Social Ties and the Incidence of Homelessness

Although almost all homeless people are poor, most poor people do not experience homelessness. We use a detailed national survey to explore the role of social ties—including connection to relatives, friends, and religious community—in explaining why only a subset of poor adults fall into homelessness. We find that lifetime incidence of homelessness is reduced by 60% for individuals with strong ties along each of these dimensions. Ties to relatives are most important, followed by ties to religious community, whereas ties to friends are not associated with reduced incidence of homelessness. We also find that among currently low-income individuals, social ties are not associated with income, providing evidence that our results are not explained by unobserved variation in historical depth of poverty that is potentially correlated with our measures of social ties.     

Using Private Information to Predict Homelessness Entries: Evidence and Prospects

Do people at risk of homelessness have private information—information that social service agencies cannot credibly obtain—that helps predict whether they will become homeless? This article asserts that the answer to this question is yes: homeless people and people at risk of homelessness know important things about their future. Data from Journeys Home (JH), a pathbreaking longitudinal study of people experiencing homelessness and people at risk of homelessness in Australia, are used in this article. In many cases, the private information that participants have predicts entries better than the public information that agencies can obtain. Ways in which this private information can be used to improve service delivery are suggested.     

Assessing (and fixing?) Election Day lines: Evidence from a survey of local election officials

Despite recent studies that find few people face significant wait times when attempting to vote in U.S. elections, the 2012 election produced numerous anecdotal and journalistic accounts claiming otherwise. This study relies on a national survey of local election officials to systematically ascertain their views about the challenges and successes they had in administering the 2012 general election. Consistent with surveys of voters, most officials report that wait times and lines were minimal. Furthermore, the relative amount of money available to a jurisdiction for election administration was unrelated to the occurrence of these problems, while the presence of more poll workers—especially first-timers—may actually exacerbate them.     

People: hearts and minds Towards rebirth of the public service ethic

No country will escape the enormous forces that are now buffeting the public sector worldwide. The massive changes underway are affecting people—public servants and citizens alike—and not just bottom lines. Standard approaches to dealing with change may unwittingly overlook the fact that Public Services are first and foremost “people systems”. The article provides a timely reminder that players in public organizations—senior officials, middle managers and front-line workers—experience change differently given their distinct perspectives and levels of authority. While responses to change may vary considerably within organizations, a common humanity is what ultimately unites people. As a result, governments that choose to ignore rather than acknowledge the human side of change may experience needless difficulty in bringing about the successful renewal of the public sector. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)     

Disability and support relationships: What role does policy play?

Very little is known about how relationships between people with disabilities and their paid support workers are positioned in policy. With the policy shift toward choice of provider, individualised approaches, person centredness and self‐directed funding, the nature of their relationship assumes a more prominent role in the quality of support practice. The policy analysis in this article explores the extent to which current disability policy acknowledges, promotes, or diminishes the relationships between people with disabilities and workers, in their organisational context. It uses Honneth's conditions for recognition—love (cared for), rights (respected) and solidarity or social esteem (valued)—to understand how policy positions mutuality in the relationship. The policy review applied a three‐stage process: categorisation of policies, textual analysis and content analysis to policy documents at four levels—international, Australian federal, state and organisational in two case studies. The analysis revealed that while a rights framework is explicit in most policies, the emphases on the conditions for recognition within a relationship between people with disabilities and workers are compromised in instructional policies that attempt to manage the tension between choice and risk, particularly at the organisational level.     

