SHIFTING SANDS: TEACHING PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN A CLIMATE OF CHANGE

This article analyses influences which in recent decades have changed the way in which public administration has been taught in British higher education. Focusing mainly on the former polytechnics, the article argues that a curriculum shift away from the social sciences and towards management, and changes in the nature of the British public sector, have profoundly influenced approaches to teaching public administration. It suggests that learning strategies are closely related to debate about the nature of the discipline and its location within the academic spectrum. The article also raises questions about the extent to which public administration teachers in British universities are equipped to present the more applied and skills-based teaching which has often been adopted in recent years, and the tensions which this might pose particularly in the‘new’universities with the increasing emphasis upon academic research.     

A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT TESTING INMATE CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS*

Research Summary: In California, incarceration in the state prison system is in part organized by security level. The higher the security level, the more restrictive the setting. Upon arrival at a reception center, new inmates are scored within a classification system that is used to determine the appropriate level of security. In this paper, we report on the development and testing of a new inmate classification scoring system. Over 20,000 inmates took part in a randomized experiment in which half were assigned to their housing using the existing scoring system and half were assigned to their housing using the new scoring system. There were two key outcomes: (1) potential mismatches between the number of inmates assigned to different security levels and the available beds and (2) reports of inmate misconduct. Policy Implications: We conclude there to be some potential crowding problems, but that the new scoring system is much better than the old scoring system in sorting inmates by the likelihood of misconduct. We also conclude that some predictors popular in the past are no longer effective (e.g., marital status), while some new predictors are extremely powerful (e.g., gang activity), and that one can build in a number of mandatory housing placements (e.g., for sex offenders) and not degrade the overall effectiveness of the new classification system. Finally, the new classification system is shown to be more user‐friendly than the existing classification system and well received by the staff responsible for implementing it.     

Efficient,Fair, and Incomprehensible: How the State “Sells” Its Judiciary

Socio‐legal scholars often approach dispute resolution from the perspective of the disputants, emphasizing how the resources on each side shape the course of conflict. We suggest a different, “supply‐side,” perspective. Focusing on the state's efforts to establish centralized courts in place of local justice systems, we consider the strategies that a supplier of dispute resolving services uses to attract disputes for resolution. We argue that state actors often attempt to “sell” centralized courts to potential litigants by insisting that the state's services are more efficient and fair than local courts operating outside direct state control. Moreover, we argue that state actors also invest significant energy in claiming that the local courts are incomprehensible. Thus, in its efforts to introduce and advance centralized courts, the state argues not only that it offers the best version of what the citizenry wants, but also that it is impossible to conceive that people would want something other than what the state offers. We illustrate our argument and explain its significance by examining judicial reform in New York, where there has been a decades‐long effort to displace local justice systems.     

DO CELLMATES MATTER? A CAUSAL TEST OF THE SCHOOLS OF CRIME HYPOTHESIS WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION AND DETERRENCE THEORIES

In the schools of crime hypothesis, social interactions between inmates are assumed to produce criminogenic rather than deterrent prison peer effects, thus implicating them in the persistence of high recidivism rates and null or criminogenic prison effects. We assess the validity of the schools of crime hypothesis by estimating prison peer effects that result from differential cellmate associations in a male, first‐time release cohort from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. To isolate causal prison peer effects in the presence of essential heterogeneity, we use a semiparametric local instrumental variables estimation strategy. Our results do not support the school of crime hypothesis. In our sample, prison peer effects produced in interaction with more criminally experienced cellmates are always null or deterrent rather than criminogenic. Although we do not explicitly test for the operant conditioning mechanisms theorized to underlie social influence in the context of differential association, we argue that, under the assumption that the differential association context relates positively to the direction of peer influence, our universally noncriminogenic estimates exclude direct reinforcement, vicarious reinforcement, and direct punishment as potential drivers of prison peer effects produced in interaction with more criminally experienced cellmates. Our results support the assertion that operant conditioning mechanisms connect differential association and deterrence theories.     

THE ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL POLICY TRANSFER WITHIN THE MULTIPLE STREAMS APPROACH: THE CASE OF SMART ELECTRICITY METERING IN AUSTRALIA

This article draws on Kingdon's Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) to consider international, not just domestic, flows of policy. It is argued that using the MSA in conjunction with international policy transfer and mobility theories allows for a fuller explanation of the development of smart electricity metering policy in Australia. The MSA is based originally on empirical research within a single country – the USA – in the late 1970s, and all three of the ‘streams’ identified as important to policy change – problems, politics and policy – are conceptualized as domestic. While recent scholarship has broadened the application of the MSA beyond nation state boundaries, it is argued that there is scope to further develop such ideas. In particular, the notion of policy mobility is introduced to capture issues about the globalization of policy, the role of non‐state actors and the material substance of policy.