What Happens When House Members “Run with Congress”? The Electoral Consequences of Institutional Loyalty

This article characterizes the electoral consequences of messages of institutional loyalty and disloyalty sent by incumbent House members to their constituents. We show that, for the contemporary House, there is variation in these messages—not all incumbents in the contemporary House “run for Congress by running against Congress.” Moreover, we show that these messages can, under the right conditions, have significant electoral consequences, even after controlling for party affiliation and district political factors. In addition to demonstrating the electoral relevance of legislators' presentations, our results show an incumbent‐level link between constituents' trust in government and their voting behavior—a link created by interaction between constituents' perceptions, legislators' party affiliations, and the messages that legislators send to their constituents.     

Why China Won't Follow Arab Revolt

Do China's mandarins have anything to fear from the winds of freedom that have blown away Arab autocrats? The short answer is no—for now. The Chinese government has performed for its people, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty during the same length of time Hosni Mubarak reigned in Egypt. Though many in the West would like to think so, it is not likely that the rising middle class in China will one day also fill Tiananmen Square in protest. In the immediate future, the chaos and economic drift that will now engulf the liberated Middle East will remind them again that China was right not to go down the path of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika in Russia. And it is not as if they will have a chance. The authorities are determined never to allow any two people who vent virtually on the Net to meet in the street. In this section, we discuss the impact of the Arab revolt—and lack of it—on China's system of governance.     

Legislative Term Limits and Fiscal Policy Performance

Do term limits impede the ability of legislators to effectively set fiscal policy? To address this question, I examine state bond ratings from 1996 to 2009. Bond ratings serve as a valuable indicator of a state's fiscal performance, gauging the risk and uncertainty that investors face when buying these bonds. In addition, bond ratings are important policy ends in themselves. High bond ratings make it easier for states to borrow and raise revenue, while lowering interest rates. Results from analyses of “Term‐Limitedness” and legislator experience suggest that term limits negatively impact a state's fiscal performance, leading to lower bond ratings.     

Humanitarian Intervention and Communal Civil Wars:

How do policymakers in democratic nations mobilize support for hard-line strategies? Existing answers to this question emphasize the exaggeration of external threats. Yet this overlooks an important dilemma: because democratic citizens expect their leaders to explore peaceful solutions or less aggressive alternatives when foreign dangers are ambiguous, the same conditions that make threat inflation necessary also make it difficult to employ successfully. To mobilize support for hard-line measures when the public wants its leaders to demonstrate restraint, policymakers may therefore attempt to shift blame onto an adversary by using “counterfeit diplomacy.” Specifically, democratic leaders may adopt more cooperative or less coercive options than they believe are necessary, but which they anticipate will fail. This approach can be a risky one, however, because an opponent might accept a nation's demands, accede to its conditions, or offer counterproposals in the hope of diffusing support for more confrontational measures.     

GHETTOS,THRESHOLDS, AND CRIME: DOES CONCENTRATED POVERTY REALLY HAVE AN ACCELERATING INCREASING EFFECT ON CRIME?*

Theories make varying predictions regarding the functional form of the relationship between neighborhood poverty and crime rates, ranging from a diminishing positive effect, to a linear positive effect, to an exponentially increasing or even threshold effect. Nonetheless, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists testing this functional form. This study estimates the functional form of the relationship between poverty and various types of serious crime in a sample of census tracts for 25 cities, and it finds that a diminishing positive effect most appropriately characterizes this relationship whether estimating the models nonparametrically or parametrically. Only for the crime of murder does some evidence exist of an accelerating effect, although this occurs in the range of 20 to 40 percent in poverty, with a leveling effect on crime beyond this point of very high poverty. Thus, no evidence is found here in support of the postulate of scholars extending William Julius Wilson's (1987) insight that neighborhoods with very high levels of poverty will experience an exponentially higher rate of crime compared with other neighborhoods.     

THE “TRUE” JUVENILE OFFENDER: AGE EFFECTS AND JUVENILE COURT SANCTIONING

Age is the only factor used to demarcate the boundary between juvenile and adult justice. However, little research has examined how age guides the juvenile court in determining which youth within the juvenile justice system merit particular dispositions, especially those that reflect the court's emphasis on rehabilitation. Drawing on scholarship on the court's origins, attribution theory, and cognitive heuristics, we hypothesize that the court focuses on youth in the middle of the range of the court's age of jurisdiction—characterized in this article as “true” juveniles—who may be viewed as meriting more specialized intervention. We use data from Florida for court referrals in 2008 (N = 71,388) to examine the decision to proceed formally or informally and, in turn, to examine formally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, probation, commitment, and transfer) and informally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, and probation). The analyses provide partial support for the hypothesis. The very young were more likely to be informally processed; however, among the informally processed youth, the youngest, not “true” juveniles, were most likely to be diverted or placed on probation. By contrast, among formally processed youth, “true” juveniles were most likely to receive traditional juvenile court responses, such as diversion or probation.