Understanding the Temporal, Regional, Demographic, and Policy Factors Influencing Counties’ Daily Traffic Volume Reductions in Response to COVID-19

This research aims to understand temporal, regional, demographic, and policy factors that influenced travel reduction within the contiguous United States during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly, this research combines U.S. Census data, infection rates, and state-level mandates to determine their effects on daily, county-level vehicle miles traveled (VMT) estimations from March 1, 2020 to April 21, 2020. Specifically, this work generates metrics of VMT per capita, daily change in VMT, and VMT immediate reaction rates for every county in the U.S.A. and develops regression models to determine how these factors influence VMT rates over time. Results show that state-mandated orders were deployed in a pattern relative to their expected economic impact. Model results showed infection rates may have had a greater influence on forcing state policy adoption, ensuring reduced VMT, rather than the number of cases directly influencing individual travel to a significant degree. Additionally, counties with higher populations or labeled as urban counties saw a greater reduction in VMT across all three models compared with lower population and rural counties. Planners and policy makers in the future can utilize the results of this research to make better informed responses as well as to know the expected results of their actions.

The Initiative Process and Policy Innovation in the American States

We utilize a new policy adoption database with over 500 policies to test whether the initiative process influences the timing of policy adoption. Prior studies have produced both supportive and null findings of the effect of the initiative, but typically examine policies one policy or a single composite score at a time. Theoretical accounts suggest that the initiative process should have heterogeneous effects on policy outcomes depending on the configuration of public and government preferences. By pooling hundreds of policies we are able to estimate the average effect of the initiative process on state policy adoption more systematically while also evaluating variation in its effect. We find via a pooled event history analysis that the initiative tends to increase innovativeness, but that this effect can be cancelled out by signature and distribution requirements. We find that this effect varies substantially across policies and is more consistently positive on average in states more liberal populations. We also find evidence that the initiative process moderates the effect of ideology on policy adoption, while making the adoption of non-ideological policies more likely on average.

Policy Learning and Criminal Justice Reform in the U.S. States

This article investigates criminal justice reform in the U.S. states through a policy learning framework. A comparative case study of reform in Texas and California reveals a policy learning process conditioned by each state’s political environment. Republicans in Texas embraced reform after conservative policy entrepreneurs framed the issue in a manner that matched lawmakers’ core ideological beliefs. Republicans received no such messages in California. With few electoral incentives to support reform, Republicans in California demonstrated little interest in learning from the policy experiences of co-partisans in earlier adopting states. Overall, the analysis shows how policy learning shapes Republicans’ relative support for criminal justice reform and the dynamic ways Republican leadership on the issue helps facilitate state policy adoption.

Examining the Role of Gender in Educational Policy Formation: The Case of Campus Sexual Assault Legislation, 2007–2017

The persistent problem of sexual assault on college campuses is receiving attention in both the public sphere and state legislatures. Although a considerable body of research examines various aspects of campus sexual assault, such as rates and reporting, scholars have not examined how state characteristics and interstate dynamics influence the policy process related to campus sexual assault. This gap is compounded by an underemphasis on gender in theories of state policy adoption, even as a record number of women serve in state legislatures. Drawing on a data set that captures the introduction and enactment of campus sexual assault legislation between 2007 and 2017, David R. Johnson and Liang Zhang examine in this article how the state policy adoption and diffusion framework explains the introduction and enactment of campus sexual assault policy. The results of their study show that the number of forcible sex offenses at public colleges, the number of female Democrats in state senates, contributions from women’s interest groups, gubernatorial power, Republican influence, and bipartisan sponsorship influence the campus sexual assault policy process, with varying influence across legislative stages. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for researchers interested in policy adoption and gender issues as well as for advocates working on campus sexual assault policy reform.

