Comparative transport finance: The institutional logic of infrastructure development in Canada, France, and the United States

This dissertation compares the political causes and policymaking consequences of institutions that finance and administer surface transportation infrastructure. Roadway and railroad development in Canada, France, and the United States provide the empirical context in which to assess institutions' significance to the policymaking process. The diversity of fiscal and administrative arrangements presented by these three nations belies the claim that exogenous geographic, economic, or technological attributes determine unique transportation policy outcomes. Over time and across nations, the changing relationships between rail and road development offer evidence that institutions do matter in politics and public policy. Institutions provide a reciprocal link between politics and policymaking by creating a logic that influences policy actors' conception of the issues and thus structures their preferences. The examination of that logic proceeds inductively by an historical review of each nation's infrastructure development.;In France, institutions reflect a progressive integration between particular infrastructure development. The United States offers a divergent pattern of infrastructure development in which the fiscal and administrative attributes associated with each policy episode encourage independence from both past and future arrangements. Canada's fiscal and administrative arrangements are even more isolated than their U.S. counterparts, due to a constitutional division of responsibilities for road and rail infrastructure.;To explain both the cross-national variation between institutional arrangements that address substantially similar policy problems (e.g., the development of a national railway, or financing a superhighway network) and the longitudinal changes in fiscal and administrative organization, two institutional attributes, effectiveness, and durability, are put forward as parameters for a typology of the institutional logic that links politics to policymaking.;Institutional effectiveness is defined as the degree to which fiscal and administrative arrangements can reorder existing political and economic priorities. Institutional durability represents the degree to which the norms and rules created to address policy objectives are "cast in concrete." Combinations of these parameters yield a four part typology characterized by unique institutional logics: the logic of exclusivity; the logic of ambivalence; the logic of rational ignorance; and the logic of personalized policymaking.