Bulletin n. 2-3/2012
October 2012-February 2013
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Sara E. Dahill-Brown and Lesley Lavery
    Implementing Federal Policy: Confronting State Capacity and Will
    in Politics & Policy , Volume 40, Issue 4 ,  2012 ,  1747-1346
    This article identifies two key constructs likely to influence implementation of federal policy. It theorizes that states' institutional capacity and political will may constrain or facilitate application of national initiatives, and offers a way to reorganize implementation analyses. The argument is applied in the education policy arena using several years of data to examine how resources and political will influence state test rigor under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). We hypothesize that better resourced and more conservative states are less likely to develop rigorous exams. Using a multilevel model, we find that state-level capacity and political will (notably state-level partisanship and preexisting accountability regimes) explain a substantial portion of variance in response to NCLB. These findings suggest in particular that implementation researchers should more often take note of explicitly political factors like state partisanship to anticipate how layers of government interact as they translate policy into practice.
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