobilization in Traditional and Vote-by-Mail Precincts
This study extends previous field experimental research on turnout by considering how institutional context moderates the effect of mobilization. Taking advantage of a setting in which some registrants are assigned to vote by mail, the authors find that a door-to-door mobilization campaign has a larger effect on the participation of those who vote at polling places than on registrants assigned to cast mail ballots, but only among individuals whos…
Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management . By Henrik Selin
Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management . By Henrik Selin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 235p. $44.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. In his book, Henrik Selin introduces readers to the complex and fragmented international regime governing the management of hazardous chemicals. He presents a compelling account of the environmental and human health threats posed by international trade and the transboundary movement of …
Response to Henrik Selin's review of Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water
In his careful and generous review of my book, Henrik Selin asks why I selected responsiveness and intergovernmental coordination as dependent variables for my analysis, therefore setting aside other policy effects that special district governance might produce. This is an important question: the delegation of policy authority to autonomous, specialized governments is a significant departure from the normal politics that takes place in a multidim…
Working with the State: Exploring Interagency Collaboration within a Federalist System
In an era of devolution, collaboration between state and local institutions could be an effective tool for state governments to capitalize on local knowledge and respect local autonomy, while maintaining consistent standards and enforcement. However, the benefits to local agencies are less clear. Local agency personnel may have goals that diverge from their state counterparts and significant constraints on their resources, forcing them to conside…
Turning Personal Experience into Political Attitudes: The Effect of Local Weather on Americans’ Perceptions about Global Warming
How do people translate their personal experiences into political attitudes? It has been difficult to explore this question using observational data, because individuals are typically exposed to experiences in a selective fashion, and self-reports of exposure may be biased and unreliable. In this study, we identify one experience to which Americans are exposed nearly at random—their local weather—and show that weather patterns have a significant …
Climate Change: US Public Opinion
A review of research findings and polling data about Americans’ attitudes on climate change reveals a lack of meaningful long-term change in mass opinion. Instead, the structure of Americans’ attitudes toward belief in climate change's existence, concern about its consequences, and demand for policy response is similar to that regarding many other issues in contemporary US politics: stability in aggregate opinion that masks partisan and ideologic…
Does Voting by Mail Increase Participation? Using Matching to Analyze a Natural Experiment
Would holding elections by mail increase voter turnout? Many electoral reform advocates predict that mail ballot elections will boost participation, basing their prediction on the high turnout rate among absentee voters and on the rise in voter turnout after Oregon switched to voting by mail. However, selection problems inherent to studies of absentee voters and Oregon give us important reasons to doubt whether their results would extend to more …
How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Citizens Registered to Vote
A well-established scholarly tradition links lower voting costs with higher turnout. Whereas previous research emphasized the costs imposed by requiring voter registration, our research assesses postregistration costs and state policies that can make it easier for registered citizens to vote. These policies include mailing each registrant a sample ballot and information about the location of his or her polling place, providing a longer voting day…
The Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance on Public Policy
What are the policy consequences of creating functionally specialized venues for decision making? This study directly compares special districts with general purpose local governments to evaluate how specialization influences responsiveness and policy choice. Previous theorizing has assumed that specialization should have the same effect across all policy contexts. The findings presented here show instead that its effect is conditional on the sta…
Animals and Anthropology
Anthropology encompasses four distinct subdisciplines: biological anthropology, social anthropology (known as “cultural anthropology” in North America), archaeology, and linguistics. Beyond these basic four elds, one could further divide anthropology into a nearly endless array of specializations (primatology, legal anthropology, medical anthropology, and historical archaeology, to name just a few). Of course, all elds have their divisions, but a…
Working with the State: Exploring Interagency Collaboration within a Federalist System
In an era of devolution, collaboration between state and local institutions could be an effective tool for state governments to capitalize on local knowledge and respect local autonomy, while maintaining consistent standards and enforcement. However, the benefits to local agencies are less clear. Local agency personnel may have goals that diverge from their state counterparts and significant constraints on their resources, forcing them to conside…
City Caesars: Institutional Structure and Mayoral Success in Three California Cities
Recently, voters in many large cities have approved charter reforms that strengthen the power of the executive, suggesting that big city residents and mayors themselves view the formal authority of the office as an important influence on whether a mayor will be successful in solving urban problems. This article employs qualitative data from three California cities to specify how structural characteristics interact with personal factors to facilit…
Local News and the Electoral Incentive to Invest in Infrastructure
