Government economic development programmes provide opportunities for firms to leverage financial incentives for business expansion and relocation. This article examines the ability of these incentives to promote employment. Using establishment-level data from the state of Kansas as well as original firm-level survey data, I evaluate the effectiveness of financial incentives in creating jobs thr…
The landmark United States healthcare reform law – the Affordable Care Act – provides an opportunity to study the dynamics of implementation for complex, politically contentious policies. Matland’s Ambiguity-Conflict Model suggests that bottom-up models will dominate in such cases. I exploit variation across states in the implementation of online health insurance marketplaces to test whether th…
In recent years, United States (US) policymakers have instituted quadrennial strategy reviews in several major policy areas. In this article, I examine why policymakers have initiated these large strategic reviews, and why a particular model for them has diffused from the US Defense Department to other government agencies. I find that policymakers have initiated the reviews principally to spur …
This study investigates the conditions under which pro-status quo groups increase their advocacy success during an entire policymaking process. It scrutinises whether pro-status quo defenders who are involved in multiple institutional venues and who join many coalitions of interest groups are able to achieve their policy preferences. A case study focussing on the regulation of stem cell researc…
This contribution to the Special Issue on Gender and Conservatism uses expert and election surveys to explore the extent to which the feminist or traditional gender ideology of parties of the right relates to their economic and liberal/authoritarian ideology. We show that although parties of the left generally espouse more feminist ideologies than parties of the right, there are a significant n…
The question of conservative feminism in the United States did not really arise before the 2008 elections; most politically active conservative women leaders did not refer to themselves as feminists. Sarah Palin's vice presidential bid, however, prompted a shift. On a number of well-publicized occasions, Palin called herself a feminist, generating considerable discussion over whether conservati…
Parties are the key actors shaping women's representation in advanced parliamentary democracies. Based on traditional patterns of feminist organizing, conventional wisdom suggests that parties of the left are the strongest advocates for women. Despite the prevalence of this claim, a burgeoning body of work indicates that parties on the right can—and often do—seek to represent women. To address …
Conservative political actors appear rather troubling for many gender and politics scholars and feminist activists. What should we make of their claims to represent women? How should we best understand their actions? This article, based on a critical rereading of the empirical literature and informed by contemporary representation theory, develops a new conceptual framework for assessing the qu…