IS ALL CORRUPTION DYSFUNCTIONAL? PERCEPTIONS OF CORRUPTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Many anti‐corruption organisations work from the notion that both petty and grand corruption axiomatically results in negative consequences. However, few studies have asked citizens to evaluate the effects of different scales and types of corruption. This article investigates how rural people in Papua New Guinea associate dysfunctional or functional consequences to different types and scales of corruption. It draws on findings from focus groups conducted in four provinces of the country. The article finds that most examples of corruption considered by respondents were perceived as dysfunctional; however, marginalised respondents considered small‐scale corruption as functional—if the acts described benefitted marginalised people. These findings suggest that it is critical that anti‐corruption organisations understand and respond to the constraints faced by poor and marginalised people when operating in weak states. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Invisible Populations and the #MeToo Movement

The #MeToo movement has done a great deal to address sexual abuse and violence. There is no doubt that justice may occur when the right person speaks out. However, what happens when the wrong people—that is, people of color, the working class women, and transgender people— speak out on the same issue? When these “wrong people” do speak out, they are discredited, marginalized, and silenced by being ignored. This Viewpoint essay addresses two populations that have been overlooked by the #MeToo movement: women of color and transgender people. The essay concludes with recommendations for how the movement can move forward given the criticisms around the absence of diversity and transparency.     

The Politics of Everyday Coalition-Building

One of the most important challenges of contemporary progressive politics is building social movements for change that take up the ways that that relations of power are shaped by the interaction and intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and other lines of power. As such, questions related to coalition—political solidarity across difference—are key. How do we build coalitions that take up the complexity of these power relationships? How do we build movements that don't leave people out? In this article, I will distinguish between two approaches to coalition. The first are coalitions grounded in shared or overlapping interests or goals; in such coalitions, groups identify common ground and then work together towards the achievement of mutual goals or interests. The second is grounded in a process of what María Lugones (2003) calls becoming “interdependently resistant” in which people recognize and back up each other’s resistances to multiple relations of power in their everyday lives. This article unpacks the nuts and bolts of building such “everyday coalitions” in our lives.     

Elections and selfishness

Elections affect the division of resources in society and are occasions for political elites to make appeals rooted in voters' self-interest. Hence, elections may erode altruistic norms and cause people to behave more selfishly. We test this intuition using Dictator Games in a lab-in-the-field experiment involving a sample of more than 1000 individuals in Kenya and Tanzania. We adopt two approaches. First, we experimentally prime participants to think about the upcoming or most recent elections and find that this priming treatment reduces how much money participants are willing to give to other players. Second, we compare results obtained across lab rounds in Kenya taking place right before the country's 2013 national elections and eight months prior, and find that selfishness is greater in the lab round more proximate to the election. Our results suggest that elections may affect social behavior in important—and previously unrecognized—ways.     

Partisanship and Preference Formation: Competing Motivations,Elite Polarization,and Issue Importance

An enduring and increasingly acute concern—in an age of polarized parties—is that people’s partisan attachments distort preference formation at the expense of relevant information. For example, research suggests that a Democrat may support a policy proposed by Democrats, but oppose the same policy if proposed by Republicans. However, a related body of literature suggests that how people respond to information and form preferences is distorted by their prior issue attitudes. In neither instance is information even-handedly evaluated, rather, it is interpreted in light of partisanship or existing issue opinions. Both effects are well documented in isolation, but in most political scenarios individuals consider both partisanship and prior opinions—yet, these dynamics may or may not pull toward the same preference. Using nationally representative experiments focused on tax and education policies, I introduce and test a theory that isolates when: partisanship dominates preference formation, partisanship and issue opinions reinforce or offset each other, and issue attitudes trump partisanship. The findings make clear that the public does not blindly follow party elites. Depending on elite positions, the level of partisan polarization, and personal importance of issues, the public can be attentive to information and shirk the influence of party elites. The results have broad implications for political parties and citizen competence in contemporary democratic politics.     

