Predilection or Prediction? Country Selection for the President's Daily Intelligence Brief, 1961–1977

A study of the daily briefings of US presidents by the intelligence community offers a useful test of whether governments can surmount intragovernmental influences in the acquisition and processing of information. A finding that the briefs somehow anticipate events would suggest that governments—their leaders and organizations—rise above political incentives and institutional practices to approach the rationality that realist and liberal scholars attribute to states. This study, thus, examines which countries appear in (the now declassified) daily intelligence briefs of the 1961–(January)1977 period, covering the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford years. It not only finds evidence that the selection of countries for the briefs favors countries referenced in prior briefs (per the foreign-policy literature) but also finds significant evidence that the appearance of countries, in the briefs, anticipates their increased activity in the period to follow (per a rational model).

Defended or defunded? Local and state policy outcomes of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests

This article provides novel evidence on the local policy outcomes of the largest protest movement in U.S. history: the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Building on a hand-compiled dataset containing information on the 300 largest cities in the United States, data on state legislation, and comprehensive protest data, we assess whether two core political demands of the movement were realized. We find that protest did not affect city police budgets but did lead to the adoptions of state police reform. We do not find compelling evidence that protest affected agenda setting at the state-level. Although inconsequential in local politics overall, protest proved counterproductive in cities with large white population shares and large Republican population shares. We argue that local and state politics offer different political opportunities for protests to succeed. In state politics, protest creates electoral incentives to make political concessions. In local politics, a lack of political threat and the perception of protest as inconvenient create political incentives to resist policy change.

Energy and the Complexity of International Order

This article explores the role of states and industrial policy in shaping the historical coevolution of energy and international order. I explore how states, by narrowly self-interested pecuniary goals, the desire for geopolitical advantage, and concerns about the political ramifications of domestic economic structure, use industrial policy to encourage the development of energy-intensive transportation and agricultural systems. Over time, increasingly energy-intensive systems allowed an increasingly complex international order to develop, one characterized by significant differentiation and specialization organized over a geographically expansive area. This contemporary complex order is dependent on fossil fuels. I argue that states retain geopolitical and domestic political incentives to use green industrial policy to develop the technologies needed to transition away from this fossil fuel dependence, but industrial policy today faces greater challenges than it did in the past.

Benevolent Policies: Bureaucratic Politics and the International Dimensions of Social Policy Expansion

Research on the welfare state has devoted considerable attention to social policy expansion. However, little is known about why governments expand social policies serving groups with limited power on issues with low visibility. I call these “benevolent policies.” This class of social policies improves population well-being but produces minimal political gains for the governments enacting them. Why do governments expand benevolent policies if political incentives for reform are weak? I investigate this question by focusing on government responses to malnutrition. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork, including 71 interviews, I argue that the origins of policy expansion can be found in the government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats with technical expertise—technocrats—can play a defining role, deploying international pressure to court executive support and orchestrate policy change. Their actions help explain the Indonesian government’s unexpected expansion of nutrition policies, which serve low-income women and children and address micronutrient malnutrition.

Should the United States Rejoin the Trans-Pacific Trade Deal?

Before the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) entered into force, the United States withdrew from the trade accord. Eleven other TPP signatories decided to revive the agreement, which led to the implementation of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for TPP (CPTPP). The objectives of this paper are to estimate economic welfare effects under alternative scenarios of TPP/CPTPP, to evaluate the extent of losses to the US from its withdrawal from TPP and expected gains from rejoining the Trans-Pacific trade accord, and to examine whether the US economy would have to undergo extensive sectoral adjustments from its participation. We employ a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to examine these issues. The results suggest that the US loses an opportunity to gain 0.4 percent in its economic welfare by withdrawing from TPP, but it would be able to recover most of its projected welfare gains by reengaging with CPTPP. Since sectoral output adjustments in the US are small, its adjustment costs from participation in CPTPP would be limited. In addition, there exist political incentives for the US to become a member of this trade accord.

Rhetorical uses of precise numbers and semi-magical round numbers in political discourse about COVID-19: Examples from the government of the United Kingdom

This paper examines how the British government has used statistics about COVID-19 for political ends. A distinction is made between precise and round numbers. Historically, using round numbers to estimate the spread of disease gave way in the 19th century to the sort precise, but not necessarily accurate, statistics that are now being used to record COVID-19. However, round numbers have continued to exert rhetorical, ‘semi-magical’ power by simultaneously conveying both quantity and quality. This is demonstrated in examples from the British government’s claims about COVID-19. The paper illustrates how senior members of the UK government use ‘good’ round numbers to frame their COVID-19 goals and to announce apparent achievements. These round numbers can provide political incentives to manipulate the production of precise number; again examples from the UK government are given.

Critical Issues and Opportunities for Producing Biomethane in Italy

Nowadays, most Italian biogas produces electricity even though recent political incentives are promoting biomethane from biogas by “upgrading” it. The aim of this paper is to focus on the regulatory framework for producing biomethane from new or already-existent anaerobic digestion plants. The complexity and lack of knowledge of the regulations on biofuel production and of anaerobic digested biomethane from waste and by-products create difficulties of both interpretation and application. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to analyze the regulations for producing biomethane, underline the critical issues and opportunities, and evaluate whether an electrical plant built in the last 10 years in Italy can really be converted to a biomethane plant, thereby lengthening its lifespan. Three case studies were considered to look more closely into applying Italian biomethane incentives and to simulate the types of incentivization in agriculture with examples based on certain fuel types typical of a standard biomethane plant of 500 standard cubic meter per hour. All the considered cases put in evidence that biomethane is a further opportunity for development with a high level of efficiency for all biogas producers, especially for many biogas plants whose incentivization period is about to finish.

Why Delegate?

There is no escaping the delegation relationship, whether in our everyday lives or in the wider economic or political world. This chapter introduces the central concepts that help us understand delegation such as principal, agent, information asymmetry, moral hazard, adverse selection, can’t control and won’t control and the various incentives to delegate. The aims of the book are to develop a broader more descriptively useful logic of delegation that has wide applicability and to do so in an informal and accessible way using real world examples. The book is structured around the variety of economic and political incentives to delegate, stretching from saving time and effort to saving reputation and position and finding someone to blame for wrongdoing.