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This article identifies two key constructs likely to influence implementation of federal policy. It theorizes that states' institutional capacity and political will may constrain or facilitate application of national initiatives, and offers a way to reorganize implementation analyses. The argument is applied in the education policy arena using several years of data to examine how resources and political will influence state test rigor under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). We hypothesize that better resourced and more conservative states are less likely to develop rigorous exams. Using a multilevel model, we find that state-level capacity and political will (notably state-level partisanship and preexisting accountability regimes) explain a substantial portion of variance in response to NCLB. These findings suggest in particular that implementation researchers should more often take note of explicitly political factors like state partisanship to anticipate how layers of government interact as they translate policy into practice.

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sa r a e. da hill-brow n, John f. w it te, a nd ba r ba r a wolfe Has access to selective postsecondary schools expanded or contracted? Evaluating this question has proven a difficult task because data are limited, particularly with regard to family income. We complement previous work and provide a replicable model of institutional analysis. This paper presents a detailed, quantitative assessment of admissions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an elite flagship public university-the type that is supposed to offer excellent opportunities to students from all backgrounds. We use an innovative measure of family income to compare applicant, admissions, and enrollment trends for low-income and minority students from 1972 to 2007. The unique aspects of this study include the more reliable measure of income and the ability to look at the full process from applications, admissions, and matriculations (demand and supply), not generally available in national datasets.

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