Purpose. The purposes of this study were to identify a) specific reasons public works safety committee members have to influence their fellow committee members, b) influence strategies public works safety committee members use more often in the performance of their roles, and c) the degree to which “hard” or “soft” influence strategies are used by public works safety committee members to influence their committee peers. Methodology. Fifty-nine safety committee members from municipal and local government agency public works safety committees in Southern California comprised the sample for this descriptive study. Surveys and interviews were used to gather data. Survey data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Interviews from the surveys were analyzed using qualitative methods. The questionnaire response rate was 98%； interview response rate was 60%. Findings. Safety committee chairpersons, management representatives, employee members, and safety advisors a) identified the primary reason they attempt to influence their peers is to achieve task completion, b) reported that influencing safe behaviors and gaining acceptance of their ideas are important reasons to influence other safety committee members, c) demonstrated more frequent use of “soft” influence strategies, such as rational reasoning, consultation, and inspirational appeals； d) identified situations before, during, and after safety committee meetings in which they used “hard” influence strategies, such as legitimating, assertiveness, and coalition building； and e) demonstrated use of multiple influence strategies. Conclusions. Safety committee members a) seek to influence change across their organizations to increase safe behavior； b) are a supportive group for the development of ideas and suggestions as demonstrated by members use of “soft” influence strategies； and c) find “hard” influence strategies, such as assertiveness, to be acceptable when used to prevent accidents. Employee members use expertise and legitimating influence strategies to balance the positional power of the committee chairperson, management representative, and safety advisor. Recommendations for future research. a) Replicate this study in the private sector using public works contractors, private utilities, or pipeline related businesses. b) Conduct a study to determine the use of influence strategies to intervene in unsafe work practices by coworkers.

US preparedness for a potential bioterrorist attack must include a comprehensive stockpile of countermeasures against biological agents. The Project BioShield Act was enacted in 2004 to promote the development of biodefense countermeasures. Under the act, however, only a limited number of such products have successfully been developed and none have yet received regulatory approval. This dissertation seeks to understand the barriers and ineffective incentives that challenge the development of such countermeasures by analyzing the following: 1) Evaluation of factors technical, regulatory, economic, legal, political and military) surrounding the development of biodefense products； 2) Comparison of the impact of two acts with the aim to incentivize the development of products with little market appeal: Project BioShield and the Orphan Drug Act； and 3) Comparison of four companies with a BioShield anthrax contract in a multiple-case study. The purpose of these analyses is to identify opportunities to remove barriers that challenge the development of biodefense countermeasures. This dissertation finds that the most critical barriers to the successful development and approval of biodefense countermeasures are regulatory and political. The regulatory pathway is still unproven, and the political barrier is apparent because the government is not only the sole customer, but also the regulator, legislator, and collaborator of the biodefense industry. Radical strategies to lower the regulatory and manufacturing barriers have been proposed but still need to be implemented by the Department of Health and Human Services. This initiative suggests, however, that without significant federal funding and keen involvement, the development of biodefense countermeasures could be stumped. This dissertation proposes an alternative model where the resources and burdens are shared between the private industry, the government, and a third contractor party on standby. Additional opportunities to remove barriers include the need for federal commitment to maintain biodefense and BioShield funding, continuous improvement of federal coordination and communication, using a simplified acquisition procedure as opposed to the current approach favoring full and open competition, investment in biodefense products) and associated technological platforms, and the promotion of a government-industry-academia-military partnership. The alternative model enhancement to the biodefense drug model suggested in this dissertation along with BioShield can create the necessary foundation to stimulate the development of biodefense countermeasures for preparedness against potential bioterrorist attacks.

The choice of economic development incentives involves a complex system of political and economic considerations. Policy tools theory has largely focused on the individual characteristics of each particular tool and has not considered interactions among instruments or explained why multiple tools are used simultaneously in practice. Extant research has overlooked interdependence among policies and the fact that policies may serve as substitutes or compliments to each other. Building on theories of policy tools and policy diffusion, a theory of policy bundling is developed in this dissertation to explain why multiple tools are used in conjunction with one another to solve public problems. A diverse set of motivations and strategies are formed to explicate why bundling occur. The theory of policy tool bundling is empirically tested using panel data from the state of Georgia. The presence of policy tool bundling is assessed by modeling four economic incentives simultaneously with a multivariate probit model estimated using Bayesian methods. The results demonstrate that bundling is occurring between free or reduced cost land and expedited permitting and also between free or reduced cost land and industrial development bonds. No evidence of bundling was found between other incentives indicating that while policy bundling does occur in economic development, many of the observed relationships between policies are not strategic.

