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Explaining States’ Responses to the REAL ID Act: the Role of Resources, Political Environment, and Implementor Attitudes in Complying with a Federal Mandate

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Abstract

Fifteen state legislatures in the USA have enacted statutes prohibiting their states from complying with the federal REAL ID Act. This article seeks to explain why those states have explicitly opposed the act’s requirements. We determine to what extent state-level noncompliance is a product of the resources available to the state for compliance, the state’s political environment, the attitudes of key implementors in the state government, and the states’ level of concern with matters related to immigration. We find that the attitude of each state’s key implementor is the best predictor of whether a state has opted to oppose the act’s implementation.

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Notes

  1. Originally, 17 states enacted statutes opposing the act’s implementation, but two have since repealed those acts (National Conference of State Legislatures 2010)

  2. It should be noted that Regan and Deering (2009) also found a state’s population density and the state’s number of interest groups to be related to their state’s response to the REAL ID Act. See note 7 for more information regarding how we dealt with these variables in our analyses.

  3. The REAL ID Act began as H.R. 418 (109th Cong.) and passed the House 261–161. The bill was then passed by the House as an amendment to H.R. 1268 (109th Cong.), Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, 2005, which went to on pass the US Senate, 100–0. See http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:H.R.418 (accessed December 29, 2010).

  4. See ICE’s history at the agency’s website: http://www.ice.gov/history/ (accessed April 28, 2014).

  5. Updated data are available at http://www.uky.edu/~rford/stateideology.html.

  6. Data on undocumented aliens were derived from Passel et al. (2004). The report provides a numeric range of the estimated number of undocumented aliens for each state. The authors calculated the midpoint of the range for each state then divided that number by the state’s overall population. The year 2002 is the only year in which estimates of total numbers of undocumented aliens are available for more than a handful of states (see for example Hoefer et al. 2010).

  7. The survey was internet-based, conducted in the first 2 weeks of February, 2009, with follow-up interviews conducted with 20 of the respondents in April of 2009. The response rate was 80 % (i.e., 40 state DMV directors completed at least part of the survey). Although undoubtedly other individuals in state government play very important roles in the implementation of the Real ID Act, we chose DMV directors because we deemed them their roles as the most critical, especially in the areas of issuing new drivers licenses and other forms of state identification. Our survey follows a similar survey of state DMV directors conducted by the National Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators who sought to determine the fiscal impact compliance would have on the states. See National Governors Association, et al. (2006).

  8. It should be noted that we ran additional models (not included here) where we substituted Erikson et al.’s (1993) updated measures of state-level citizen ideology (available at http://mypage.iu.edu/~wright1/CorrectAppendixTable12.1.txt) in place of the measure developed by Berry et al. (1998). Using Erickson et al.’s did not change our findings. Like Regan and Deering (2009), we also included a measure of state population density in our analyses as an indicator of a state’s dependence on federal highway funding which could be lost if the state resisted the REAL ID Act. When included in our models, density did not produce statistically significant coefficients. Although Regan and Deering (2009) included the number of interest groups per capita for each state, we did not because the data are not publicly available.

  9. Chronbach’s alpha = 0.734.

  10. Chronbach’s alpha = 0.625.

  11. The objectives of the Real ID Act are unrealistic (r = 0.443, p = 0.009, n = 34). I think that states’ limited resources will prohibit many of them from complying with the Real ID Act (r = 0.312, p = 0.072, n = 34). I think that states’ limited resources will prohibit many of them from complying with the Real ID Act (r = −0.412, p = 0.014, n = 35). The Federal government should determine the ID standards (r = −0.273, p = 0.118, n = 34). I personally support the implementation of the Real ID Act (r = −0.487, p = 0.004, n = 33).

  12. The battles over the REAL ID Act are not over. States have until January 2013 to comply with the law. This means more states may pass legislation opposing the act’s implementation or that states may repeal the legislation they have passed. The REAL ID Act itself could be repealed. In fact, current DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has stated her opposition to the act when she was Arizona’s governor and has stated publicly she would like to see the act repealed (CNN 2009). She is supporting another bill, dubbed “PASS ID,” which was introduced in Congress in 2009 that would weaken some of REAL ID Act’s requirements, such as the one requiring states to share data (Hsu 2009). However, no major action has been taken on the legislation as of this writing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Public Policy Ph.D. Program, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

    Faith Bradley

  2. Department of Political Science and Public Policy Ph.D. Program, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

    William D. Schreckhise

  3. Department of Government and Masters of Public Administration Program, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA

    Daniel E. Chand

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  1. Faith Bradley
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  2. William D. Schreckhise
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  3. Daniel E. Chand
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Correspondence to Faith Bradley.

Appendix

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Table 4

Table 4 Variable descriptions for analyses presented in Tables 2 and 3
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Bradley, F., Schreckhise, W.D. & Chand, D.E. Explaining States’ Responses to the REAL ID Act: the Role of Resources, Political Environment, and Implementor Attitudes in Complying with a Federal Mandate. J Knowl Econ 8, 877–897 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-015-0295-y

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