Despite broad public support, investment in US infrastructure has not kept pace with growth, population shifts, and rising exposure to climate change risks. One explanation lies in politicians' electoral incentives: because, in the short term, voters see only the costs of investment and not its benefits, politicians have incentive to pander and spend less than what they or their fully informed constituents would prefer. Local newspapers could hel…
Local Response to Water Crisis: Explaining Variation in Usage Restrictions During a Texas Drought
What explains local policy response to extreme events? This question takes on growing importance as climate change increases the frequency of droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires, and severe storms. Emergency events like these often require local officials to make decisions that trade off short-term risk reduction against longer-term political costs. Policies that promote community-wide safety and resilience may face opposition because they re…
Ascendant Public Opinion
Here we document an under-studied but important phenomenon that we call ascendant public opinion, which emerges when a new concern is framed as an instance of a broader issue and gains ascendancy over that issue in the public’s mind. We focus on the ever-increasing role climate change has come to play over the past three decades in shaping how Americans think about broader environmental concerns. We show that news coverage of the environment has …
Multilevel Instruments for Infrastructure Investment: Evaluating State Revolving Funds for Water
In recent decades, the federal government has introduced complex, multilevel state‐operated revolving loan fund programs as an instrument for promoting state and local investment in national infrastructure priorities while limiting direct federal involvement in implementation. A federally funded state revolving fund (SRF) program combines features of a categorical matching grant to states and a subsidized loan program to localities, both of which…
State Agency Discretion in a Delegated Federal Program: Evidence from Drinking Water Investment
This article examines the use of discretion by state agencies in the context of multilevel policy. Research on agency discretion assumes that discretion represents a departure from legislative intent. However, Congress may delegate authority to promote policy innovation. Using data on investment in drinking water infrastructure from 2000 to 2008, we examine the relationship between agency discretion and functional expertise in implementing the Dr…
Get Out the Vote-by-Mail? A Randomized Field Experiment Testing the Effect of Mobilization in Traditional and Vote-by-Mail Precincts
This study extends previous field experimental research on turnout by considering how institutional context moderates the effect of mobilization. Taking advantage of a setting in which some registrants are assigned to vote by mail, the authors find that a door-to-door mobilization campaign has a larger effect on the participation of those who vote at polling places than on registrants assigned to cast mail ballots, but only among individuals whos…
Avoiding Punishment? Electoral Accountability for Local Fee Increases
Do voters punish incumbent legislators for raising service costs? Concern about electoral punishment is considered a leading obstacle to increasing taxes and fees to fund service provision, but empirical evidence of such backlash is surprisingly sparse. This paper examines whether voters hold local elected officials accountable for raising water service costs. Using 10 years of panel data on municipal elections and water rates in North Carolina, …
Delivering on Environmental Justice? U.S. State Implementation of the Justice40 Initiative
President Biden has committed to a “whole of government approach” to address environmental and climate justice, which includes directing resources to historically underserved and overburdened populations. The Justice40 program is one of the signature programs in these efforts, requiring that 40 percent of the benefits of designated programs be targeted to disadvantaged communities. Because many federal spending programs that are part of the Justi…
Learning from Local Government Research Partnerships in a Fragmented Political Setting
Research partnerships between scholars and local governments offer promise to advance scholarly understanding of local public administration and to improve the lives of people living and working in local communities. Yet political fragmentation complicates the prospect of broader learning from these partnerships and creates the risk that research partnerships will amplify disparities in local government performance. If scholars and practitioners …
Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered
External drivers of participation in regional collaborative water planning
What drives participation in collaborative planning? How does this vary across different institutional contexts? Public managers must navigate emerging challenges in public service provision; perceived risk and capacity to act can play a pivotal role, shaping managerial behavior. In water management, for example, issues stemming from climate change and water‐intensive growth create new concerns about continued water supply. Strategic decisions ma…
Representations of History, Irish Feminism, and the Politics of Difference
Local News Reporting and Mass Attitudes on Infrastructure Investment
A growing body of research documents how shrinking local newsrooms undermine political accountability and local fiscal and policy performance in the United States. We extend this work to examine political impacts from the level of information content in local news, which has been jeopardized by reductions in newsroom staffing. To understand how information content affects public response to news coverage of a local issue, we focus on the case of …
US Partisan Polarization on Climate Change: Can Stalemate Give Way to Opportunity
The rise of climate change on the global political agenda coincided with the growth of partisan polarization in US politics and, in many ways, their trajectories mirror one another. When the climate crisis first began to attract political attention 30 years ago, Republicans and Democrats responded with similar levels of interest and concern. Today, partisan division overwhelms all other aspects of climate-change politics and environmental politic…