Are we #stayinghome to Flatten the Curve?*

The recent spread of COVID-19 across the U.S. led to concerted efforts by states to “flatten the curve” through the adoption of stay-at-home mandates that encourage individuals to reduce travel and maintain social distance. Combining data on changes in travel activity with COVID-19 health outcomes and state policy adoption, we characterize nationwide changes in mobility patterns, isolate the portion attributable to statewide mandates, and link these reductions to changes in COVID-19 health outcomes. We find evidence of dramatic nationwide declines in mobility prior to any statewide mandates, beginning early in a state’s outbreak. Once states adopt a mandate, we estimate further mandate-induced declines between 2.8 and 6.5 percentage points across methods. Using previous changes in mobility, we find significant effects on current mortality and morbidity, with 1% reductions in visits to non-essential businesses weeks prior being associated with 9.2 fewer deaths per 100 million per day, corresponding with over 74,000 lives saved nationwide for the months of March and April - nearly 1.3 times the actual deaths during these months. These averted deaths correspond with estimated economic benefits between $249-$745 billion for observed behavioral changes in March and April. These estimates represent a lower bound of direct health benefits, as they do not account for spillovers or undercounting of COVID-19 mortality. Our findings indicate that statewide policies reduced travel and helped attenuate the negative consequences of COVID-19. Further, substantial reductions in mobility prior to state-level policies convey important policy implications for re-opening.

Inferring Policy Diffusion Networks in the American States

For decades scholars of state politics have studied the ways in which innovations in public policy diffuse across the states. Several studies indicate that policy diffusion is an explicitly dyadic process whereby states learn and adopt policies from their neighbors in geographic, social, economic, and political space. This dyadic diffusion process implies the existence of a policy diffusion network among the states. Using a dataset consisting of 189 policies, we introduce and apply algorithms designed to directly infer a diffusion network from a sample of policy adoption sequences. In addition to presenting the network inference algorithm, we offer three substantive contributions with regard to research on policy diffusion in the American states. First, we summarize and analyze the structure of the inferred diffusion network and assess the ways in which it has changed over the last several decades. Second, we demonstrate how the inferred diffusion network can be integrated into conventional statistical models of state policy adoption. Third, we estimate models to explain the pattern of diffusion ties and test a variety of theoretical expectations about who states choose to emulate.

Intrastate and Interstate Influences on the Introduction and Enactment of Campus Carry Legislation, 2004–2016

Using a data set that captures the introduction and enactment of “campus carry” bills between 2004 and 2016, we examined how the state policy adoption and diffusion framework explains the policy process related to allowing concealed weapons on the campuses of U.S. colleges and universities. Panel data logistic regression analyses revealed that active shooter incidents, the percentage of Republicans in state government, citizen political ideology, and policy diffusion influence the introduction of campus carry legislation. In addition, survival analysis showed that conservative citizen political ideology and anti-gun-control interests are positively related to the enactment of campus carry laws. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical analysis of the policy process related to campus carry legislation. It expands the empirical scope of higher education policy research by considering a social problem that, like free speech and transgender “bathroom bills,” is only indirectly related to student achievement but nevertheless a high priority for some state legislators. Importantly, the results underscore the importance of examining how the influences of state characteristics and interstate dynamics vary across stages of the policy process.

Sport Policy Institutionalization: Examining the Adoption of Concussion Legislation Across States

Multilevel examinations of sport policy institutionalization are scarce in sport management scholarship. As sport policies diffuse across geographic boundaries, there is often variation in the timing of adoption. In this study, the authors used event history analysis to examine the effect of institutional factors, within and between states, on the speed of youth sport concussion legislation adoption. Our quantitative analyses show that a series of intrastate factors—state norms, disruptive events, and local advocacy—had a significant influence on the timing of state policy adoption, but interstate social networks did not. Supporting qualitative data provide additional insight about the relationship between disruptive events and local advocacy in the adoption of concussion legislation. This study contributes to a better understanding of institutional factors in the diffusion of sport policy across geographic boundaries and offers an approach for future research examining variation in sport policy or practice adoption.