This will be a joint workshop presentation featuring work by Yale graduate students in the Department of Political Science.
Natalie Hernandez: “Abortion Policy in Focus: Understanding the Relationship Between State-Level Public Opinion and State Laws in the Post-Roe Era”
Abstract: A tenet of representative democracy is the responsiveness of elected officials to the preferences of their constituents. In the post-Roe context, do state-level abortion laws reflect state-level public opinion on abortion? Standard survey measures on abortion commonly employed by polling groups and scholars do not map onto the precise policy debates happening at the state level, making it difficult to answer this question. Additionally, it is difficult to attain large enough sample sizes to study state-level public opinion. In my project, I seek to answer this question using original survey data that is large enough to calculate precise state-level estimates of public opinion (n=30,240). I use a new abortion survey measure I developed in my first dissertation paper that asks respondents about their abortion policy preferences in a way that aligns with current state level policy debates. I compare this to an original dataset of state-level abortion laws. In my talk, I will present preliminary findings of this project.
Natalie Hernandez is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Yale University studying political behavior and gender.
Nicholas Ottone: “Non-Profit Service Providers as Interest Groups on the Inside: A Case Study of New Haven”
Abstract: Since the 1960s, all levels of government in the United States have relied on nonprofit organizations to provide critical services to their citizens, often subsidizing them through competitive grants and contracts. As a result, nonprofit service providers are not only a privatized form of “street-level bureaucracy” but also influential interest groups in local and state politics. However, few have examined the consequences of nonprofit influence on the local level. Using interviews and participant observation, I present a qualitative case study of New Haven’s city government and nonprofits in the policy areas of homelessness and affordable housing. I argue that nonprofit service providers act as “interest groups on the inside,” who are both constrained and empowered by their financial relationship with the government. In turn, government bureaucrats and elected officials regard nonprofit workers as subject matter experts and powerful allies outside formal government bureaucracy. Further, I argue this close relationship allows nonprofit service providers to shape the policy agenda and downstream policy implementation. These findings shed light on how institutional arrangements shape interest group involvement in local politics and speak to normative debates regarding the democratic accountability and transparency of local government.
Nicholas Ottone is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale University. His research interests include political behavior and public policy, and his dissertation focuses on the causes and consequences of state and local governments outsourcing social services to non-profit organizations. He is currently serving as an editorial assistant for the American Political Science Review and as a research assistant for Yale’s ISPS Data Archive. He holds a B.S. in Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics and Political Science from the University of Notre Dame.
This workshop is open to current members of the Yale community only.