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Thomas A Birkland. 2006. Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change After Catastrophic Events. Washington: Georgetown University Press. 240 pp. How does change occur in public policymaking? What role do disasters play [...]

Popular support for American welfare policies dipped sharply during the mid-1990s. The purpose of this article is to determine why this pronounced, but temporary, shift in public opinion occurred. We use data from the CPS National Election Studies to examine several explanations for temporal variability in citizens' attitudes toward welfare spending. Our results show that these changes follow similar variations in media content. Individual-level opinion change was also based entirely upon political motivations (e.g., ideology and partisanship) rather than economic beliefs or racial attitudes. We argue that this provides evidence, admittedly somewhat indirect, that elite rhetoric guides and shapes mass opinions.

This article examines the relationship between government performance and quality of life in the American states. We contend that the management capacity of state governments should have direct, tangible impacts on the overall social and economic well-being of state citizenry. In order to test this idea, we examine the influence of state management capacity (using the 1999 Government Performance Project grades), alongside other economic and political variables, on two prominent measures of state quality of life--The Morgan Quitno 'Most Livable State' Index and State Policy Reports' (SPP) 'Camelot Index.' We find that both state economic conditions and governmental policy priorities have significant impacts on state performance levels. But, our results clearly indicate that the management capacity of state governments also contributes directly to improving the overall quality of life for state citizens. Key Words: Public management; State quality of life; Government performance; Management capacity; State policy priorities; State government.

Government performance is an enduring concern for students of public management, public administration, and political science. Government's administrative arrangements and managerial behavior can profoundly influence programmatic content, activities, and outcomes; therefore, considering public management's effects is necessary for a true understanding of public policy and government performance. This article uses data from the Maxwell School's Government Performance Project to examine the relationship between state governments' managerial capacity and a measure of government performance (specifically, state policy priorities). We find that state management capacity has direct effects on state policy commitments: States possessing higher levels of management capacity tend to favor programmatic areas that distribute societal benefits widely (that is, collective benefits) as opposed to narrowly (that is, particularized benefits). Our analysis demonstrates that public interest group activity, government ideology, and citizen ideology each have significant, predictable effects on state policy commitments. Thus, our findings place managerial capacity alongside other more commonly studied state characteristics as an important influence on government activities.

This paper examines the structure of bureaucratic decisions in state Medicaid programs. More specifically, the analysis tries to discern an underlying pattern in Medicaid optional service adoptions across the American states during the period from 1985 through 1994. These adoptions result from state-level administrative initiatives rather than federal or state legislative actions. The analysis shows that states differ in the extent to which they extend services into more controversial aspects of health care. And their willingness to do so follows a clear cumulative pattern: States initiate more controversial, limited services only after they have already adopted a full range of services that are widely acceptable to the public and governmental officials. This cumulative pattern in administrative decisions reveals a great deal about the nature of bureaucratic actions in state-level social welfare programs. This study also produces an empirical measure of bureaucratic policy outputs that can be used as an analytic variable in other research efforts., Bureaucrats have a significant impact on the ways that governmental policies impinge on American citizens. This is particularly true at the state level. Administrators in state agencies have wide latitude [...]

This article focuses on recent developments in state Medicaid programs and the role of Section 1115 waivers in this process. The evidence presented here demonstrates quite clearly that the states are using Section 1115 waivers to experiment with a broad range of innovative health-care service delivery, reimbursement, and eligibility concepts. This has allowed the states to reconfigure their Medicaid systems. More important, perhaps, the use of Section 1115 waivers has also increased the role of the states in the American health-care policy process., The Clinton administration's inability to pass universal health insurance in the early 1990s convinced many policy experts and political leaders of one major point. It is difficult to imagine the [...]

Health care is a major policy issue in the United States. Most Americans believe that health care is too inaccessible, too expensive, and too undependable. There is almost universal agreement [...]

Analysis of the implementation of Medicaid policies by state officials shows that bureaucratic policymaking is complex and is influenced by such factors as interest groups such as environmental groups and the social needs of the population. Furthermore, such bureaucratic policies are not significantly affected by political partisan politics and ideology. Thus, there is an intermeshing of the public administrative and social policies.

This article focuses on the influence of federal regional administrative offices on maternal and child health-care services in state Medicaid programs. The empirical results demonstrate that regional administrative offices affect [...]

This article examines variability in policy priorities across the American states; that is, the ways that state governments allocate resources to meet societal needs. Specifically, our analysis uses 1992 data on state program expenditures to produce a comprehensive geometric representation--or model--of state policy priorities for that year. This model is parsimonious, powerful, and substantively meaningful. The structure of state policy priorities is manifested as a sharp contrast between programs that deliver particularized benefits and those that supply collective goods. Furthermore, we show that policy priorities are largely determined by public opinion and interest group activity within the respective states. Therefore, our analysis not only operationalizes successfully a critical aspect of the policy process; it also makes a useful contribution to the study of state politics.

By Christopher Howard. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. 250p. $39.50. Saundra K. Schneider, University of South Carolina The uniqueness of the American welfare state has been the focus of [...]

Medicaid is the major mechanism for financing health and long-term care for the poor in the United States. As such, the program covers the medical expenses for over 35 million [...]

In the United States it is widely believed that public assistance may have harmful effects on the social and political orientations of those who receive it. Certain kinds of government support — particularly welfare may foster a 'culture of dependence' comprising values and beliefs that are different from, and perhaps contrary to, the predominant American political culture. We examine the relationship between government assistance and public opinion using survey data taken from the 1992 CPS National Election Study. Our empirical results show that welfare benefits do have some effect on issue attitudes. But recipients of public aid are virtually identical to non-recipients in terms of their core values, reactions to the political system and general beliefs about American society. There is no evidence that a distinctive 'culture of dependence' has developed among people who rely on financial support from the federal government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]