Playing Politics with Sex Offender Laws: An Event History Analysis of the Initial Community Notification Laws acrossAmerican States

Abstract

Despite a decline in crime rates, the 1990s witnessed extensive media coverage of several high‐profile stranger abductions and murders of children. State legislators' swift response to the public's growing fear of sex offenders with the adoption of sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws raises questions about the role of politics. Punctuated equilibrium theory and the diffusion of innovation jointly provide a context to conduct an event history analysis to assess the extent to which politics enhanced legislative responsiveness to public opinion in SORN policymaking. Contrary to the commonly held belief that attributes legislative interest in SORN to salient crimes against children, the results suggest that factors such as the percentage of a conservative population, district‐level competition, and state innovativeness accelerated the diffusion of innovation of the laws.

Beyond Panic: Variation in the Legislative Activity for Sex Offender Registration and Notification Laws Across States Over Time

“…Therefore, Lytle's (2015) finding that significant variation in the timing between SORN policy changes can be attributed to timeinvariant factors (such as state-level context) was replicated when expanded to a national data set. In addition, this finding supports existing research that has questioned the sufficiency of nationwide factors in explaining SORN policy change (Burchfield et al, 2014;Easterly, 2015). The variation in policy change due to statespecific factors could also be observed in the number of states making a policy change nationwide in Figure 1.…”

“…In the early to mid-1990s, however, there was what appears to be a policy punctuation in SORN legislative action, during a period of increased attention to child sexual victimization (Jenkins, 1998; Nelson, 1984). Although PET may have face validity as an explanation for change in sex offense laws, research has indicated these laws may not be driven by media accounts and public attention alone (Easterly, 2015).…”

Fade to Black? Exploring Policy Enactment and Termination Through the Rise and Fall of State Tax Incentives for the Motion Picture Industry

“…Each event history analysis relies on a Cox proportional hazard model, which has been used to examine the diffusion of sex offender laws (Easterly, 2015), ethanol subsidies (Skidmore, Cotti, & Alm, 2013), and research and development tax credits (Miller & Richard, 2010). The Cox model does not assume a specific functional form for the likelihood of enactment or termination, known as the hazard rate.…”

How Noninstitutionalized Policy Innovation Is Justified: A Rhetorical Perspective

“…Over decades, seeking deep insights into why some government entities adopt new policy ideas while others have not, has been a significant theme of public policy research (e.g., Berry & Berry, ; Easterly, ; Jensen, ; Mintrom, ). Empirical work in this train has generated a wealth of insights into why and how policy innovation takes place, with learning, imitation, normative pressure, competition, and coercion identified as five potential forces contributing to policy diffusion (Berry & Berry, ; Dobbin, Simmons, & Garrett, ; Shipan & Volden, ).…”

“…Policy innovation has been a core phenomenon in the field of public policy, which can be defined in general as taking place when a government entity adopts a policy idea that is new to itself (Berry & Berry, , p. 307; Mintrom, ; Petridou, , p. 19). Some policy innovations appear dramatic or even contentious at the time when they were initially proposed, yet the literature has provided numerous narratives demonstrating gradual circulation of such policies across their settings (e.g., Easterly, ; Jensen, ). If we take the diffusion of those innovative ideas as the indication of growing acceptability, a typical treatment in the literature, then we are left with a puzzle: how do the advocates of innovative policies manage to frame those innovations as appropriate and desirable?…”