Scholars routinely make claims that presuppose the validity of the observations and measurements that operationalize their concepts. Yet, despite recent advances in political science methods, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to measurement validity. We address this gap by exploring four themes. First, we seek to establish a shared framework that allows quantitative and qualitative scholars to assess more effectively, and communicate about, issues of valid measurement. Second, we underscore the need to draw a clear distinction between measurement issues and disputes about concepts. Third, we discuss the contextual specificity of measurement claims, exploring a variety of measurement strategies that seek to combine generality and validity by devoting greater attention to context. Fourth, we address the proliferation of terms for alternative measurement validation procedures and offer an account of the three main types of validation most relevant to political scientists.

Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research

This article considers the impact of public opinion on public policy, asking: (1) how much impact it has; (2) how much the impact increases as the salience of issues increases; (3) to what extent t...

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The Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy: A Review and an Agenda:

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Local policy adoptions provide an excellent opportunity to test among potential mechanisms of policy diffusion. By examining three types of antismoking policy choices by the 675 largest U.S. cities between 1975 and 2000, we uncover robust patterns of policy diffusion, yielding three key findings. First, we distinguish among and find evidence for four mechanisms of policy diffusion: learning from earlier adopters, economic competition among proximate cities, imitation of larger cities, and coercion by state governments. Second, we find a temporal component to these effects, with imitation being a more short-lived diffusion process than the others. Third, we show that these mechanisms are conditional, with larger cities being better able to learn from others, less fearful of economic spillovers, and less likely to rely on imitation.

The mechanisms of policy diffusion

In this review, we provide an introduction to the topics of environmental justice and environmental inequality. We provide an overview of the dimensions of unequal exposures to environmental pollution (environmental inequality), followed by a discussion of the theoretical literature that seeks to explain the origins of this phenomenon. We also consider the impact of the environmental justice movement in the United States and the role that federal and state governments have developed to address environmental inequalities. We conclude that more research is needed that links environmental inequalities with public health outcomes.

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ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Human Health and Environmental Inequalities

We construct dynamic measures of the ideology of a state's citizens and political leaders, using the roll call voting scores of state congressional delegations, the outcomes of congressional elections, the partisan division of state legislatures, the party of the governor, and various assumptions regarding voters and state political elites. We establish the utility of our indicators for 1960-93 by (i) examining and, whenever possible, testing the assumptions on which they are based, (ii) assessing their reliability, (iii) assessing their convergent validity by correlating them with other ideology indicators, and (iv) appraising their construct validity by analyzing their predictive power within multivariate models from some of the best recent research in the state politics field. Strongly supportive results from each battery of tests indicate the validity of our annual, state-level measures of citizen and government ideology. Substantively, our measures reveal more temporal variation in state citizen ideology than is generally recognized.

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the American States, 1960-93

Berry et al.'s (1998) measures of U.S. state citizen and government ideology rely on unadjusted interest-group ratings for a state's members of Congress to infer information about (1) the ideological orientation of the electorates that selected them or (2) state legislators and the governor from the same state. Potential weaknesses in unadjusted interest-group ratings prompt the question: Are the Berry et al. measures flawed, and if so, can they be fixed by substituting alternative measures of a member's ideology? We conclude that a version of the Berry et al. state government ideology indicator relying on NOMINATE common space scores is marginally superior to the extant version. In contrast, we reaffirm the validity of the original state citizen ideology indicator and find that versions based on NOMINATE common space scores and adjusted ADA and COPE scores introduced by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999) are weaker.

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the U.S. States: A Re-appraisal:

Over the past decade activists, academics, and policymakers have devoted a great deal of attention to “environmental equity,” or the notion that sources of potential environmental risk may be concentrated among racial and ethnic minorities and the poor Despite these efforts, the existence and extent of environmental inequities is still the subject of intense scholarly debate This manuscript reports the results from a meta-analysis of 49 environmental equity studies The analysis demonstrates that while there is ubiquitous evidence of environmental inequities based upon race, existing research does not support the contention that similar inequities exist with respect to economic class © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management

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Assessing Evidence of Environmental Inequities: A Meta‐Analysis

Theory: The theory of overhead democracy is supplemented with theoretical insights from public administration to produce a more complete picture of bureaucratic decision making. Hypotheses: Efforts at political control are less successful in altering agency goals, values, and the general direction of public policy than they are at altering bureaucratic outputs. Changes in bureaucratic activity over time depend upon external efforts at political control, agency resources, and the complexity and salience of the policy area. Methods: A series of multivariate transfer-function models is used to account for changes in EPA enforcement activity, total federal enforcement activity, and the expression of agency values in water-pollution control. Results: Executive and legislative efforts at political control did reduce enforcement activity. However, these efforts were ineffective at altering agency values, less effective at EPA than in most other agencies, and less effective in waterpollution control than in other areas of EPA enforcement. They also mobilized EPA clientele to produce lower levels of political control in the long run.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2111616.pdf

Political Control and Policy Impact in EPA's Office of Water Quality

The last few decades have been marked by the emergence of a number of environmental protection regimes in the international arena. We know little about the effectiveness of these regimes, however, largely because such evaluations face the formidable obstacles of a scarcity of time series data on environmental quality, a complex mix of nonpolicy factors that affect environmental quality, and the fact that participation in nearly all international environmental agreements is voluntary, which means that policy effectiveness must be estimated from self-selected samples. In this article we assess the effects of the 1985 Helsinki Protocol for reducing sulfur dioxide emissions in Europe, paying particularly close attention to the obstacles noted above. We find that while nations ratifying the Helsinki Protocol have experienced significant emission reductions, the protocol itself has had no discernible effect on emissions. We end the article by discussing the implication of these results for the effectiveness of international environmental regimes in general.

Evan J. Ringquist

Papers

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the American States, 1960-93

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the U.S. States: A Re-appraisal:

Assessing Evidence of Environmental Inequities: A Meta‐Analysis

Political Control and Policy Impact in EPA's Office of Water Quality

Assessing the Effectiveness of International Environmental Agreements: The Case of the 1985 Helsinki Protocol