Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Policy Tool Bundling: Predicting the Selection of Economic Development Policy Instruments Using a Multivariate Probit Analysis

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。经济发展激励工具的建模选择需要整合一个复杂的政治和经济考量系统，并考虑到一系列政策选项中特定工具之间的关系。以往关于政策工具选择的研究几乎只关注孤立的个别政策工具。这忽略了多个工具相互结合的现实。 经济发展激励措施之间的关系可能是地方官员追求效率（如规模经济）或追求政治利益（满足意识形态或选民要求）的结果。 任何政策备选方案的选择都不是独立于其他政策备选方案的。 正如经济商品一样，政策工具可以作为补充或替代品。 本文提出了一个政策工具捆绑理论来解释城市为促进其经济或政治利益而采取的发展政策配置。 政策捆绑的方法建立在现有的研究，从政府和政策扩散文献的工具，调查如何内部因素，地方政府和外部压力，从邻近管辖区影响的政策工具选择。汇集，纵向数据，以确定格鲁吉亚城市的激励政策之间的相互依存关系。研究的纵向性质允许预测以前和当前经济政策选择的影响，同时避免虚假的关系。关注一个州有助于纳入捕捉周围社区行动的扩散变量。 政治机构的影响，特别是专业管理人员和一般理事会代表的存在，预计将鼓励基于效率考虑的政策捆绑。 民选行政人员和地区代表的存在预计将鼓励基于政治利益的捆绑。 贝叶斯多变量概率模型被用来预测经济政策选择，因为它允许同时估计多个政策的采用和识别替代和互补效应。 本文的学术价值在于综合了解释政策捆绑的政策工具和扩散政策理论框架。 在这两个领域的现有实证研究中，缺乏对政策相互依存关系的系统研究。 在这项研究中开发的政策捆绑理论试图填补这一空白，并可以扩展到许多政策领域，包括经济发展，环境监管，税收政策，以及许多其他政府举措，同时利用多种工具。 因此，这项研究有望使学者和实践者受益，并扩大我们对政治制度如何影响政策结果的理解。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Modeling choices of economic development incentive tools requires integration of a complex system of political and economic considerations and accounting for relationships among specific instruments within a bundle of policy options. Previous studies of policy instrument choice focus almost exclusively on individual policy tools in isolation. This neglects the reality that multiple tools work in conjunction with one another. Relationships among economic development incentives can result from local officials' pursuit of efficiencies, such as scale economies, or their pursuit of political gains, from satisfying ideological or constituency demands. The selection of any policy alternative is not independent of the other policy options. Just as with economic goods, policy tools can operate as complements or substitutes. This dissertation develops a theory of policy tool bundling to explain the configurations of development policies cities adopt to promote their economic or political interests. The policy bundling approach builds on extant research from the tools of government and policy diffusion literatures by investigating how factors internal to local governments and external pressures from neighboring jurisdictions influence the set of policy instruments selected. Pooled, longitudinal data is employed to identify codependences among incentives policies for Georgia cities. The longitudinal nature of the study allows predictions of the influence of previous and current economic policies choices while avoiding spurious relationships. Focusing on one state facilitates the inclusion of diffusion variables capturing the actions of surrounding communities. The influences of political institutions, particularly the presence of professional managers and at-large council representation are expected to encourage policy bundling based on efficiency concerns. The presence of elected executives and district representation are expected to encourage bundling based on political interests. A Bayesian multivariate probit model is used to predict economic policy choice because it allows simultaneous estimation of multiple policy adoptions and identification substitutive and complementary effects. The intellectual merit of this dissertation is derived from the synthesizing of the policy tools and diffusion policy theoretical frameworks to explain policy bundling. Systematic investigation of policy interdependencies is absent from extant empirical research in both areas. The theory of policy bundling developed in this research seeks to fill this lacuna and can be extended to numerous policy areas including economic development, environmental regulation, tax policy, and numerous other government initiatives which utilize multiple instruments simultaneously. Thus, this research promises to benefit both academics and practitioners and expand our understanding of how political institutions influence policy outcomes.