This dissertation examines the impact of fiscal decentralization of the public sector on both income levels and government size relative to GDP across a sample of twenty high-income OECD countries. Both pooled and country fixed effects panel data analysis is performed on this sample spanning the years 1972 through 2005. Polynomial regressions were also included in the multivariate analysis to control for the possibility of a non-linear relationship between these two pair of variables. Results indicate that fiscal decentralization increases income levels at a decreasing rate. Fiscal decentralization has the same immediate effects on government size. However, the cumulative effects of public sector decentralization are evidenced to decrease government size in the long run.

The attitudinal model of judicial behavior dominates judicial politics scholarship, including studies of federal courts and agencies. Extant research finds limited support for legal constraints as determinants of judge behavior when agency decisions are under review. Attitudinal scholars suggest judges substitute their policy preferences in place of agency preferences. Contrarily, the legal model suggests judges defer to agencies because of procedures and doctrine rooted in the rule of law. This study tests hypotheses predicting whether federal agency review decisions in the U.S. Courts of Appeals during 1982-2002 are a function of judges attitudes, namely ideology, or a function of legal constraints, including agency adherence to legally prescribed procedures and agency passing standard-of-review muster. Using logistic regression, I examine the impact of legal and ideological variables on the outcome of judges reviews of agency decisions. Results support several hypotheses. Agency adherence to procedural standards, such as those outlined in the Administrative Procedures Act, increases the likelihood that a review panel will defer to the agency. If review panels and judges answer standard-of-review questions favorably toward agencies, review panels and judges are more likely to support agencies in final case outcomes. Individual judge votes to support agencies are influenced by the ideology of other judges on the review panel: if the ideology of the review panel is in agreement with the agency position, individual judges are more likely to support agencies in final case outcomes. Finally, a judge is more likely to dissent when he/she is in ideological dis)agreement with the agency position. In sum, results suggest that judges regard for law and regard for their judge colleagues informs decisionmaking. Judges often defer to federal administrative agencies, even when their personal policy preferences are not found to be significantly associated with decisions. Judges ideological preferences appear to be less important in the U.S. Courts of Appeals than previous scholarship indicates, but ideology may influence judges decisions through the ideological composition of the review panel and in dissent behavior. The implication is that the legal model of judicial behavior may be more prominent than the attitudinal model in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. KEYWORDS: Judicial Behavior, U.S. Courts of Appeals, Judicial Review, Federal Administrative Agencies, Attitudinal Model

This dissertation represents a comprehensive study of human prosperity. It consists of two main components separated into two essays. The first essay provides a theoretical definition and a measurement of prosperity. The second essay contributes a review of the institutional and cultural factors identified in the first essay, and examines their influence on the economic subset of prosperity. The definitions of the concept in Essay One, and the theoretical propositions of the determinants of prosperity in Essay Two, are found to be supported through a cross-country empirical analysis. By defining human prosperity as life-satisfaction, Essay One identifies the correlates of prosperity through an analysis of cross-country measures of subjective well-being using raw data from the World Values Survey 1981.2005). The study finds robust evidence that income, freedom, health, religious beliefs, stability, security, and family life are among the factors contributing to human prosperity. The methods consist of a factor analysis of the survey questions combined with an OLS regression. A sensitivity analysis, using three large and distinct samples of the population, validates the findings and enhances the power of the model. The final section in Essay One evaluates existing measures of prosperity and develops a new index based on the findings. The descriptive statistics and the regression outcomes, as well as the index of prosperity in the first essay, demonstrate evidence that cultural factors play a relatively modest role in defining the causes of prosperity, but a more robust role in generating prosperity. The first essay, therefore, provides the background for analyzing the causes of prosperity. Because of the immensity of such a project, Essay Two concentrates on the economic aspect of prosperity. The first section in Essay Two evaluates the frameworks used in the academic literature. Reviews of the literature lead to the establishment of a social theory that suggests how the cultural factors identified in the first essay may be incorporated into a framework that analyzes economic prosperity. The final section in Essay Two reviews and proposes a model of economic prosperity that includes cultural mechanisms and tests this theoretical model. The empirical results provide strong support for the importance of cultural factors to economic prosperity. A short summary chapter concludes the dissertation.