The 2017 General Election,Brexit and the Return to Two‐Party Politics: An Aggregate‐Level Analysis of the Result

The outcome of the 2017 general election—a hung parliament—defied most predictions. In this article, we draw on aggregate‐level data to conduct an initial exploration of the vote. What was the impact of Brexit on the 2017 general election result? What difference did the collapse of UKIP make? And what was the relative importance of factors such as turnout, education, age and ethnic diversity on support for the two main parties? First, we find that turnout was generally higher in more pro‐remain areas, and places with high concentrations of young people, ethnic minorities and university graduates. Second, we find that the Conservatives made gains in the sort of places that had previously backed Brexit and previously voted for UKIP . But, third, we find that the gains the Conservatives made from the electoral decline of UKIP were offset by losses in the sort of places that had previously supported the Conservatives, particularly areas in southern England with larger numbers of graduates. The implication of these findings is that while a Brexit effect contributed to a ‘realignment on the right’, with the Conservative strategy appealing to people in places that had previously voted for UKIP , this strategy was not without an electoral cost, and appears to have hurt the party in more middle class areas.     

Explaining Explanations: How Legislators Explain their Policy Positions and How Citizens React

Legislators claim that how they explain their votes matters as much as or more than the roll calls themselves. However, few studies have systematically examined legislators’ explanations and citizen attitudes in response to these explanations. We theorize that legislators strategically tailor explanations to constituents in order to compensate for policy choices that are incongruent with constituent preferences, and to reinforce policy choices that are congruent. We conduct a within‐subjects field experiment using U.S. senators as subjects to test this hypothesis. We then conduct a between‐subjects survey experiment of ordinary people to see how they react to the explanatory strategies used by senators in the field experiment. We find that most senators tailor their explanations to their audiences, and that these tailored explanations are effective at currying support—especially among people who disagree with the legislators’ roll‐call positions.     

Reordering Honours: Perspectives and Possibilities

The UK's honour system is a strange mixture of ancient tradition and Victorian invention, and is drifting into obsolescence. Many of its honours recall a vanished imperial past, or maintain increasingly unacceptable demarcations between classes of recipients. However, the high rate of acceptance of honours and the almost universal existence of similar systems throughout the world suggests that people do still value an honours system. But what form should it take? In 2004 two separate reports looked at most elements of the system and produced recommendations, though their impacts were lost in the shadow of the far more dramatic Butler Report. David Cannadine assesses both honours reports and their prospects for adoption at a time when the policy‐makers and government are preoccupied with other issues. He concludes that the time is right for change — in spite of the inevitable opposition from some quarters — given that both Whitehall and Westminster agree that change is necessary.     

Silence and Catastrophe: New Reasons Why Politics Matters in the Early Years of the Twenty‐first Century

Megaprojects are systems of highly concentrated power whose footprints, or radius of effects, are without precedent in human history. Once upon a time, even under imperial conditions, most people on our planet lived and loved, worked and played within geographically limited communities. They never had to reckon with all of humanity as a factor in their daily lives. Whenever they acted recklessly within their environment, for instance, they had the option of moving on, safe in the knowledge that there was plenty of Earth and not many others. Whenever bad things happened, they happened within limits. Their effects were local. The politics of megaprojects radically alters this equation; it poses new questions about the governance of risk and the nature and limits of democratic politics. The politics of megaprojects—put simply—raises fundamental questions about the ‘life and death of democracy’.     

Altruism and Spite in Politics: How the Mind Makes Welfare Tradeoffs About Political Parties

How much will people sacrifice to support or oppose political parties? Extending previous work on the psychology of interpersonal cooperation, we propose that people’s minds compute a distinct cost–benefit ratio—a welfare tradeoff ratio—that regulates their choices to help or hurt political parties. In two experiments, participants decide whether to financially help and hurt the inparty and outparty. The results show that participants were extremely consistent (>?90%) while making dozens of decisions in a randomized order, providing evidence for tradeoff ratios toward parties. Moreover, participants’ ratios correlated in the expected directions with partisanship, political ideology, and feelings of enthusiasm and anger toward each party, corroborating that these ratios are politically meaningful. Generally, most participants were willing to sacrifice at least some money to help their inparty and hurt the outparty. At the same time, a sizable minority hurt their inparty and helped their outparty. Welfare tradeoff ratios push our understanding of partisanship beyond the classic debate about whether voters are rational or irrational. Underneath the turbulent surface of partisan passions hide precise calculations that proportion our altruism and spite toward parties.

