Since I'm more than 50% caught up with my to-do list (yet still horribly behind), a short thread on why I think this paper is neat.

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My co-authors and I examine whether form of government, issue salience (traffic), or the combination of the two have any influence on transit spending or decisions to expand transit services. We're using @mullinmeg's conditionality framework but with transit. 2/

One might expect a specialized govt (a transit agency) to be more attuned to issue salience than a general govt who has competing interests. However, when the issue becomes prominent the two start acting similar. 3/

Meg finds this exact relationship with the adoption of block rate water pricing. Interestingly, we find no relationship so the question becomes why. We postulate that different policy areas have different attributes that make them more or less in line with this hypothesis 4/

Water provision has few substitutes. There's usually one provider (or well water). Transit is merely one provider in a vast fabric of transportation options. We suspect that making policy in this environment is simply different. 5/

In light of this result we should be paying a lot more attention to issue salience and form of government in a lot more policy areas. Both are important but we don't know in what areas or how much for a lot of policy areas. We should work on changing that.

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