Congratulations to Shahidur Rashid Talukdar for successfully defending his PhD dissertation entitled “Policy conflicts among local government officials: How does officials’ engagement with regional governance relate to their position divergence on sustainability policy?” The abstract for his dissertation is provided below.
Shahidur will receive a Ph.D. in Public Administration and Public Affairs from the Center for Public Administration and Policy (CPAP) at Virginia Tech.
I served as a member of Shahidur’s doctoral committee, along with Prof. Karen Hult (Committee Chair), Dr. David Bredenkamp, and Dr. Stephanie Davis. It is customary in CPAP to hold PhD defenses in full academic regalia.
Abstract
Policy conflict plays an important role in shaping public policy—both as a process and as a product. The policy conflict framework—a relatively novel theoretical framework, developed by Christopher Weible and Tanya Heikkila in 2017—considers position divergence among policymakers a key characteristic of policy conflict, which can be affected several factors including organizational and network affiliation of policymakers. This dissertation analyzes position divergence among local and regional officials over community sustainability policy, with a focus on affordable housing, which is a major concern of community sustainability. This research examines if, and how, local government officials’ engagement with regional governance can play a role in shaping their policy positions. Understanding what influences officials’ policy positions is essential in managing conflicts that arise in the making of sustainability policies in general and affordable housing policies, in particular.
This study argues that local government officials’ engagement with regional governance can lower policy position divergence among them by influencing their policy core beliefs and policy relevant knowledge. This analysis includes testing several hypotheses using data from a state-wide survey of local and regional policymakers. Employing cross-tabulations, multivariate regressions, and ordered logit analysis, this study finds that (a) policymakers share a wide range of policy positions on community sustainability policies and (b) for local government officials engaged with regional governance, position divergence on community sustainability is lower than that among those who are not engaged with regional governance. Although position divergence on affordable housing among those engaged with regional governance is generally lower than those who are not engaged with regional governance, this finding is not robust. In some regions and localities, the relationship between position divergence and engagement with regional governance does not hold.
Furthermore, this study finds that local government officials’ engagement with regional governance is associated with higher levels of policy relevant knowledge, which can influence the policymakers’ policy positions. Policy core beliefs do not have a statistically significant relationship with policymakers’ engagement with regional governance. The analysis suggests that local government officials’ policy core beliefs may not be affected by their engagement with regional governance.
Ralph P Hall 