     

Participation in welfare legislation—A poverty-aware paradigm

Public participation, responsive regulation, and other policy formulations are intended to draw governments down from their ivory towers and into engagement with the people. However, they paint at best, a hazy picture of who “the people” are. This superficial representation is felt, among other collectives, by people living in poverty, who not only face hunger, often accompanied by poorer health and lower life expectancy, but whose social exclusion typically goes unrecognized by the authorities. The legal framing of poverty—and, as a result, states' policy approaches to its alleviation—focuses on the material core, representing a very thin conceptualization that fails to address the social dimension. Furthermore, practical avenues for incorporating citizens' views into lawmaking—which might enrich understanding—are lacking when it comes to people in poverty. Combined with a blatantly hegemonic stance, the resulting ignorance around poverty and “the poor” generates welfare laws that are woefully out of touch with reality, and legislative thinking that perpetuates, rather than alleviates, poverty. This paper seeks to make a twofold contribution: (i) to demonstrate this situation with a deep empirical inquiry into the legislative process of one legal provision within the Israeli welfare law regime, juxtaposed against qualitative field-research findings and (ii) to introduce the inventive and groundbreaking “poverty-aware” paradigm, constructed in social-work discourse, to illuminate and explain the empirical findings and point to potential procedural–institutional reform, to pave the way for poverty-aware legislation.     

How people with disabilities fare when public policies change

Changes in public policy and in macroeconomic conditions have dramatically affected the economic well-being of people with disabilities over the past two decades, both absolutely and relative to people without disabilities. Using data from the Current Population Survey (1968–1988), we find that the households of white or well-educated males with disabilities have fully recovered from the program cuts and recession of the early 1980s. However, much of this recovery was due to additional earnings by other household members. The households of males who are “doubly handicapped”—nonwhite or poorly educated males with disabilities—have not recovered. We conclude that the new mandates on business aimed at integrating people with disabilities into the workplace are not likely to significantly benefit the doubly handicapped.     

A mobility strategy for improving opportunity

Abstract

Postwar changes in the metropolitan settlement structure have profoundly altered the geography of opportunity in the older cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Poverty is concentrated in once‐central cities, while employment continues to deconcentrate to the suburbs. In the face of these changes, antipoverty policy has become a geographic exercise of moving people and resources from certain places to other places.

The three main strategies for confronting inner‐city poverty are dispersal, development, and mobility. These strategies are discussed and compared, with particular emphasis on the mobility approach. The article argues that the mobility approach—which connects poor inner‐city residents to suburban employment opportunities without changing the location of households or firms—is the most promising near‐term strategy for combating urban poverty.     

The Theory and Practice of “Nudging”: Changing Health Behaviors

Many of the most significant challenges in health care—such as smoking, overeating, and poor adherence to evidence‐based guidelines—will only be resolved if we can influence behavior. The traditional policy tools used when thinking about influencing behavior include legislation, regulation, and information provision. Recently, policy analysts have shown interest in policies that “nudge” people in particular directions, drawing on advances in understanding that behavior is strongly influenced in largely automatic ways by the context within which it is placed. This article considers the theoretical basis for why nudges might work and reviews the evidence in health behavior change. The evidence is structured according to the Mindspace framework for behavior change. The conclusion is that insights from behavioral economics offer powerful policy tools for influencing behavior in health care. This article provides public administration practitioners with an accessible summary of this literature, putting these insights into practical use.     

Racism: Less is More

Racism has been in sharp decline in recent decades yet the word, as accusation, is used more than ever. The word/idea needs to be more restrictively defined and kept for when it is really needed. When almost everyone is a racist, no one is. To this end we need to distinguish more clearly between the greater comfort people often feel among familiar people and places and active hostility towards outsider ethnic groups. We also need a more discriminating language to describe the spectrum of discrimination. Prejudice, clannishness—even in some instances discrimination itself—should be regarded as sentiments and behaviours that are distinct from proper racism.