Climate Planning and Implementation in Metropolitan Transportation Governance
Even with expected changes in fuel, transportation will produce significant greenhouse gas emissions long into the future. We conduct the first evaluation of the performance of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in planning and implementing strategies for emission reduction. By coding regional transportation plans in three U.S. states, we find a reasonably high level of plan conformance: MPOs that express commitment to climate change miti…
Committees of Apsa
The administrative committee consists of the president, president-elect, treasurer, and four other council members whose main duties include preparing agendas for council meetings and annual business meetings and acting on behalf of the council to dispose of policy issues deemed of insufficient weight to require decisions by the council
Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves
Representations of History, Irish Feminism, and the Politics of Difference
Animals and Anthropology
Anthropology encompasses four distinct subdisciplines: biological anthropology, social anthropology (known as “cultural anthropology” in North America), archaeology, and linguistics. Beyond these basic four elds, one could further divide anthropology into a nearly endless array of specializations (primatology, legal anthropology, medical anthropology, and historical archaeology, to name just a few). Of course, all elds have their divisions, but a…
City Caesars: Institutional Structure and Mayoral Success in Three California Cities
Recently, voters in many large cities have approved charter reforms that strengthen the power of the executive, suggesting that big city residents and mayors themselves view the formal authority of the office as an important influence on whether a mayor will be successful in solving urban problems. This article employs qualitative data from three California cities to specify how structural characteristics interact with personal factors to facilit…
How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Citizens Registered to Vote
A well-established scholarly tradition links lower voting costs with higher turnout. Whereas previous research emphasized the costs imposed by requiring voter registration, our research assesses postregistration costs and state policies that can make it easier for registered citizens to vote. These policies include mailing each registrant a sample ballot and information about the location of his or her polling place, providing a longer voting day…
Under the Palace Portal: Native American Artists in Santa Fe
Journal Article Under the Palace Portal: Native American Artists in Santa Fe Get access Under the Palace Portal: Native American Artists in Santa Fe. By Hoerig Karl A.. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. xvi + 261 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) Molly Mullin Molly Mullin Albion College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 2,…
Does Voting by Mail Increase Participation? Using Matching to Analyze a Natural Experiment
Would holding elections by mail increase voter turnout? Many electoral reform advocates predict that mail ballot elections will boost participation, basing their prediction on the high turnout rate among absentee voters and on the rise in voter turnout after Oregon switched to voting by mail. However, selection problems inherent to studies of absentee voters and Oregon give us important reasons to doubt whether their results would extend to more …
The Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance on Public Policy
What are the policy consequences of creating functionally specialized venues for decision making? This study directly compares special districts with general purpose local governments to evaluate how specialization influences responsiveness and policy choice. Previous theorizing has assumed that specialization should have the same effect across all policy contexts. The findings presented here show instead that its effect is conditional on the sta…
Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water
An analysis of the political consequences of special district governance in drinking water management that offers new insights into the influence of political structures on local policymaking. More than ever, Americans rely on independent special districts to provide public services. The special district—which can be as small as a low-budget mosquito abatement district or as vast as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—has become the mos…
Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves
Working with the State: Exploring Interagency Collaboration within a Federalist System
In an era of devolution, collaboration between state and local institutions could be an effective tool for state governments to capitalize on local knowledge and respect local autonomy, while maintaining consistent standards and enforcement. However, the benefits to local agencies are less clear. Local agency personnel may have goals that diverge from their state counterparts and significant constraints on their resources, forcing them to conside…
Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management . By Henrik Selin
Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management . By Henrik Selin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 235p. $44.00 cloth, $22.00 paper. In his book, Henrik Selin introduces readers to the complex and fragmented international regime governing the management of hazardous chemicals. He presents a compelling account of the environmental and human health threats posed by international trade and the transboundary movement of …
Response to Henrik Selin's review of Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water
In his careful and generous review of my book, Henrik Selin asks why I selected responsiveness and intergovernmental coordination as dependent variables for my analysis, therefore setting aside other policy effects that special district governance might produce. This is an important question: the delegation of policy authority to autonomous, specialized governments is a significant departure from the normal politics that takes place in a multidim…
Committees of Apsa
