Final Exam Questions PDF

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Answers for my year's final exam, written out. Serves as a study guide. ...

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1. Deborah Stone (Policy Paradox) argues increasing efficiency is one of the primary goals in policy making. a. What are the other four goals that Stone highlights? b. Identify two specific policies that we discussed in class in which the goal of efficiency comes into direct conflict with one of these other goals. One frequent complaint lodged against the bureaucracy is that it operates inefficiently. c. Provide an argument for why some of this inefficiency may be by design. d. Propose a reform to U.S. political institutions that you believe would reduce the amount of inefficiency in the bureaucracy. What tradeoffs do you believe are present that have prevented this reform from being adopted already? 2. At multiple points in her book, Deborah Stone (Policy Paradox) extolls the virtue of ambiguity in politics. a. Explain her rationale for why ambiguity can be good in the policymaking process. b. Provide a counter-example that shows how ambiguity can be problematic. c. Bearing in mind Stone’s theory, what incentive(s) does Congress have to write an ambiguous piece of legislation that gives power to an agency, and thus decreases the likelihood that the agency applies the law in the way that Congress intends? d. Describe a specific example we discussed in class in which Congress passed some ambiguous policy, or language in a policy. What was the process through which this ambiguity was resolved? 3. Consider the ordinary politics of tobacco, as described by Martha Derthick (Up In Smoke). a. Applying the Wilson-Lowi framework, provide an example from tobacco legislation in which Congress engaged in “client politics” and an example in which Congress engaged in “entrepreneurial politics”. b. Derthick discusses how states and localities also engaged in a lot of policymaking on tobacco. Provide two examples, one in which states lagged and one in which states led the federal government in regulating tobacco. c. Is this a policy domain in which we should expect a significant amount of policy diffusion at the state and local level? d. Do you agree with Derthick’s assessment that ordinary politics demonstrated it was capable of solving the problem of tobacco without the threat of adversarial legalism?

4. Consider adversarial legalism, as described by Martha Derthick (Up In Smoke). a. What are the three elements that must be established in order for a plaintiff to prevail in a tort case? b. What key elements of tort law changed as strict liability was adopted that made it more feasible for smokers to prevail over tobacco companies for injuries that they claim resulted from smoking? c. Derthick is critical of using the legal system to bring about policy change that could be accomplished using ordinary politics. Considering this argument, provide examples of how adversarial legalism can be both democratic and undemocratic. d. Propose a policy problem besides obesity or smoking that you think would be better situated to solve via adversarial legalism, as opposed to ordinary politics. Make sure to justify why you believe adversarial legalism is better suited to solve this problem. 5. One model that was referenced heavily throughout the course is the Median Voter Model (MVM). a. What is the central prediction that the MVM makes? b. Describe the assumptions that are made in order for this prediction to hold. c. Metzler and Richard (“A Rational Theory of the Size of Government”) apply the MVM to make predictions about how tax rates should evolve as the level of inequality in society increases. Why do they reach the conclusion that the amount of taxation should increase as society become more unequal? d. Then explain why the evidence presented by Larry Bartels (Unequal Democracy) suggests that this theoretical prediction may not hold in the real word. 6. There are many forces in politics, and particularly in US political institutions, which make current policy influential in shaping future policy. One example is the cloture vote in the Senate. a. Explain how the cloture vote operates and how it makes it hard to change the status quo policy. b. In recent years we observed the elimination of cloture votes when judicial nominees are being confirmed. Assess the likelihood that cloture votes will be scaled back more broadly over the next ten years. c. Describe two additional institutional features of the American political system that made it difficult to change civil rights policy during the 1950s. d. What do these examples indicate about the political and institutional conditions necessary for changing policy at the federal level?

7. Consider the concept of pluralism. a. A reoccurring theme throughout class was the importance of interests being able to form interest groups in order to better influence the policymaking process. How does this observation relate to our understanding of pluralism? b. Highlight an example from class in which a policy was implemented because a set of interests in favor of a policy were better organized than a set of interest opposed to a policy. c. Mancur Olson (The Logic of Collective Action) identifies a number of features inherent of interests that make them better able to form groups. One of these is coercion – the ability of the interest group to force beneficiaries to act. Identify three other distinct features of interests that make them more likely to be able to from into an interest group, and provide a real-world example of each of these features. d. Finally, relate the concept of coercion to the issue at hand in the 2016 Supreme Court case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. 8. At many points during the class, we applied David Mayhew’s theory (Congress: The Electoral Connection) that to understand the behavior of members of Congress, we need to understand how that behavior affects their chances of being reelected. a. Explain how McCubbins and Schwartz (“Congressional Oversight Overlooked”) draw on this theory to explain the relative preference of members of Congress for “police patrol” vs. “fire alarm” oversight. b. More broadly, what kind of activities can members of Congress engage in to affect their chances of being reelected? c. How do these activities differ in an institution like Congress, in which people vote for an individual, relative to a parliamentary system, in which people are voting for a party? d. One challenge to Mayhew’s theory is that incumbent members of Congress who stand for reelection win at extremely high rates. If incumbents are winning reelection so frequently, why is their behavior so affected by their reelection concerns?

9. Roughly $3 billion dollars are spent annually lobbying the federal government and billions more are spent annually lobbying state and local governments. a. According to Hansen’s theory (“Gaining Access”), what are the primary goals of these expenditures? b. Explain the difference between positive and negative agenda control, and defend the claim made in class that lobbying access is more likely to provide negative agenda control than positive agenda control. c. People have differing normative views about the value of lobbying. Do you agree with Allard’s claim that lobbying is an honorable profession? d. The Washington Post had a story on April 25, 2017 highlighting that lobbying expenditures in the first quarter of 2017 were the highest in the last five years. Use theory from the course to explain why you think this was the case. 10. Most of this class was spent talking about public politics, in which claims for policy change were settled by governmental institutions. But Baron (Business and its Environment, Chapter 4) also discusses the concept of private politics, in which claims for policy change are directed at private actors. For example, an environmental activist could either lobby Congress or car companies directly to adopt higher fuel economy standards. a. Identify three comparative advantages of private politics over public politics. b. Suppose that leading environmental groups called for a boycott of a specific auto manufacturer (e.g., Ford, Toyota) whose fleet of cars had lower fuel economy standards than other automakers. Do you predict that this boycott would affect the number of cars sold by this auto manufacturer? c. Apply Baron’s theory to predict what type of media coverage this boycott is likely to receive. d. Do you ultimately believe that environmental activists would be able to improve the fuel efficiency of cars by engaging in private politics?...