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Public Preferences (public + preference)
Selected AbstractsPUBLIC PREFERENCES FOR REHABILITATION VERSUS INCARCERATION OF JUVENILE OFFENDERS: EVIDENCE FROM A CONTINGENT VALUATION SURVEY,CRIMINOLOGY AND PUBLIC POLICY, Issue 4 2006DANIEL S. NAGIN Research Summary: Accurately gauging the public's support for alternative responses to juvenile offending is important, because policy makers often justify expenditures for punitive juvenile justice reforms on the basis of popular demand for tougher policies. In this study, we assess public support for both punitively and nonpunitively oriented juvenile justice policies by measuring respondents' willingness to pay for various policy proposals. We employ a methodology known as "contingent valuation" (CV) that permits the comparison of respondents' willingness to pay (WTP) for competing policy alternatives. Specifically, we compare CV-based estimates for the public's WTP for two distinctively different responses to serious juvenile crime: incarceration and rehabilitation. An additional focus of our analysis is an examination of the public's WTP for an early childhood prevention program. The analysis indicates that the public is at least as willing to pay for rehabilitation as punishment for juvenile offenders and that WTP for early childhood prevention is also substantial. Implications and future research directions are outlined. Policy Implications: The findings suggest that lawmakers should more actively consider policies grounded in rehabilitation, and, perhaps, be slower to advocate for punitive reforms in response to public concern over high-profile juvenile crimes. Additionally, our willingness to pay findings offer encouragement to lawmakers who are uncomfortable with the recent trend toward punitive juvenile justice policies and would like to initiate more moderate reforms. Such lawmakers may be reassured that the public response to such initiatives will not be hostile. Just as importantly, reforms that emphasize leniency and rehabilitation can be justified economically as welfare-enhancing expenditures of public funds. The evidence that the public values rehabilitation more than increased incarceration should be important information to cost-conscious legislators considering how to allocate public funds. Cost-conscious legislatures may become disenchanted with punitive juvenile justice policies on economic grounds and pursue policies that place greater emphasis on rehabilitation. They may be reassured, on the basis of our findings, that the public will support this move. [source] Public Preferences for Program Tradeoffs: Community Values for Budget PrioritiesPUBLIC BUDGETING AND FINANCE, Issue 1 2004Glenn C. Blomquist A growing literature concerns techniques to improve community-based reforms and citizen-centered governance in order to reinforce the trust in democratic government. We analyze a contingent choice technique that systematically collects information about individual citizens' relative values of a set of state public programs. Individual citizens are asked to allocate a fixed increment of public funds. Individuals reveal their marginal willingness to trade off (MWTTO) additions in one program for additions in another. MWTTO values provide program rankings and information concerning the relative strength of citizen preferences. An example of a contingent choice survey is described. [source] INTEGRATING HUMANS IN ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT USING MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION MAKING,JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION, Issue 2 2003Georgios E. Pavlikakis ABSTRACT: The Ecosystem Management (EM) process belongs to the category of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problems. It requires appropriate decision support systems (DSS) where "all interested people" would be involved in the decision making process. Environmental values critical to EM, such as the biological diversity, health, productivity and sustainability, have to be studied, and play an important role in modeling the ecosystem functions; human values and preferences also influence decision making. Public participation in decision and policy making is one of the elements that differentiate EM from the traditional methods of management. Here, a methodology is presented on how to quantify human preferences in EM decision making. The case study of the National Park of River Nestos Delta and Lakes Vistonida and Ismarida in Greece, presented as an application of this methodology, shows that the direct involvement of the public, the quantification of its preferences and the decision maker's attitude provide a strong tool to the EM decision making process. Public preferences have been given certain weights and three MCDM methods, namely, the Expected Utility Method, Compromise Programming and the Analytic Hierarchy Process, have been used to select alternative management solutions that lead to the best configuration of the ecosystem and are also socially acceptable. [source] Government slow to act on public preference for total pub smoking banAUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, Issue 1 2009Billie Bonevski No abstract is available for this article. [source] The use of willingness-to-pay approaches in mammal conservationMAMMAL REVIEW, Issue 2 2001Piran C. L. White ABSTRACT With limited monetary resources available for nature conservation, policy-makers need to be able to prioritize conservation objectives. This has traditionally been done using qualitative ecological criteria. However, since declines in species and habitats are largely the result of socio-economic and political forces, human preferences and values should also be taken into account. An environmental economics technique, contingent valuation, provides one way of doing this by quantifying public willingness-to-pay towards specific conservation objectives. In this paper, the use of this approach for quantifying public preferences towards the UK Biodiversity Action Plans for four different British mammal species is considered. The species included are the Red Squirrel Sciurus vulgaris, the Brown Hare Lepus europaeus, the Otter Lutra lutra and the Water Vole Arvicola terrestris. Willingness-to-pay for conservation was increased by the inclusion of the Otter among the species, membership of an environmental organization and awareness of the general and species-specific threats facing British mammals. It was reduced by the presence of the Brown Hare among the species being considered. These findings for British mammals are compared with other willingness-to-pay studies for mammal conservation worldwide. Willingness-to-pay tends to be greater for marine mammals than terrestrial ones, and recreational users of species (tourists or hunters) are generally more willing than residents to pay towards species conservation. The choice of technique for eliciting willingness-to-pay from respondents is also shown to be highly significant. Willingness-to-pay values for British mammals derived from contingent valuation are sensitive to the species included rather than merely symbolic. This indicates that, with care, such measures can be used