State and local governments are increasingly interested in understanding the factors that influence data center location. This paper examines a common state policy tool, state sales and use tax exemptions for data center investment, as a location factor using staggered difference-in-differences methods. Tax exemptions significantly increased data center square footage but had little effect on the number of facilities or energy use. The results indicate an estimated 50 percent “but for” effect, evidence of early-mover advantages, and declining incentive effectiveness over time, suggesting that infrastructure and other location factors may now play a larger role than tax incentives.
Citizen advisory bodies (CABs) are a longstanding and widespread feature of local governance in the United States. Created to solicit resident input, enhance public trust, and extend local government capacity, CABs represent a structured, robust, yet under-studied mechanism of civic engagement. This article reviews the limited academic literature on CABs and integrates those insights with observations from eight collaborative learning workshops with practitioners on the topic. We synthesize findings across four primary questions: Why are CABs created and maintained? Who serves, and why? How do elected officials perceive their value? And how is their effectiveness assessed? The analysis highlights how CABs serve as a widespread form of collective coproduction and underscores the gaps in what we currently know regarding representativeness, orientation and training, organizational support, and democratic legitimacy. Four strands of promising future scholarship are outlined so that public administration research might better inform the practice of CABs.
This study reconceptualizes state preemption as a multidimensional policy design choice that actively reshapes state-local authority. We examine gubernatorial treatment of local governments through executive orders issued during the COVID-19 pandemic to capture the complexity of state-local interactions. Utilizing the Institutional Grammar Tool, we code executive orders to develop a novel measure that considers both the direction (authorization versus prohibition) and scope (narrow versus broad) of state intervention in local autonomy. This approach reveals variation in how states simultaneously constrain and empower local governments, demonstrating patterns that are obscured by conventional measures that treat preemption solely as a prohibitive instrument. The findings highlight the importance of nuanced measurement strategies for understanding intergovernmental dynamics, particularly in crisis contexts that are characterized by rapid policy change.
The cybersecurity planning landscape across U.S. state governments is both critically important and surprisingly understudied. This article provides a systematic document-based comparative analysis of publicly available cybersecurity planning materials across all 50 U.S. states. It evaluates against a unified framework of eight best-practice themes: training, partnership, coordination and communication, developing awareness and culture, better equipment, leadership, funding, and national security. Using publicly accessible state cybersecurity planning documents collected as of December 2021, this study categorizes states into four archetypes (high, moderate, low, and minimal) based on the depth and comprehensiveness of their planning documents. The findings reveal striking structural heterogeneity across states, significant gaps in the coverage of critical themes, including leadership and funding, and a null relationship between political culture and the comprehensiveness of publicly available plans. The article concludes with policy implications for federal intergovernmental coordination and the future of national cybersecurity infrastructure.
Water system decision makers navigate complex financial landscapes as they make necessary infrastructure investments, address ongoing operational needs, and meet stringent regulatory requirements. Despite their importance, these decisions have been given relatively little empirical examination. This study leverages the Municipal Drinking Water Database (MDWD) to examine patterns and trends in total expenditures, capital expenditures, and revenues for drinking water systems. Central to our analysis is capital intensity, measured as the capital expenditure to water utility revenue ratio, or capex ratio. We find a robust negative association between the capex ratio and per capita current expenditures, while overall spending increases, reflecting the direct relationship between capital expenditures, total expenditure and the capex ratio; alongside multiple independent covariates, this helps explain some of the within-municipality variation in spending outside of year-specific shocks. Capital spending is often critical for long-term resilience, but sustained spending may produce affordability challenges. This research provides new insight into the spending decisions of municipal water system managers and underscores the challenge of investing in infrastructure to both enhance resilience and ensure the affordability of drinking water services.
