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OBJECTIVES: This study examines the effectiveness of state and federal taxes in reducing the consumption of cigarettes, estimates the impact of government health warnings, and shows how warnings and taxes interact. METHODS: By means of a pooled time-series analysis from 1955 through 1994 with the 50 states as units of analysis, the impact of excise taxes on cigarette consumption for several different models and econometric techniques is assessed. RESULTS: From 1955 through 1994, increases in state taxes were effective in reducing cigarette use. Federal tax increases, however, appear to have been more effective. This difference is partly the result of the "bootlegging" of cigarettes across state lines and the size of the increases in the federal tax. Cigarette consumption also declined when health warning labels were added. CONCLUSIONS: Increases of taxes on cigarettes are associated with declines in the consumption of tobacco. Because of inflation, increased health concerns, and the declining percentage of smokers, however, large reductions in consumption require large tax increases.

Practitioners and scholars are concerned that citizen surveys about community services are heavily influenced by respondents' opinions on other issues and by their sociodemographic backgrounds. We search for these biases by examining the extent to which citizen assessments of streets and parks in Iowa communities match the assessments of a nonresident. The citizens' ratings correlate significantly with the nonresident's ratings, indicating that citizen evaluations are not entirely the product of other influences. However, further analysis reveals some bias. In particular, streets are rated higher in wealthy towns, towns high in political efficacy, and towns where residents rate government services good overall. Parks are rated higher in towns where people come together to solve problems and in towns where people rate government services good overall. Even with these biases, our research indicates that citizen evaluations convey reasonably accurate information about the condition of community streets and parks. . Tom W. Rice is a professor of political science at the University of Iowa. His recent research has focused on social capital, the transmission of culture, and community politics.

The retrenchment of the federal government and the deregulation of many industries, beginning in the 1980s, afforded state elected officials opportunities for policy entrepreneurship. In particular, state attorneys general began to create policy The recent high profile tobacco litigation demonstrates the use of this oft-overlooked office for policy innovation. The legal effort initiated by the states against the tobacco industry sheds light on the role of the state attorney general in our federal system. While much of the literature on state politics continues to debate and examine the influence of the governor on policy innovation and diffusion, our study provides a clear example of policy innovation independent of the governor. Our event history analysis supports critiques of the field of state politics that note the lack of attention to other actors and the context surrounding state policy development. We find that the attorney general is an innovator in her own right, motivated by partisan self interest and working within the constraints of her role. Crises and events clearly mobilized activity among the attorneys general. The state attorneys general succeeded in creating a new national tobacco policy through litigation and these actors demand closer attention as policy entrepreneurs. Although the American system of federalism creates numerous potential policymakers, as scholars we often focus on a small number of these actors. However, the need to broaden the scope of our research has increased in recent decades. Opportunities for policy entrepreneurship at the state level expanded in the wake of the retrenchment of the federal government and the deregulation of many industries, beginning in the 1980s. (Derthick 1986;Nathan and Doolittle 1987;Conlan 1991). State officials, acting in concert, began to fill the void left by the federal government. Scholars of state government have focused primarily

Excise taxes are popular as regulatory policy. This popularity stems in part from their simple disincentive mechanism: higher prices mean less consumption of the regulated item. The size of the disincentive, however, may not be the whole story since governments rarely regulate without sending signals about why the regulation is necessary. This paper integrates signaling into a model designed to test the effectiveness of regulatory policies. By focusing on how signaling can be used in conjunction with more traditional policy analysis models, we offer a more complete understanding of regulation.As the regulatory role of government has grown since the late 1960s, so has the importance of understanding how regulatory policy works. An ongoing debate in regulatory policy concerns the effectiveness of various policy instruments (Eisner 1993; Ringquist 1993). One common regulatory tool is incentives' policy, and excise taxes are a widely used disincentive. Imposed on goods such as tobacco and alcohol, they are levied on producers or sellers, who then pass them on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. If the increase in price generated by the tax is large enough and the program is monitored appropriately, it acts as a disincentive and demand for the product should drop Smith 1974).The size of the disincentive, however, may not be the whole story. The government obviously does not design and implement a disincentive without airing its intent for the policy or without sending "signals" about why the regulation is necessary. Along with the disincentive, the government passes along information about its policies to the targets of the regulation (Schneider and Ingram 1993). This is the key to our argument. Excise taxes can send signals to the targets of the regulation because the justification for them is not secret and is often widely publicized. Information about the reasoning behind a disincentive can travel to citizens via the media, other citizens, or government public information campaigns. If citizens understand the justification for a new disincen-