The LeRoy Collins Institute at the Florida State University recently released a report that provides a blueprint for a better approach to making state policy and budget decisions by using rigorous evidence to inform these choices. Florida is widely known as a low tax/low services state, and it faces growing challenges. We rank 35th among…
Tag: government
Research Spotlight: Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Impacts of Technology-Enabled Coproduction on Equity in Public Service Delivery
Smart technologies, such as IoT and smart city management apps, can provide real-time and location-specific data that facilitates timely decision making in public resource distribution. It may also distort the distributional equity as many low-income may participate less. Existing research on technology-enabled citizen participation in public service provision shows mixed findings. Most studies find that…
Income Tax Withholding and Government Growth
Prior to World War II most Americans paid no income tax. The standard deduction was high enough that people who had factory or office jobs didn’t earn enough income to owe any income tax. That changed when the standard deduction was lowered in 1940 (and again in 1941 and 1942) to raise revenues to finance…
Ph.D. Spotlight: Executive Turnover, Policy Change and Evolution of Interlocal Collaboration Network
Public officials’ turnover could play an important role in improving the quality of democratic governance. Public officials’ turnover happens at all levels of government. Politicians are vacated from their offices after the loss of regular elections or political appointees are fired or voluntarily resign for policy failure. Their departure is a mechanism to ensure that…
Social Science Scholar: Florida Department of Health
This summer, I completed an internship with the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) in Tallahassee, Florida, and Sarasota, Florida. The FDOH oversees all matters of public health and is comprised of a state health office in Tallahassee, and 67 local county departments. My internship comprised of serving at the state health office, as well as…
Social Science Scholar: Lex Legal Fellowship 2019 in Madrid, Spain
This past summer, I worked on two different projects through Social Science Scholars. During the initial part of the summer, I worked on my Honors Thesis and IDEA grant research project in the region of Catalonia focused on the region’s declaration of independence. On the latter half of the summer, I became a Lex fellow…
Social Science Scholar: Michigan Department of State
My internship and broader experience within the Social Science Scholars program helped me gain a clearer focus on my plans post-graduation. I have decided to use my fourth and final year as an undergraduate at Florida State to fulfill requirements for dual degrees in Political Science and Spanish. I already intended to pursue a graduate degree, but some of my conversations with executive staff during my internship led me to reconsider my program of study, and to shift away from political science and toward data science. My ultimate goal is to work in either state or federal government, or as a researcher at a think tank, and to be able to use both my political science background and my data science skills to craft robust, empirically-derived public policy.
The Measurement and Importance of Economic Freedom
Since the initial publication of the Economic Freedom of the World report in 1996, numerous scholarly studies have used the data to examine the impact of economic freedom on investment, economic growth, income levels, and poverty rates. Virtually without exception, these studies have found that countries with institutions and policies more consistent with economic freedom have higher investment rates, more rapid economic growth, higher income levels, and a more rapid reduction in poverty rates.
Survey Research and the Politics of Old Age Welfare
A recent paper appearing in Theory in Action, co-authored by William R. Earnest and FSU Sociology Professor Irene Padavic and supported by FSU’s Pepper Center on Aging, tackles a flawed proposal from Robert Binstock about minimizing intergeneration conflict over elderly benefits and uses it to analyze how assumptions grounded in interest group liberalism inform current…
Lessons from the Lab: Fighting Corruption
Corruption is one of the “wicked” problems facing many societies. Simple punishment and regulation is often ineffective and more creative, bottom-up approaches to fighting corruption have been proposed. Testing these approaches in the field is next to impossible as it is difficult to find a government able and willing to experiment on its citizens. Social science laboratory experiments provide a way to assess effective tools in the battle against systemic corruption.
Wicked Problems, Wicked Solutions 