The administrative committee consists of the president, president-elect, treasurer, and four other council members whose main duties include preparing agendas for council meetings and annual business meetings and acting on behalf of the council to dispose of policy issues deemed of insufficient weight to require decisions by the council
Turning Personal Experience into Political Attitudes: The Effect of Local Weather on Americans’ Perceptions about Global Warming
How do people translate their personal experiences into political attitudes? It has been difficult to explore this question using observational data, because individuals are typically exposed to experiences in a selective fashion, and self-reports of exposure may be biased and unreliable. In this study, we identify one experience to which Americans are exposed nearly at random—their local weather—and show that weather patterns have a significant …
Get Out the Vote-by-Mail? A Randomized Field Experiment Testing the Effect of Mobilization in Traditional and Vote-by-Mail Precincts
This study extends previous field experimental research on turnout by considering how institutional context moderates the effect of mobilization. Taking advantage of a setting in which some registrants are assigned to vote by mail, the authors find that a door-to-door mobilization campaign has a larger effect on the participation of those who vote at polling places than on registrants assigned to cast mail ballots, but only among individuals whos…
State Agency Discretion in a Delegated Federal Program: Evidence from Drinking Water Investment
This article examines the use of discretion by state agencies in the context of multilevel policy. Research on agency discretion assumes that discretion represents a departure from legislative intent. However, Congress may delegate authority to promote policy innovation. Using data on investment in drinking water infrastructure from 2000 to 2008, we examine the relationship between agency discretion and functional expertise in implementing the Dr…
Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889
Journal Article Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879–1889 Get access Jon K. Lauck. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. xx, 281 pp. $32.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Page 1291, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav109 Published: 01 March 2015
Local Response to Water Crisis: Explaining Variation in Usage Restrictions During a Texas Drought
What explains local policy response to extreme events? This question takes on growing importance as climate change increases the frequency of droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires, and severe storms. Emergency events like these often require local officials to make decisions that trade off short-term risk reduction against longer-term political costs. Policies that promote community-wide safety and resilience may face opposition because they re…
Climate Change: US Public Opinion
A review of research findings and polling data about Americans’ attitudes on climate change reveals a lack of meaningful long-term change in mass opinion. Instead, the structure of Americans’ attitudes toward belief in climate change's existence, concern about its consequences, and demand for policy response is similar to that regarding many other issues in contemporary US politics: stability in aggregate opinion that masks partisan and ideologic…
Multilevel Instruments for Infrastructure Investment: Evaluating State Revolving Funds for Water
In recent decades, the federal government has introduced complex, multilevel state‐operated revolving loan fund programs as an instrument for promoting state and local investment in national infrastructure priorities while limiting direct federal involvement in implementation. A federally funded state revolving fund (SRF) program combines features of a categorical matching grant to states and a subsidized loan program to localities, both of which…
Collaboration Risk and the Choice to Consolidate Local Government Services
Collaboration among local governments occurs through a range of mechanisms, which vary in degree of formality from contracts and ad hoc agreements to full consolidation. Prior work indicates that local decision makers favor formal mechanisms when expected gains from less formal collaboration may not be realized. This article explicates the concept of collaboration risk, treating it as a product of the likelihood that collaboration fails and the s…
Is coastal adaptation a public good? The financing implications of good characteristics in coastal adaptation
Sea level rise poses a crisis for coastal communities. Many local governments have identified strategies to prepare for the impacts of sea level rise but often lack funding mechanisms. To date, the assumption that coastal adaptation is a public good has limited the tools used to finance responses to sea level rise. We argue that good characteristics - subtractability, excludability, heterogeneity, joint production, and capital intensity - combine…
Climate Planning and Implementation in Metropolitan Transportation Governance
Even with expected changes in fuel, transportation will produce significant greenhouse gas emissions long into the future. We conduct the first evaluation of the performance of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in planning and implementing strategies for emission reduction. By coding regional transportation plans in three U.S. states, we find a reasonably high level of plan conformance: MPOs that express commitment to climate change miti…
Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered
Learning from Local Government Research Partnerships in a Fragmented Political Setting
Research partnerships between scholars and local governments offer promise to advance scholarly understanding of local public administration and to improve the lives of people living and working in local communities. Yet political fragmentation complicates the prospect of broader learning from these partnerships and creates the risk that research partnerships will amplify disparities in local government performance. If scholars and practitioners …
Political science (26 works) · Business (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (10 works) · Public Administration (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Climate change (9 works)