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Raising the opportunity cost of people’s time may reduce their commitment to social obligations such as voting. Notably, entertaining sporting events can be strong civic distractions, as commentators throughout history have lamented. To consider sporting events’ influence on political behavior, this paper examines the effect of Monday Night Football games the day before US general elections from 1970 to 2014. More attractive games, such as those that feature more prominent and competitive match-ups or that feature local or high-scoring teams, may entice people to consume more entertainment and thus have less time to devote to civic affairs. When preelection football game quality increases from its 25th to 75th percentile, voter turnout falls by between 2 and 8 percentage points. These effects are somewhat weaker among those more interested in politics and do not appear in placebo tests on other political behaviors occurring before the preelection game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent globalization discussions have revived the issue of regulatory convergence. Convergence advocates point to the structural pressures of the global economy on countries, while the divergence school points to the embeddedness of domestic regulatory institutions. This paper examines cross-national divergence in adoption rates of ISO 14001, an important international nongovernmental environmental regime developed with the cooperation of multinational firms. ISO 14001 offers a process-based system of voluntary regulation instead of an outcome-based system of public regulation that many firms find cumbersome. Our analysis of data from 59 countries suggests that ISO 14001 adoption rates are likely to be higher in countries whose trading partners have adopted this nongovernmental regime, which are embedded in international networks of nongovernmental organizations, whose governments flexibly enforce stringent environmental regulations with a less adversarial and litigious stance towards firms, and where consumers want mechanisms for identifying environmentally progressive firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 supply-side variables suggested by the literature. We conjecture that supply-side effects are highly contingent on political circumstances and the type of spending being analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]