Mona Vakilifathi is an Assistant Professor of Public Service in the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. Her research and teaching interests include American political institutions, state politics, legislative delegation, K-12 education governance, and charter schools.
Mona's research and teaching interests include American political institutions, state politics, legislative delegation, K-12 education governance, and charter schools. Her research addresses the effect of legislative political institutions on K-12 student achievement by the degree of policy discretion elected officials grant in state statutes. The first category of her research addresses legislators’ electoral motivation to decrease statutory discretion and the effect of legislative political institutions on statutory discretion. The second category of her research creates new quantitative measures of statutory discretion using automated text analysis and evaluates the effect of statutory discretion on K-12 school and student achievement.
Mona is a 2020-2021 APSA Congressional Fellow.
Mona received her Ph.D., M.A., and B.A. in Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. She worked as a Research Analyst at the Center for Education Policy Analysis and Policy Analysis for California Education at Stanford University. In addition, Mona worked as a consultant and a fellow for the California Assembly Committee on Education, New Jersey State Department of Education, New York City Department of Education, and San Diego Unified School District.
The purpose of the course is to deepen students’ understanding of the way in which public policy and political realities interact in American government at the national, state, and local levels: how political pressures limit policy choices, how policy choices in turn reshape politics, and how policymakers can function in the interplay of competing forces. The theme explored is how public officials balance concerns for substantive policy objectives, institutional politics and elective politics in order to achieve change. The nature of key legislative and executive institutional objectives and roles is examined. In addition, attention is given to the role of policy analysis and analysts in shaping policy decisions, seeking to identify their potential for positive impact and their limitations in the political process.
A second goal of the course is to sharpen students’ ability to think and write like professional policy analysts. Students will be asked to apply both policy analysis framework and political perspective to the issues under discussion.
The purpose of the course is to deepen students’ understanding of the way in which public policy and political realities interact in American government at the national, state, and local levels: how political pressures limit policy choices, how policy choices in turn reshape politics, and how policymakers can function in the interplay of competing forces. The theme explored is how public officials balance concerns for substantive policy objectives, institutional politics and elective politics in order to achieve change. The nature of key legislative and executive institutional objectives and roles is examined. In addition, attention is given to the role of policy analysis and analysts in shaping policy decisions, seeking to identify their potential for positive impact and their limitations in the political process.
A second goal of the course is to sharpen students’ ability to think and write like professional policy analysts. Students will be asked to apply both policy analysis framework and political perspective to the issues under discussion.
The purpose of the course is to deepen students’ understanding of the way in which public policy and political realities interact in American government at the national, state, and local levels: how political pressures limit policy choices, how policy choices in turn reshape politics, and how policymakers can function in the interplay of competing forces. The theme explored is how public officials balance concerns for substantive policy objectives, institutional politics and elective politics in order to achieve change. The nature of key legislative and executive institutional objectives and roles is examined. In addition, attention is given to the role of policy analysis and analysts in shaping policy decisions, seeking to identify their potential for positive impact and their limitations in the political process.
A second goal of the course is to sharpen students’ ability to think and write like professional policy analysts. Students will be asked to apply both policy analysis framework and political perspective to the issues under discussion.
The purpose of the course is to deepen students’ understanding of the way in which public policy and political realities interact in American government at the national, state, and local levels: how political pressures limit policy choices, how policy choices in turn reshape politics, and how policymakers can function in the interplay of competing forces. The theme explored is how public officials balance concerns for substantive policy objectives, institutional politics and elective politics in order to achieve change. The nature of key legislative and executive institutional objectives and roles is examined. In addition, attention is given to the role of policy analysis and analysts in shaping policy decisions, seeking to identify their potential for positive impact and their limitations in the political process.
A second goal of the course is to sharpen students’ ability to think and write like professional policy analysts. Students will be asked to apply both policy analysis framework and political perspective to the issues under discussion.
