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This study aims to present a more balanced perspective of risk acceptability through integrating economic individualism and social constructivism and examining the impact of trust in the national and local government on citizens' attitudes toward risk and nuclear power plants, respectively. The data were gathered from surveys of local residents engaged in fierce debates on whether they agreed to accept a nuclear power plant in their local area, the city of Samcheok in South Korea. To capture the causal links among the determinants of risk acceptability of a nuclear power plant and their relationships, the authors utilized a structural equation model. Demonstrating that a shared worry about nuclear stigmatization has both a positive impact on risk perception but also a negative impact on trust in local government, our findings emphasize that risk studies of nuclear energy should pay attention to the social, cultural, and historical contexts of nuclear energy as well as its economic aspects when examining the determinants of risk acceptability. This study also enriches our understanding that national and local governments can play different roles in promoting citizens' risk acceptability of a nuclear power plant. Thus, this study contributes towards presenting a better specified causal model of risk acceptability and offers practical implications of how to promote the public's risk acceptability of nuclear power facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is quite an honor to be selected for this John Gaus Award Lecture by a committee of my peers. I want to thank my husband, Bill Berry—my partner for 48 years and sometimes coauthor—and certainly my children, Katie Berry and David Berry, who have diverted my attention from policy studies for 35 years now and made life much more enjoyable by their personalities. I especially want to thank my many coauthors who have kept research and writing an engaging endeavor while we have developed friendships that will last a lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the diffusion of diversity management policies across large state bureaucracies that operate in a national marketplace of ideas. We analyze organizational antecedents and horizontal, vertical, and vertical-diagonal diffusion mechanisms associated with the degree of diversity management convergence among research universities from 2008-2016. Findings suggest the long-theorized, but rarely measured, non-linear pattern of diffusion explains organizational adoptions and the degree of policy convergence across the system. We also show a vertical-diagonal process whereby policy spills over to influence policy choices in other lower-level governance systems. This spillover may explain how organizations make policy decisions in complex governance arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examined the current status of state legislative program evaluation using data from a variety of sources, including interviews with eight evaluation directors and seven senior staff. State offices have used now methods and information formats, integrated changing staff roles and functions, and become more proactive in meeting legislative policy information needs. (SLD)

Numerous countries employ social enterprise as an alternative way of addressing social, economic, and environmental problems, with this new approach steadily gaining strength over the last two decades. Despite this growth, few empirical studies have examined the effects of government policies on social enterprise development. Seeking to fill this gap, this study examines the impact of government funding on the social and economic performance of social enterprises in South Korea, framed by integrative publicness hypotheses. The integrative publicness framework posits that infused publicness by government funding can enhance public value creation. To investigate the impact of government funding on social enterprises, this study has gathered data from annual reports voluntarily published by Korean social enterprises in 2018. Regression was employed to analyze the data. The findings suggest that government funding is positively associated with social enterprise's employment of the disadvantaged, community contribution, and democratic decision-making. In addition, government funding is related to a decrease in the business profitability of social enterprises, implying that it may lessen their profit-maximization. This study provides policymakers and managers of social enterprises with suggestions on how to measure the outcomes of social enterprises and offers real-world touchstones on how they can improve their creation of public value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since being added as an amendment to the Social Security Act of 1975, the US child support enforcement (CSE) programme has provided services to both Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and non-TANF families under the name of reducing expenditures on welfare programmes and securing children's rights to be protected by their parents. The federal government mandates that states collect five performance measures in the CSE programme: (1) paternity establishment, (2) support order establishment, (3) current collection, (4) arrearage collection, and (5) costeffectiveness. Implementing federal programmes does not give states full discretion, but there exists room for states to exercise discretion in developing their own strategies to effectively deliver services and improve performance. In this paper, using Miles and Snow's strategic dimensions (1978) and Boyne and Walker's later studies (2004), states' strategic stances are categorized into Analyser, Prospector, and Defender, and the effects of states' strategic stance and their internal implementation factors on the CSE performance are examined using models estimated with ordinary least square (OLS) regression and seemingly unrelated regression (SUR). The strategy classification is widely studied in private organizations, but it has relevance to current public organizations that seek to achieve improvement in performance. The results of the cross-sectional OLS and SUR models suggest that states having an Analyser stance have a positive relationship to two performance indicators (arrearage collection and Cost-Effectiveness) of the CSE programme, and states with Prospector and Defender stances are particularly significant in predicting high paternity establishment in the CSE programme, but no other performance indicator. Past performance is one of the strongest predictors of all five-performance indicators of the CSE programme. State internal implementation factors show mixed impacts in terms of significance and direction on the performance indicators of all the five models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Risk Society" as Ulrich Beck (Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London, UK: Sage, Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World risk society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press) has called modern society, has changed the policy dynamics of many high-risk policies. Policy conflicts occur due to both physically objective risks and socially constructed risks. Risk politicization means that issue expansion and attention cycles are likely to be related to the social construction of policy images. An interesting case in point concerns the risk perception about Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) among four groups of people in South Korea: bureaucrats, citizens, scientists, and interest groups. We develop expectations about how the four groups will frame the political issues based on their roles and concerns in the policy process. Downs' (Downs, Anthony. 1972. Up and down with ecology: The issue-attention cycle. Public Interest 28:38-50) work on the issue-attention cycle suggests how issues rise and fall on the public agenda, and our work also directly tests his theses. This study uses semantic network analysis based on content analysis of key words in 6 400 articles published in 2008 to construct semantic networks for the four stakeholder groups over four stages in the policy process. Through this unique data analysis, we can see the major issue concerns and intensity of each of the four groups in the four policy stages by assessing the key words each group uses in the media articles and the visualizations of their semantic associations. We do find distinct differences in what issues each of the four groups focus on and how the focus of substance changes in each of the four policy stages that clarify how these groups framed the BSE policy issues. Our results both confirm and raise doubts about some predictions from the issue-attention cycle. Citizens' attention follows closely to Downs' predictions, whereas the other stakeholders' issue-attention cycles do not follow Downs' predictions as well. Finally, our study explains and demonstrates the value of semantic network analysis as a powerful method for understanding issue framing in the policy process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While 33 states and the District of Columbia have adopted laws legalizing medical marijuana, no studies have considered explaining how and why state requirements and restrictions vary, including eligibility requirements, the amount of legal marijuana permitted, sanctions for abuse, and other provisions in state laws that range from more permissive laws to stricter and more limited laws. This study explains the strictness or extent of medical marijuana laws (MMLs) adopted by states from 1996 to 2013, developing hypotheses based on states' economic conditions, political structures, user demands, criminal justice demands, and the impact of neighboring states. We develop an index score that captures state statute strictness by analyzing and coding the statutes of MMLs in each state. Our findings show (1) that factors that influence adoption of MMLs are not the same as the factors that influence the strictness of policies and (2) that the regulation of users and what they are allowed to have for medical marijuana treatment are associated with different variables than the regulation of dispensaries. Overall, the leniency of MMLs is associated with liberal government ideology, poor state fiscal health, unemployment, the size of the state's criminal justice bureaucracy, numbers of AIDS/cancer patients, and number of neighboring states that have adopted MMLs. Laws regarding users tend to become more lenient over time in states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]