Matthew Potoski
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Iowa State University
E-mail: potoski(at)iastate.edu
My CV
Class web pages:
Organizational Theory, POLS 571
"Prakash and Potoski have given us
the most theoretically and empirically compelling study of voluntary environmental regulation in political science, economics and public policy combined"
Dan Carpenter, Harvard University
I am
an Associate Professor at Iowa State University where I teach courses on
public policy, administration and politics.
In 1997 and 1998 I taught at the University of Kentucky Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, first as a visiting fellow and later as visiting faculty.
I received my Ph.D. from Indiana University in December 1998. I received my undergraduate degree from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA and a Masters degree from the University of Vermont.
Research and Teaching:
My research and teaching interests lie at the nexus of public policy, administration, and
politics, with the bulk of my work focusing on contract management and voluntary
environmental regulations. The central theoretical question centers on how people
address problems and uncertainty inherent in developing,
implementing and managing public policies. Uncertainty in various guises
undermines peoples’ ability to solve complex problems and produce and management sound public policy. Such problems span levels of government and policy areas.
I investigate how local, state and the federal governments can restructure
political, policy and managerial institutions to mitigate uncertainty problems
and improve government performance.
In my research, I am currently investigating these questions in three research tracks: managing service delivery through contracting, environmental policy, and decision procedures in legislatures. The broader theoretical and empirical problems I address – how people can improve institutional performance by reducing uncertainty and solving collective action problems – reflect an enduring dilemma of democratic governments.
Environmental Policy
Aseem Prakash and I are currently studying how voluntary programs such as ISO 14001 shape how businesses respond to environmental policies. We conceptualize voluntary programs as club goods that provide members non-rival but potentially excludable benefits. For firms, the value of joining an effective voluntary environmental club over taking the same actions unilaterally is to appropriate the club’s positive reputation with stakeholders. Important questions in this area are why do firms join voluntary programs whose requirements are more stringent than government regulations? Does joining a voluntary program change firms' behavior, such as improving their compliance with government regulations? Voluntary programs may also facilitate cooperation between government regulators and regulated firms can achieve the best outcomes for both: improved environmental performance at the lowest cost. Regulators cooperate by providing regulatory relief (forgiving) voluntarily disclosed violations and firms cooperate by voluntarily self-monitoring and reporting their own violations. However, such cooperation requires that regulators trust facilities to self-monitor and disclose violations and that firms trust regulators to refrain from fully sanctioning all disclosed violations. Our project investigates how facilities and regulators can establish and reinforce such cooperation by adopting cooperative policies and establishing a pattern of cooperative interactions with each other. We investigate these questions by conducting a large-scale empirical study that evaluates cooperation between firms and regulators over time, across states and across countries. We focus on ISO 14001, a voluntary regulation that promises to improve firms’ environmental performance by codifying strict environmental management standards.
I started studying environmental policy focusing on how politicians allocate decision-making authority among governmental units to enhance the technical quality of environmental policies while keeping the policies consistent with democratically defined objectives. In environmental policy, many pollution problems are so complex that politicians need to delegate considerable discretion to bureaucracies or lower levels of governments in order to maximize technical advantages of policy experts. However, delegating policy authority to government agencies, or devolving authority to lower levels of government, risks “runaway” bureaucracies or perhaps “a race to the bottom” among states, resulting in environmental policies that are not consistent with democratically defined policy objectives.
Local Government and Contracting
I am also working with Trevor Brown of Ohio State University to investigate how local governments can improve service delivery by investing in contract management capacity. Improving contract management reduces governments’ uncertainty surrounding vendors’ performance and improves contract outcomes. Varying contracting capacity may thus explain the uneven record in the extant contracting research: governments investing in contracting capacity may be better positioned to harness the promise of effective contracting while avoiding its pitfalls.
Legislatures and Agenda Setting
My final research track examines how legislators grapple the uncertainty inherent in group decisions. A series of papers co-authored with Jeff Talbert of the University of Kentucky explores how the rules of the House allow party leaders to strategically select policy proposals and structure floor decisions to mitigate the uncertainty inherent in majority cycling problems. These papers trace the policy process from agenda setting and policy proposals, through floor decisions, to policy implementation in legislators’ districts. Other work in this area examines how decision rules governing agenda control and the policy process can dramatically alter policy outcomes. Bob Lowry and I have a paper forthcoming at the Journal of Politics thatexamines how organized interests shape how congress allocates distributive program awards across states. Finally, Tom Rice and I are studying representation among Iowa town governments.