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  • Does institutional entrenchment shape instrument adjustment?: Assessing instrument constituency influences on American and Australian motor fuel taxation

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    Author(s)
    Perl, Anthony
    Burke, Matthew I
    Griffith University Author(s)
    Burke, Matthew I.
    Year published
    2018
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    Abstract
    This article compares the long-run adjustment of transport finance instruments in the US and Australia. Change and continuity in these policy instruments highlights how the institutional context can influence an instrument constituency’s influence within a policy subsystem. In the US, a mature instrument constituency created and entrenched motor fuel taxes as an exclusive resource for implementing transport policy. In Australia, fuel taxes remained exposed to the politics of inter-governmental competition and fiscal rivalry across subsystems, leaving less opportunity for instrument constituency leverage. We explore the ...
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    This article compares the long-run adjustment of transport finance instruments in the US and Australia. Change and continuity in these policy instruments highlights how the institutional context can influence an instrument constituency’s influence within a policy subsystem. In the US, a mature instrument constituency created and entrenched motor fuel taxes as an exclusive resource for implementing transport policy. In Australia, fuel taxes remained exposed to the politics of inter-governmental competition and fiscal rivalry across subsystems, leaving less opportunity for instrument constituency leverage. We explore the circumstances under which instrument constituencies can either constrain or facilitate adjusting transportation policy through fiscal mechanisms, especially when the efficacy of established instruments appears to decline. The policy paradigm of American transportation rests upon the entrenched segregation of fuel tax revenues for infrastructure spending. When fuel tax revenues grew from the 1980s until 2008, transportation policy yielded an expanding stream of programme outputs – building the interstate highway network and upgrading part of the nation’s urban transit infrastructure. The instrument constituency that shaped the Highway Trust Fund found a privileged position within the transportation subsystem. In Australia, similar instruments have not been entrenched and have thus been open to political influences beyond the subsystem. The effects of institutional configuration on instrument constituency participation in policy change become most apparent during times of austerity, or when fiscal instruments fail to deliver expected revenues. Electrification of vehicle fleets is now creating such disruption in the transportation subsystem.
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    Journal Title
    Policy and Society
    Volume
    37
    Issue
    1
    DOI
    https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2018.1402527
    Copyright Statement
    © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
    Subject
    Transport planning
    Policy and administration
    Political science
    Australian government and politics
    Publication URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10072/375719
    Collection
    • Journal articles

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