Abstract
In their theory of social constructions of target populations, Schneider and Ingram argue that in degenerative policy systems policy designs and policy outcomes will disproportionately benefit those socially constructed as Advantaged and disproportionately harm those socially constructed as Deviants (1997). Though heretofore unexamined, an implication of Schneider and Ingram’s model presented in Policy Design for Democracy (1997) is that the effects of policy with widespread outcomes should be rankable with respect to targets’ social constructions, with Advantaged receiving less than Contenders who receive less than Dependents who receive less than Deviants of bad outcomes, and vice versa for good outcomes. Air pollution policies affect members of all four types of socially constructed groups, air pollution is well known to have social justice components, and air pollution is of particular interest because of its seeming universal application. So we performed an empirical, quantitative analysis of this rank-order hypothesis using data on air pollution in cities in California’s Central Valley. The analysis finds evidence that social constructions of subpopulations in Central Valley cities help to explain the incidence of air pollution in the hypothesized rank-order way. The results provide new evidence of the value of the Schneider and Ingram (Policy design for democracy. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1997) model in the area of outcomes, and new evidence regarding the social justice of seemingly universal policies.
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Notes
However, they point out that it remains unclear whether the differential treatment between “deserving” and “undeserving” is mainly due to the differences in political power or social construction.
For a map image, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_(California).
“Myocardial infarction” is “another term for heart attack” (New Oxford American Dictionary 2005–2011).
We used the US Census Bureau’s data for Small Business Firms, which is categorized by the following definition: “A firm may operate one place of business or more, such as a chain of restaurants, or have no fixed business location, such as the firm represented by a self-employed carpenter or salesperson. It is reported on an establishment basis rather than a firm basis” (US Census Bureau, State and Country QuickFacts 2012a). Banks are not included in this measure.
“America’s Call for Higher Education Redesign: The 2012 Lumina Foundation Study of the American Public’s Opinion on Higher Education.” Lumina Foundation. February 5, 2013. http://www.luminafoundation.org/files/publications/Americas_Call_for_Higher_Education_Redesign.pdf.
The data for Small Business Firms do not include the number of Banks.
Interestingly, Schneider and Ingram, writing after the savings and loan crisis, mention savings and loans among the Contender group (1997: 109).
All crime types are included except Larceny-theft under $400. We were not sure that those who commit such a petty crime would be considered Deviants in the sense described by Schneider and Ingram (1997).
Two of the journal’s reviewers suggested that social constructions may vary across different policy domains, with some groups relevantly socially constructed in one domain but not in others. As far as we can tell, this has not been studied and does not appear to be implied by Schneider and Ingram (1997). However, it is an interesting point worthy of study. Nonetheless, we think that air pollution, because of its widespread and integrated nature, is a domain that is relevant to almost all groups; the bottom line is that air pollution is the concern of all people and effects all people as well.
A household “includes all the persons who occupy a housing unit as their usual place of residence. A housing unit is a house, an apartment, a mobile home, a group of rooms, or a single room that is occupied” (US Census Bureau, state and country QuickFact 2012c).
We had to eliminate 16 city-level PM10 observations because of missing data for Single Mothers.
The tests for heteroskedasticity were not statistically significant, so we fail to reject the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity, so we did not need to correct the (OLS) standard errors for heteroskedasticity.
We should note that we tested using poverty as one of our independent variables [to measure a group that we expect is between the Dependent and Deviant groups in Schneider and Ingram’s (1997) social construction theory]. However, including poverty resulted in degraded results compared to when it was not in the model, so we omitted it. The reason is that Poverty was highly correlated with all independent variables, except Firms and Banks.
We should note that we tried an analysis for ozone levels, but overall the equation performed very poorly (low R-squared, low F)—which is what Liu (2001) says is generally true for ozone models.
Households and City Size are correlated, but not excessively, with a Pearson’s r of 0.35, statistically significant at 99 %. See “Appendix” for more details.
Unless, of course, there is some serious violation.
A one-unit increase for this measure is too large to be relevant.
A third element is that policy makers must be able to control policy outcomes and, even if the first two hold, given other results in the literature, this may be problematic for some outcomes (such as ozone).
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Thanks to Roger Chin for research assistance.
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Al-Kohlani, S.A., Campbell, H.E. Rank-order implications of social construction theory: Does air quality depend on social constructions?. Policy Sci 49, 467–488 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-016-9251-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-016-9251-3