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IPPSR is MSU’s new hub for public policy information and research. Search our summaries of scientific research with implications for public policy by inputting keywords in the search box or selecting options from the menus below.


Policy Research

Community-Supported Agriculture: A sustainable alternative to industrial agriculture?

Cynthia Abbott Cone, Andrea Myhre

June 2000

CSA stands for community-supported agriculture and it creates a relationship between small farmers and those who buy memberships and receive locally produced and fresh produce. It is a way for the community to buy directly from these farmers and share some of the risk of up-front costs associated with farming. This article collects data from eight CSA farms for five years and examined the perceptions of these farms, motivations for memberships, and how women play a role. They found that many farmers found the work rewarding as they got to care for their community and build a relationship with those buying their crops.

Voting May Be Habit-Forming: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Alan S. Gerber, Donald P. Green, Ron Shachar

July 2003

This report is arguing that voting is habit forming, which creates a dynamic piece to understanding political participation that has been previously static. Keeping all other attributes constant of an individual and their environment, showing up at the polls will increase a person’s likelihood of returning. Before simply accepting habit as a fact, non-experimental results had to be combined with experimental data. 25,000 subjects were randomly assigned conditions where they were urged to vote in different ways, direct mail or face-to-face canvassing, and voting behaviors were tracked in the 1998 and 1999 November elections. Both tactics had significant effects on turnout. In the end, this report found that voting in the prior 1998 election increased probability by 46.7 percentage points for the next. The more you participate, the more you feel you are doing something meaningful, and the more likely you are to attend the polls. The article points out four hypotheses on the explanations for persistence in voting behavior. The easiest to test is the first hypothesis. This is that the political environment itself reinforces a person’s political participation level. The second is voting alters specific broad psychological orientations that are known to have an impact on voter turnout. The third is going to the polls changes the positive or negative feelings people have toward voting itself. The final hypothesis is that civic participation alters the way that people look at themselves overtime.

Self-efficacy intervention, job attitudes, and turnover: A field experiment with employees in role transition

D. Brian McNatt , Timothy A. Judge

November 2008

This study looks at an experiment of college graduates working for the same accounting firm, comparing the results of the effectiveness of self-efficacy intervention on new hires to those being promoted to greater leadership positions in their second year. Only a weak relationship was found when looking at the results of new hires for both job attitudes and turnover, while the second-year employees who were given the intervention showed improvement in job attitudes and retention. Interviews and written communications were used to track the effects of efficacy intervention as well as survey responses to track attitudes. However, the sample size of this study was relatively small and not all transition factors were taken into account. It cannot be confirmed that self-efficacy was the thing which has improved as a result of interventions compelling individuals not to quit.

Personality and Gendered Selection Processes in the Political Pipeline

Adam M. Dynes, Hans J. G. Hassell, Matthew R. Miles, Jessica Robinson

September 2019

This study analyzes the different personality types of men and women involved in politics, by looking at candidates and officeholders in municipal elections. The study found that, across personality types, women are less likely to seek elected office than men are; and that the gap between men and women is consistent across personality types. However, female officeholders are slightly more extraverted and much more conscientious than males. Despite the fact that there is no difference across the population at large, or even those seeking office. This suggests that the “political pipeline” values different traits for men and women when it comes to campaigns and elections.

Bringing Party Ideology Back In: Do Left-Wing Parties Enhance the Share of Women MPs?

Andrés Santana , Susana Aguilar

October 2018

This article examines how political parties affect the level of women’s representation in government, by looking at the share of women elected as regional members of parliament in Spain. The article states that political parties are gatekeepers of elected office in parliamentary systems. Therefore, gender parity can only be reached if the parties are on board. Left-wing (socialist and communist) parties tend to be thought of as those that value gender parity the most, but this study tests the truth of that. The study found that left-wing parties are better at increasing the share of women in parliament and electing new women, but that right-wing parties are actually better at retaining women in parliament once they are elected.

Job seeking, re-employment, and mental health: a randomized field experiment in coping with job loss

Caplan RD, Vinokur AD, Price RH, van Ryn M

October 1989

Job loss accompanied by preventative intervention, shortly thereafter, has resulted in higher quality reemployment based on a randomized field experiment conducted in southeastern Michigan using 928 recently unemployed adults. To mitigate the prevalence of mental health issues resulting from job loss which can account for declines in perceived self-efficacy, job seeking performance, reemployment and poor-quality reemployment, this study shows that interventions aligned with mechanisms geared toward motivation and coping prove beneficial.

How to Measure Economic Impact – Evaluating State Tax Incentive

Sarah Leiseca, PEW

February 2014

This article mentions three states that have had “produced high quality evaluations of tax incentive programs” and asks specific questions of each to measure the effectiveness of their tax incentive programs. In Minnesota, they ask how much job creation from the incentive would have likely occurred without it. The study concluded that that number is near 79%. In Louisiana, when asking how these incentives affected surrounding industry, they found that most of the created jobs were also displacing existing jobs, leading to a lower net gain than previously reported. Lastly, in Massachusetts the study asked what the trade-offs associated with the incentives were. Here, they showed that the economic cost of funding this program over others resulted in a positive gain of jobs when compared with funding other areas.

United States progress in remediating contaminated sediments in Great Lakes Areas of Concern

M. L. Tuchman, S.E. Cieniawski , J.H. Hartig

March 2019

Contaminated sediments are a huge problem in the Great Lakes basin and have been the focus of the Great Lakes Water Quality agreement since 1972. The problem still persists today, particularly in places call Areas of Concern (AOCs), however, progress has been made in reducing the amounts of AOCs that exist. The way this has been accomplished is through careful thought put into the size of equipment to do things like dredging, which has kept projects on schedule, as well as productive working relationships between key partners in the project like the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), state agencies of states that border a Great Lake, and Canada.

Gender and Democratic Attitudes: Do Women and Men Prioritize Different Democratic Institutions?

Michael A. Hansen , Agustín Goenaga

September 2019

This article compares the difference in attitudes between men and women, across 29 European countries, on democracy. In established democracies, both men and women support democracy roughly the same levels, but there are differences in what democratic institutions are considered the most important. The differences are the largest in countries with the most robust democracies. Women tend to deem things such as the media, political parties, and representative institutions (all of which privilege male resources and power) less important, and find things less subject to gender imbalances, such as protection of social rights, direct participation, and public justification of government decisions. The differences between men and women on these opinions are relatively small, but are comparable to differences between other individual factors such as education and income. The study also found that women are less likely to believe that democracy works for them.

Family Unification Program: Housing Services for Homeless Child Welfare–Involved Families

Patrick J. Fowler , Dina Chavira

October 2014

This article assesses the effectiveness of The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Family Unification Program (FUP) in increasing family stability. FUP provides housing assistance to families who are at risk of parent-child separation. Using data from a randomized controlled set of families receiving FUP assistance, the preliminary findings of this study finds that families who were referred to the program did experience a lower risk for homelessness and out-of-home placement as compared to families who did not.