Introduction to Public Policy covers a wide range of topics, from the norms and values informing democratic policymaking to the basics of cost-benefit and other tools of policy analysis. Though emphases will differ based on instructor strengths, all sections will address the institutional arrangements for making public policy decisions, the role of various actors-including nonprofit and private-sector professionals-in shaping policy outcomes, and the fundamentals (and limits) of analytic approaches to public policy.
Note: Students who have not taken an American Government course, or have not taken the course in many years, are strongly encouraged to brush up on knowledge of the basic design and functions of the governmental units in the United States.
The purpose of the course is to deepen students’ understanding of the way in which public policy and political realities interact in American government at the national, state, and local levels: how political pressures limit policy choices, how policy choices in turn reshape politics, and how policymakers can function in the interplay of competing forces. The theme explored is how public officials balance concerns for substantive policy objectives, institutional politics and elective politics in order to achieve change. The nature of key legislative and executive institutional objectives and roles is examined. In addition, attention is given to the role of policy analysis and analysts in shaping policy decisions, seeking to identify their potential for positive impact and their limitations in the political process.
A second goal of the course is to sharpen students’ ability to think and write like professional policy analysts. Students will be asked to apply both policy analysis framework and political perspective to the issues under discussion.
2020
This Data Report aims to map the pathways leading to issue politicization through identifying influential users within politically contentious topics on Twitter, using the online discussion over the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. We find that politically motivated popular users are the most influential users in both CCSS and BLM online conversations.
Do judges selected by merit review commissions perform better than elected judges or those directly appointed by elected officials? This paper takes advantage of the variation in the means of the selection for trial court judges within Arizona, a state comprised of appointed, elected, and merit-selected trial court judges. This unique context allows us to use an objective measure of judicial performance – the reversal rate of appealed trial court cases by Arizona’s state appellate courts – to evaluate judges by their means of selection. We gather an original dataset on 2,919 cases heard by 176 judges, estimating multivariate models that control for characteristics of cases and of judges. Overall, we find that elected judges have a lower reversal rate than merit-selected judges. Our findings question the conventional wisdom in the state courts literature for merit selection and against judicial elections, and encourage further work on the effects of judges’ means of selection beyond state supreme courts to include state appellate and trial courts.
Social media present an increasingly common path to issue politicization, as the distance between policy advocates and the masses is greatly reduced. In this Data Report, we analyze the discussions on Twitter of two issues (Black Lives Matter and Common Core State Standards) as they evolved over time. We show that politicization of the issues did not take the same path, and that different types of messages and senders were influential in expanding and shaping the discussions about the respective issues. For both issues, tweets by highly followed and verified users were widely shared, and contributed to a large downstream growth in the discussion. However, the substance of tweets mattered as well, with the use of angry language strongly correlated with measures of influence, alongside the important roles played by the use of hashtags. Finally, we find evidence that in the discussion around Common Core, some topics were far more important, including broaching issues of individual freedoms and personal values.
What is the effect of electoral uncertainty on a legislature’s preference for bureaucratic insulation? Previous research argues that an increase in electoral uncertainty results in an increase in a legislature’s preference for bureaucratic insulation, delegation of a program to an independent agency or multiple agencies, for a government-regulated program. However, there is disagreement among political scientists on how to conceptually or empirically measure electoral uncertainty and bureaucratic insulation. I use the common conceptual definitions of electoral uncertainty and bureaucratic insulation from the legislative delegation literature in a within-subject experiment of U.S. state legislators and legislative staff to assess the causal effect of electoral uncertainty on their preference for one of the four strategies of bureaucratic insulation. Once a legislature is subject to electoral uncertainty, I find that the respondents are more likely to delegate to an independent agency and multiple agencies that collectively implement a program.
2019
Do finite time horizons constrain a legislature's ability to control the bureaucracy? I argue that legislators subject to legislative term limits enact legislation with less statutory discretion today to ensure that their preferences are implemented by the bureaucracy tomorrow since most legislators will not be around to monitor the bureaucracy over the long term. Although past works suggest that legislative term limits decrease legislatures' rate of bureaucratic oversight, I find that term‐limited legislatures use ex ante means of bureaucratic control to a greater extent by granting less statutory discretion to the bureaucracy.