The number of legal and illegal transboundary shipments of hazardous waste has been increasing in the past decade. The mismanagement of some of these shipments has resulted in illness and death, along with widespread environmental contamination. Despite efforts of the Basel Convention, a treaty that limits the transboundary shipment of waste, to reduce these shipments through mandating the treatment and disposal of any wastes as close as possible to the point of generation, recent national export data indicates that over 80% of all reporting parties to the Basel Convention export part or all of their hazardous waste. The amount of hazardous waste involved in a transboundary movement increased 22% between 2004 and 2006. This study examines select social (level of human development), economic (trade extent, structure, and openness), political (level of democracy and tolerance to civil society), and technological (technology development support) factors that may drive a country to export its waste rather than manage it within its national borders. This issue is examined at the national level because it is the responsibility of the national government to grant permission for these shipments to proceed. Self-reported national data is often incomplete, so missing values analysis was conducted and multiple imputation was performed on the research dataset. Multivariate linear regression was then conducted on each of the five imputed datasets, and the results were pooled. The results of this analysis indicate that technology development support, as determined by a proxy variable consisting of a country’s gross expenditure on research and development in relation to its gross domestic product is a significant predictor of hazardous waste export and that, as technology development increases, hazardous waste exports decrease. The development of in-country waste minimization and waste treatment/disposal technologies may be one explanation for this result. Additional exploratory analyses indicate that the broadness of the trade structure, related to trade diversity, and the level of democracy are predictors of a country’s propensity to export waste, when the technology development support variable is removed from the regression analysis. National-level policy options to address these results may include the encouragement of increased support of research and development, especially in the area of environmentally sound waste management technologies. Also examined are the more immediate needs of the government officials who are responsible for these transboundary shipments. Collective action theory provides the framework through which interactions relating to these shipments will be examined at the national, regional, and international levels.

This study examines how public management practitioners in small and medium-sized Florida cities perceive globalization and its impact on public management practice. Using qualitative analysis, descriptive statistics and factor analysis methods, data obtained from a survey and semi-structured interviews were studied to comprehend how public managers view the management and control of their municipalities in a time of globalization. The study shows that the public managers perceptions of globalization and its impact on public management in Floridas small-medium cities are nuanced. Whereas some public managers feel that globalization has significant impacts on municipalities viability, others opine that globalization has no local impact. The study further finds that globalization processes are perceived as altering the public management functions of decision-making, economic development and service delivery in some small-medium cities in Florida as a result of transnational shifts, rapidly changing technologies, and municipalities heightened involvement in the global economy. The study concludes that the globalization discourse does not resonate among some public managers in Floridas small-medium cities in ways implied in extant literature.

The Committee on Rare and Endangered Wildlife Species CREWS) of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service FWS) made important and lasting contributions to one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation in U.S. history: the Endangered Species Act of 1973 ESA). CREWS was a prominent science-advisory body within the U.S. Department of the Interior DOI) in the 1960s and 1970s, responsible for advising on the development of federal endangered-wildlife policy. The Committee took full advantage of its scientific and political authority by identifying a particular object of conservation—used in the development of the first U.S. list of endangered species—and establishing captive breeding as a primary conservation practice, both of which were written into the ESA and are employed in endangered-species listing and recovery to this day. Despite these important contributions to federal endangered-species practice and policy, CREWS has received little attention from historians of science or policy scholars. This dissertation is an empirical history of CREWS that draws on primary sources from the Smithsonian Institution SI) Archives and a detailed analysis of the U.S. congressional record. The SI sources including the records of the Bird and Mammal Laboratory, an FWS staffed research group stationed at the Smithsonian Institution) reveal the technical and political details of CREWSs advisory work. The congressional record provides evidence showing significant contributions of CREWS and its advisors and supervisors to the legislative process that resulted in the inclusion of key CREWS-inspired concepts and practices in the ESA. The foundational concepts and practices of the CREWSs research program drew from a number of areas currently of interest to several subdisciplines that investigate the complex relationship between science and society. Among them are migratory bird conservation, systematics inspired by the Evolutionary Synthesis, species-focused ecology, captive breeding, reintroduction, and species transplantation. The following pages describe the role played by CREWS in drawing these various threads together and codifying them as endangered-species policy in the ESA.

This thesis is a case study of the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment (GOMC), an intergovernmental organization with a complex governance arrangement guiding its grey literature publication practices. To gain further understanding of the use ofGOMC grey publications and their influence on public policy, in-depth interviews were conducted with 19 key GOMC Working Group Members. Barriers and enablers to production, distribution, and use of GOMC’s publications were identified and contributed to an increased understanding of publishing in the grey genre. Insights about GOMC’s publication practices, including the fragmented nature of the production process, the diverse methods of distribution of publications, and Members’ understanding of the use of publications, are addressed by this thesis. Conclusions regarding how Working Group Members perceive the grey publishing genre are provided, including the observation that publishing in the grey genre is not a matter of concern when promoting awareness of publications.