Iris Hui

Collaborative governance (CG), involving partnership between governmental and non‐governmental actors, has emerged as an alternative to traditional government (TG). While CG may be seen as a strategy for increasing legitimacy, we know little about how the public evaluates inclusion of private citizens and stakeholder groups in decision‐making processes. Following the methodology of Cain et al. in their 2020 study of transportation and drawing on legitimacy theory, we develop a series of “components” of legitimacy. We then use these to test how respondents perceive the legitimacy of different institutional arrangements through a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. Our results reveal that regardless of board function, respondents perceived CG as more legitimate than TG. Among different types of CG, they prefer the inclusion of private citizens over stakeholder groups, adding empirical data to theoretical debate over how and under what conditions CG may increase the legitimacy of public governance.

We examine spatial patterns of three types of Environmental Protection Agency violation, hazardous waste, water, and air quality, at the facility level. Since facilities operate independently, our null hypothesis is that their violations should be spatially randomly distributed. That is, we do not expect to observe spatial clusters of violations. In addition, systemic factors such as socio-demographic characteristics as well as environmental justice indices should not correlate with violations. Empirically, we find both hypotheses are refuted. Our findings confirm that environmental inequalities have been exacerbated by underlying social vulnerabilities, particularly in the case of Native Indian territories, which consistently show a disproportionately high number of environmental violations. We identify ‘hot spots’, spatial clusters where the number of violations is higher than expected in such a way that cannot be explained by socio-demographic or environmental factors. These hot spots call for local case studies to further investigate causes of spatial clustering of violations.

In recent years, wildfires have ravaged the landscape in many Western American states, especially California. But will these horrific wildfire experiences increase public support for wildfire adaptation measures? We conducted an individual-level survey in California in 2019. Combining survey data with geocoded information about a respondent’s proximity to wildfire events and exposure to wildfire smoke, we assess whether respondents’ experiences increased support for several wildfire adaptation policies. We also control for party affiliation. We find that Californians generally oppose restrictive resilience policies and view the decision to take adaptive steps as a matter of personal choice. Republicans are generally more opposed than Democrats to spending public funds to incentivize resilience measures, but proximity to wildfires lessens their opposition to using public funds to encourage homeowners to upgrade their properties for increased protection from wildfires and encourage relocation to safer places. Although exposure to wildfire smoke is extensive and harmful to health, we found that its main impact on policy preferences was statistically insignificant.

Sexual harassment and gender discrimination have become more salient in U.S. politics in recent years due, in part, to the #MeToo movement. We conducted two surveys on Californians in the 2018 primary and general election. We find that experiencing either of these types of interactions shaped how Independent voters evaluated political figures but had a smaller effect on Democratic and Republican party identifiers. On average, experiencing gender discrimination has stronger effects on the evaluation of political figures than sexual harassment. Both experiences played out differently for Independent men and Independent women. The boost in female support for Democratic candidates was counterbalanced by a backlash vote from Independent men who reported they experienced gender discrimination, aiding the President and hurting Democratic political figures. This suggests that the pro-Kavanaugh backlash had deeper roots in male resentment towards the perceived preferential treatment of women, especially in work environments.

Despite the widespread use and extensive studies of collaborative governance in the United States, we still know too little about how the public at large evaluates the formal inclusion of private stakeholders in collaborative decision making. We examine this question by conducting a series of survey experiments about the function, composition, and power of a proposed regional transportation board. The survey results reveal that while our respondents generally favored collaborative governance (i.e., public officials with private stakeholders) over collaborative government (i.e., public officials only), it was largely due to the inclusion of private citizens, not the stakeholder group representatives. This finding is consistent with a populist framework that presumes that interest group influences tend to impede or distort the will of the electoral majority and that favors functionally delimited mandates and limited power for non-elected decision-making bodies. This has important implications for the design and public acceptance of future collaborative government arrangements.

Creating successful collaborative governance regimes is difficult, but can be especially hard when collaborations are externally generated by higher levels of government as opposed to self-generated by local agencies and stakeholders due to the lack of spontaneity. We analyze this problem as it applies to California’s Integrated Regional Water Governance Program. Public administration theory indicates that a core element in a successful collaboration is empowering local leaders who share the collaboration’s intended goal. However, the political concessions to local autonomy necessary to enact an externally generated collaboration can undermine its success. The tensions between maintaining local autonomy and creating a regional approach are inherently strong in a “layered collaborative governance” approach that acknowledges and accommodates local boundaries. Drawing on the concept of role differentiation, we hypothesize that the roles participants play in layered collaborative governance will frequently derive from their preexisting issue areas, geographic orientations, and power relations, but that program design incentives can influence which groups participate in the effort and how they engage. We test these hypotheses in the context of California’s Integrated Regional Water Management (IRWM) program. We find evidence of role differentiation on grant leadership both with respect to the initial goal of regional collaboration as well as later efforts to address the water issues of disadvantaged communities.

Wind energy is widely recognized as a key element of the worldwide effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions. As compared with the general population, environmental activists have a much higher level of knowledge, interest, and capacity to affect the final outcome of a proposed wind turbine facility. To explore how their opinions on wind energy, particularly on vertical‐axis wind turbines, differ from the general public, we administered the same online experimental survey to a general population sample of adult Californians and to a self‐selected sample of online energy and environmental activists. We find that support for wind energy increases with the degree of environmental activism and engagement. The general public prefers vertical‐axis wind turbines in open spaces, away from one's residence. Location and price sensitivity, however, are weaker among activists. Among activists, attitudes about specific vertical‐axis wind turbine technologies are more crystalized and less susceptible to the information effects except on the topic of minimizing bird deaths.

We explore the connection between residential migration choices and political party identification by movers who change their political party registration. We find that an impressive number of migrants choose neighbourhoods that favor their new party of registration. The association between the party change of the migrant and the balance of local partisanship in their new neighborhood cannot be accounted for by a process of neighbourhood socialisation because the move is too recent for socialisation pressures to have operated. It is more likely that the migrant's political transition occurred well before the relocation and shaped the destination search. Relocation offered an opportunity to mark a previously transformed partisan preference on the voter rolls. In this sense, partisan identification is stable, but observing any large subset of migrants may make it appear unhinged, as this group collectively takes its opportunity to officially disclose their change in political party loyalty when they have a chance to relocate and must reregister.