as a reliable means of quantifying public preferences for conservation, and therefore contributing to the decision-making process. However, irrespective of the internal consistency of contingent valuation, the validity of the approach, especially for use in nature conservation, is disputed. Willingness-to-pay is likely to reflect many interrelated factors such as ethical and moral values, knowledge and tradition, and monetary values may not be an adequate representation of these broader considerations. Willingness-to-pay approaches should therefore be used in addition to, rather than in place of, expert judgements and more deliberative approaches towards policy decision-making for conservation. [source] The Role of Public Input in State Welfare PolicymakingPOLICY STUDIES JOURNAL, Issue 4 2000Greg M. Shaw This article reports findings from a survey of 257 state officials involved in public assistance policymaking in the American states during the early to mid-1990s. Respondents were asked to comment on the impetus for welfare reform, on methods employed to gauge public preferences, and on sources of policy ideas. These officials, including state legislators, social service agency directors, and senior advisors to governors, revealed a variety of forums for gathering public input. Although few respondents affiliated with elective office reported significant direct electoral challenges on welfare issues, they often cited constituent contacts regarding welfare reform. [source] The Budget-Minimizing Bureaucrat?PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 1 2002Empirical Evidence from the Senior Executive Service In a representative democracy, we assume the populace exerts some control over the actions and outputs of government officials, ensuring they comport with public preferences. However, the growth of the fourth branch of government has created a paradox: Unelected bureaucrats now have the power to affect government decisions (Meier 1993; Rourke 1984; Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). In this article, I rely on two competing theories of bureaucratic behavior-representative-bureaucracy theory and Niskanen's budget-maximization theory-to assess how well the top ranks of the federal government represent the demands of the citizenry. Focusing on federal-spending priorities, I assess whether Senior Executive Service (SES) members mirror the attitudes of the populace or are likely to inflate budgets for their own personal gain. Contrary to the popular portrayal of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat (Niskanen 1971), I find these federal administrators prefer less spending than the public on most broad spending categories, even on issues that fall within their own departments' jurisdictions. As such, it may be time to revise our theories about bureaucratic self-interest and spending priorities. [source] Public Values for River Restoration Options on the Middle Rio GrandeRESTORATION ECOLOGY, Issue 6 2009Matthew A. Weber Abstract River restoration is a widespread phenomenon. This reflects strong public values for conservation, though missing are studies explicitly justifying restoration expenditures. Public restoration benefits are not well quantified, nor are public preferences among diverse activities falling into the broad category "restoration." Our study estimates public values for restoration on the Middle Rio Grande, New Mexico. Stakeholder meetings and public focus groups guided development of a restoration survey mailed to Albuquerque area households. Four restoration categories were defined: fish and wildlife; vegetation density; tree type; and natural river processes. Survey responses supplied data for both choice experiment (CE) and contingent valuation (CV) analyses, two established environmental economics techniques for quantifying public benefits of conservation policies. Full restoration benefits are estimated at over $150 per household per year via the CE and at nearly $50 per household per year via CV. The CE allows value disaggregation among different restoration categories. The most highly valued category was tree type, meaning reestablishing native tree dominance for such species as Cottonwood (Populus deltoides) and eradicating non-native trees such as Saltcedar (Tamarix ramosissma). The high public values we have found for restoration offer economic justification for intensive riparian management, particularly native plant-based restoration in the Southwest. [source] The Dynamics of Political Attention: Public Opinion and the Queen's Speech in the United KingdomAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2009Will Jennings This article represents the effect of public opinion on government attention in the form of an error-correction model where public opinion and policymaking attention coexist in a long-run equilibrium state that is subject to short-run corrections. The coexistence of policy-opinion responsiveness and punctuations in political attention is attributed to differences in theoretical conceptions of negative and positive feedback, differences in the use of time series and distributional methods, and differences in empirical responsiveness of government to public attention relative to responsiveness to public preferences. This analysis considers time-series data for the United Kingdom over the period between 1960 and 2001 on the content of the executive and legislative agenda presented at the start of each parliamentary session in the Queen's Speech coded according to the policy content framework of the U.S. Policy Agendas Project and a reconstituted public opinion dataset on Gallup's "most important problem" question. The results show short-run responsiveness of government attention to public opinion for macroeconomics, health, and labor and employment topics and long-run responsiveness for macroeconomics, health, labor and employment, education, law and order, housing, and defense. [source] On Being a Good Listener: Setting Priorities for Applied Health Services ResearchTHE MILBANK QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2003JONATHAN LOMAS In the last decade, explicit priority setting has become an integral part of health care systems. Indeed, there is even an International Society on Priorities in Health Care, created in 1997 (Ham 1997). Whether it is Oregon's priority ordering of symptom treatment pairs to maximize the impact of a limited Medicaid budget (Fox and Leichter 1991), England's National Institute for Clinical Excellence's assessing priorities for new therapeutic innovations in the National Health Service (Rawlins 1999), or New Zealand's setting priorities for patients' access to cardiovascular treatment (Hadorn and Holmes 1997), techniques for judging the relative worth of different health service investments abound. As these techniques are refined, the most common addition is the incorporation of public values as part of the assessment. Priority setting is increasingly seen as combining an objective assessment of costs and effects with a more subjective assessment of patient or public preferences (Lenaghan, New, and Mitchell 1996; Lomas 1997; National Institute for Clinical Excellence 2002; Stronks et al. 1997). [source] | |||||||||||||||||||