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Full-Text Articles in Public Policy

Civic Responsibility And Patterns Of Voluntary Participation Around The World, Mary Alice Haddad Nov 2006

Civic Responsibility And Patterns Of Voluntary Participation Around The World, Mary Alice Haddad

Mary Alice Haddad

This article seeks to explain why different types of volunteer organizations are prevalent in different countries. It hypothesizes that patterns of volunteer participation are a function of citizen attitudes toward governmental and individual responsibility for caring for society. Those countries (e.g., Japan)—where citizens think that governments should be responsible for dealing with social problems—will tend to have higher participation in embedded volunteer organizations, such as parent-teacher associations. Those countries (e.g., the United States)—where citizens think that individuals should take responsibility for dealing with social problems—will tend to have more participation in nonembedded, organizations, such as Greenpeace. These hypotheses are tested …


Congestion Pricing: The Answer To America's Traffic Woes?, Ryan Yeung Dec 2005

Congestion Pricing: The Answer To America's Traffic Woes?, Ryan Yeung

Ryan Yeung

Congestion results in losses in productivity, added delivery time, extra costs for consumers, as well as damage to the environment. The most obvious solution to traffic congestion is to build more roads, but the prevailing thought among experts is that adding supply is not an effective long-term solution. Another approach is congestion pricing, where motorists are charged different prices based on demand. A literature review supports congestion pricing’s effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. Perhaps most importantly, a number of case studies suggest that congestion pricing is politically feasible.


Punctuated Equilibrium In Limbo: The Tobacco Lobby And U.S. State Policy Making From 1990 To 2003, Michael S. Givel Dec 2005

Punctuated Equilibrium In Limbo: The Tobacco Lobby And U.S. State Policy Making From 1990 To 2003, Michael S. Givel

Michael S. Givel

Since the mid-1980s, U.S. tobacco policy has been an intense and acrimonious issue between antitobacco advocates and the tobacco industry. In the United States, the tobacco industry has responded to heightened state antitobacco litigation, adverse public opinion, and public health advocacy by aggressively mobilizing against tobacco taxes and regulations. This article examines whether these tobacco policy trends can be generalized to punctuated equilibrium theory ideas that policy monopolies are stable over long periods and usually change because of sharp and short-term exogenous shocks to the policy system. From 1990 to 2003, there was a sharp mobilization by health advocates in …


Superfund, Hedonics, And The Scales Of Environmental Justice, Douglas S. Noonan, Brett M. Baden, Rama Mohana Turaga Dec 2005

Superfund, Hedonics, And The Scales Of Environmental Justice, Douglas S. Noonan, Brett M. Baden, Rama Mohana Turaga

Douglas S. Noonan

The environmental justice (EJ) movement now occupies a prominent position in environmental policy. EJ is a core principle for thousands of grassroots environmental organizations, is the subject of a Presidential executive order and an office in the EPA, and recently served to frame how the nation viewed the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This paper contributes to the research on environmental equity by (a) improving on traditional environmental justice research by incorporating results from economic analyses, and (b) presenting new evidence on the distributional equity of Superfund site locations at multiple scales. Choosing the correct spatial scale for analysis continues …