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American Politics

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Full-Text Articles in Public Policy

Sex Segregation As Policy Problem: A Gendered Policy Paradox, Elizabeth Sharrow Jan 2019

Sex Segregation As Policy Problem: A Gendered Policy Paradox, Elizabeth Sharrow

Elizabeth Sharrow


2017 marked the forty-fifth anniversary of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a sex non-discrimination policy which remade American education and athletics. Has Title IX fulfilled its promise to end discriminatory and disparate treatment of women in educational institutions? This article places policy in conversation with scholarly debate over tackling persistent sex and gender inequalities, illustrating that the athletic policy sphere sits at the center of both addressing and reproducing sexism.  It examines the under-appreciated complexity of sex equity politics and suggests the need to question how well public policy addresses inequalities.  It argues that we are losing …


Fairness, Justice And An Individual Basis For Public Policy, Douglas R. Oxley Apr 2014

Fairness, Justice And An Individual Basis For Public Policy, Douglas R. Oxley

Douglas R. Oxley

Prior models of the policy process have examined how human characteristics can affect policy decision-making in such a way that it leads to aggregate effects on policy outcomes as a whole. I develop a model of the policy process which suggests that emotions related to fair and unfair experiences in the same policy domain are utilized by decision-makers as policy criteria. In the lab, I empirically tested this, and find that emotions and experience related to fairness do influence the policy decision to move away from the status quo alternative. Based upon this result, I simulated the evolution of a …


Self-Interest, Symbolic Attitudes, And Support For Public Policy: A Multilevel Analysis, Richard Lau, Caroline Heldman Jul 2009

Self-Interest, Symbolic Attitudes, And Support For Public Policy: A Multilevel Analysis, Richard Lau, Caroline Heldman

Caroline Heldman

This paper examines the role of self-interest and symbolic attitudes as predictors of support for two domestic policy issues—guaranteed jobs and incomes and national health insurance—in the American National Election Survey (ANES) between 1972 and 2004. As was the case in 1976 when Sears, Lau, Tyler, and Allen (1980) first explored this topic, symbolic attitudes continue to be much more important predictors of policy attitudes than various indicators of self-interest over the 30 years we analyze. We explore this finding further to determine whether any individual/internal and external/contextual variables affect the magnitude of self-interest effects on policy support. Five possible …