Scholarly work on the politics of immigration in the U.S. has focused primarily on the influence of local demographics. Less understood are the ways in which local governments respond to demographic changes beyond the city limits. We hypothesize that local governments anticipate future influxes of immigrants from neighboring localities and adjust policies ex ante in order to constrain their movement before it can occur. We predict variation in anti-immigrant legislation as a function of proximity to nearby immigrant populations and find that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of the foreign-born population in a city’s surrounding areas doubles the likelihood that a city considers a restrictive policy. The effect is more pronounced when neighboring immigrants originate from Latin America than from other regions. We also find suggestive evidence that knowledge of adjacent foreign-born populations is transmitted via commuting patterns as neighboring populations commute into cities for work. Our research highlights the importance of spatial networks in local politics and how local political units influence one another and engage in an anticipatory strategic response.

Event history analysis (EHA) revolutionized the study of policy diffusion. However, many diffusion studies are snapshots of a policy’s spread. This begs the question of what we are learning from studies of (often) incomplete diffusion. The simple question that we ask – when should a diffusion study be conducted? – is complex to answer. We offer insight into this question using literature on EHA and empirical observation. We use data from the State Innovation and Policy Diffusion database on 83 policies that were adopted by at least 42 states to demonstrate how key results change as the observation window changes. We conclude with advice on how to approach modeling and interpreting incomplete policy diffusion in the future.

Many countries globally have adopted national policy commitments to address violence against women (VAW). Yet the implementation of these policies largely relies on subnational governments’ actions. Why do some but not all subnational governments adopt policies to implement VAW response services? Surprisingly, few studies have addressed this question. Drawing on norm diffusion and gender policy reform theories, we assess the factors driving the adoption of these local policies in Indonesia. Since Indonesia adopted its domestic violence law in 2004, only one-third of cities/regencies have adopted local regulations (peraturan daerah) on VAW response services. Using event history analysis, we analyzed data from 509 cities/regencies from 2004 to 2022. Our findings show that the presence of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) connected to national and transnational VAW advocacy networks, and women’s local legislative representation are significant factors. However, province-level morality regulations constrain the progressive effects of the VAW advocacy networks and women’s political presence.

This article contributes to the growing body of research on social assistance (SA) dynamics by analyzing patterns of SA receipt in China, a middle-income country with a large informal employment sector. Using national low-income household survey data and event history analysis, this study explored the mechanisms underlying exit from Dibao (formally known as Minimum Living Security) and changes in exit probability over time. We found that in the context of an informal economy, the ‘explicit’ change of individual characteristics and employment structure decisively affects receipt duration on the micro and macroeconomic levels, respectively. On the policy level, affected by the informal employment structure, employment services tend to be of low quality and fail to promote Dibao exit effectively. Although the specific Dibao payment strategy, which is used to address the difficulty in means tests, largely curbs the risks of declining working motivation, it considerably increases the possibility of prolonged Dibao use. With this systemic influence of informal employment, a unique pattern of SA receipt characterized by the combination of long-term use and a nondecreasing hazard rate has developed in China.

Whether men's and women's reciprocation of their intimate partners’ negative and positive affect during conflictual topic discussions accounted for the association between their trait hostility and perpetration of physical intimate partner violence (IPV) was examined within a dyadic model, using concurrent measurement. The work builds on that of Dr. Tom Dishion regarding hostile and coercive interactions in key relationships on risk outcomes and the importance of moment-by-moment influences in social interactions. Using dynamic development systems theory and a community sample of at-risk men (N = 156) and their female partners, the hypothesis that quicker negative and slower positive affect reactivity would account for physical IPV perpetration beyond trait hostility was tested. Results suggest that, for women, quicker negative affect reactivity partially explains the hostility IPV association, whereas for men, trait hostility of both partners best explained their perpetration of physical IPV. No support was found for positive affect reactivity as a protective relationship process for IPV involvement. Findings are in line with other studies indicating men were less likely to engage in negative reciprocity relative to women. Furthermore, findings highlight how both partners’ individual characteristics, communication patterns, and emotion regulation processes germane to the romantic relationship impact the likelihood of experiencing physical IPV.

Using data from Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Survey, this article explores the relationship between working part-time and progression out of low pay for male and female employees using a discrete-time event history model. The results show that working part-time relative to full-time decreases the likelihood of progression out of low pay, defined as earning below two-thirds of the median hourly wage. However, part-time workers who transition to full-time employment experience similar rates of progression to full-time workers. This casts doubt on the idea that part-time workers have lower progression rates because they have lower abilities or work motivation and reinforces the need to address the quality of part-time jobs in the UK labour market. The negative effect of working part-time is greater for men than for women, although women are more at risk of becoming trapped in low pay in the sense that they tend to work part-time for longer periods of time, particularly if they have children. Factors such as childcare policy and Universal Credit (UC) incentivise part-time employment for certain groups, although in the right labour market conditions UC may encourage some part-time workers to increase their working hours.

Given an ageing population and increased participation by women in the labour force, the relationship between unpaid care and the availability of women to the labour force is gaining in importance as an issue. This article assesses the impact of unpaid care on transitions into employment by women aged between 45 and 59 years. It uses the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) from the years 2001–2014 to estimate Cox regression models for 6,201 employed women. The results indicate that women with higher caring responsibilities and women with lower caring responsibilities are heterogeneous in terms of the socio-economic characteristics that they exhibit: higher-intensity care providers tend to have a lower level of educational attainment and a weaker attachment to the labour force than women with less-intensive caring responsibilities. Furthermore, while women with more-intensive caring roles are highly likely to exit the labour market altogether, female carers with less-intensive roles seem to be able to combine work and care better. These results highlight the importance of providing more affordable institutional and professional care services, especially for low- and medium-income families.

Pooled event history analysis (PEHA) allows researchers to study the effects of variables across multiple policies by stacking the data and estimating the parameters in a single model. Yet this approach to modeling policy diffusion implies assumptions about homogeneity that are often violated in reality, such that the effect of a given variable is constant across policies. We relax this assumption and use Monte Carlo simulations to compare common strategies for modeling heterogeneity, testing these strategies with increasing levels of variance. We find that multilevel models with random coefficients produce the best estimates and are a significant improvement over other models. In addition, we show how modeling similar policies as multilevel structures allows researchers to more precisely explore the theoretical implications of heterogeneity across policies. We provide an empirical example of these modeling approaches with a unique data set of 29 antiabortion policies.