A New Look at New Labour

This article challenges the current orthodoxy, for instance put forward by Driver and Martell (1998), that New Labour represents a clearly defined break from the Labour Party's past. Drawing upon accounts of Labour's historical development, I argue that Labour in government has always been concerned with forging cross-class alliances, more often than not in the face of bitter internal opposition from the party's grass-roots membership. I conclude that the objectives of the Blair government are not dissimilar from those of the Attlee and Wilson administrations, and that where the means to achieve these ends differ – for example with regard to social policy – this is a rational response to the profound economic and social changes that have taken place since the 1970s.     

Proportional Representation with Citizen Candidates

We construct a simple model incorporating bothcitizen-candidates and proportional representation andinvestigate its properties in a basic case with auniform distribution of citizen ideal points and purepolicy motivations, and in further cases which allowof office rents and other distributions ofpreferences. The idea of citizen-candidates, developedby Osborne and Slivinski (1996), Besley and Coate(1997), endogenises the decision to stand as acandidate and allows explicit study of the number andtype of candidates as an equilibrium phenomenon. Theidea of proportional representation allows a moreflexible relationship between the pattern of votescast and the final policy outcome, and also providesa richer model of political representation. Ourdiscussion points to the widespread possibility ofequilibria involving non-median policy outcomes;provides insights into the relationship betweenproportional representation and the equilibrium numberof candidates; and also provides an explicit accountof the trade-off between candidate benefitsdistributed on a winner-take-all basis and those thatare mediated through proportional representation.     

Socio-demographic indicators of intervention program completion with the male court-referred perpetrator of partner abuse

The purpose of this study was to provide socio-demographic indicators of the court-referred perpetrator-as-client who successfully completed a perpetrator intervention program vs. the perpetrator-as-client who was unsuccessful. Significant associations were noted between alcohol use at the time of arrest and perpetrator program completion. Additional associations included perpetrator employment history by program completion status, perpetrator level of violence by program completion status, and report of victim hospitalization by program completion status. Study findings suggest that perpetrator-as-client intervention programs might benefit by implementing comprehensive screening procedures and by developing interagency cooperation in terms of job training and access to opportunities for stable employment.     

'Dirty Words' and the Offense Principle

Law and Philosophy -     

Predicting Serial Killers' Home Base Using a Decision Support System

The effectiveness of a geographical decision support tool (Dragnet) forlocating the base of serial offenders was compared across 570 modelscomprised of a range of negative exponential functions, buffer zonecomponents, and normalization parameters. The models were applied to thebody disposal locations within each series for 70 U.S. serial killers. Twonormalization parameters were compared for all functions. The test ofeffectiveness was a specifically defined measure of search cost. Whenapplied to the Dragnet predictions it was found that the specially developednormalization parameter (QRange) produced the optimal search costs. Theoptimal search cost was also found to be for a function that did not includeany buffer zone. The optimal, average search cost across the whole samplewas 11% of the defined search area. Fifty-one percent of the offendersresided in the first 5% of the search area, with 87% in the first 25%. Allresided in the total defined search area. These results support thepotential for operational tools using such procedures as well ascontributing to our understanding of criminal's geographicalbehavior. The applicability to other forms of serial crime is considered.     

Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment

Estimates of the incidence of victim gun use from the National CrimeVictimization Survey (NCVS) are consistently lower than are those fromother studies. To examine the divergence, we conducted a survey that gaugedthe impact of methodological differences between the NCVS and the otherstudies. For half of the sample, we asked questions from the NCVS, followedby questions from the other surveys. For the other half of the sample, wepresented the questions in the reverse order. We examined two hypotheses:(1) survey methods account for the divergent results, and (2) the questionscover unrelated activities. The results provided some support for the firsthypothesis, but respondents also reported many more defenses to thequestions from the other surveys than to the NCVS questions. Consistent withthe second hypothesis, this suggests that the NCVS and the other surveysmeasure responses to largely different provocations.     

Michigan's Minority Graduates in Practice: The River Runs Through Law School

This paper reports the results of a 1997-98 survey designed to explore the careers of the University of Michigan Law School's minority graduates from the classes of 1970 through 1996, and of a random sample of Michigan Law School's white alumni who graduated during the same years. It is to date the most detailed quantitative exploration of how minority students fare after they graduate from law school and enter law practice or related careers. The results reveal that almost all of Michigan Law School's minority graduates pass a bar exam and go on to have careers that appear successful by conventional measures. In particular, the survey indicates that minority graduates (defined so as to include graduates with African American, Latino, and Native American backgrounds) are no less successful than white graduates, whether success is measured by the log of current income, self-reported satisfaction, or an index of service contributions. Also, although an admissions index that combines LSAT scores and undergraduate grade-point average is a significant predictor of law school grades, it does not predict career success on any of our three outcome measures. Michigan is a highly selective law school; our results may not generalize to people who have graduated from other law schools.