Political Environment and Policy Change: The National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s

The relationship between changes in the stability of the political environment and policy changes are examined through the case of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s. The terminologies of Hall's first-, second-, and third-order policy change and Baumgartner and Jones’ punctuation equilibrium theory of policy change are employed to analyze the relationship evident in the policy history of the Arts Endowment. The case of the Arts Endowment in the 1990s suggests that first-order changes generally occur in a stable political environment (i.e., policy equilibrium) while great instability in a political environment (i.e., policy punctuation) allows the larger second- and the largest third-orders of policy change.     

Fifty Years After the 1967 Crime Commission Report

In the 50 years since the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice under President Johnson issued its report, feminist activism and both feminist and mainstream research have resulted in defining domestic violence (DV) as a social problem. This awareness of the seriousness and expansiveness of DV has spurred the development of unprecedented programs and policies. Although DV policing changes have been significant, so too have been the development of and changes in safehouses, no‐drop court policies, domestic violence courts, community‐coordinated responses, and batterer intervention programs. In this article, we review the nonpolice responses to DV cases and outcomes and provide recommendations. First, research and policies need to more regularly be aimed at addressing victims’ safety and their diverse needs and experiences. Second, assessments should include addressing the processing of these cases through the impact of responses by individual community and criminal legal system actors (e.g., victim advocates, police, prosecutors, and judges) to victims and offenders.     

Russia and Ukraine Ten Years After the Fall of the Communist Regimes: Similarities and Differences

Ukraine made a considerable contribution to the collapse of the USSR. The continued existence of the Soviet empire was unthinkable without its participation. If Ukraine had not become fully autonomous, an alliance of the three eastern Slavic peoples would have been likely—that is, an abridged version of the USSR. After the August 1991 putsch, all the union republics except Russia seceded from the Soviet Union. According to political reality, Ukraine's independence meant its separation from Russia, since the USSR had in fact already ceased to exist by the autumn of 1991. Under Yeltsin, Russia, in a sense, swallowed up the USSR.     

Union After the Union: Problems of Ordering National and State Relations in the Former USSR

The reasons for the demise of powerful states are never fully clear, either to contemporaries or to historians—the varied interpretations of the fall of Rome are only one case in point. But this applies especially to empires, i.e., state structures that, over an entire geopolitical region, come to dominate nations whose statehood has thereby been destroyed or partially preserved, albeit with some portion of sovereignty, large or small, having been lost. In this sense (but only in this sense), the USSR was an empire like the Russian tsardom. But in this sense as well, the United States of America is an empire—true, a modern one, ruling as if by remote control, indirectly. Understood in this way, empires are a function of the entire world system and will disappear not only, and not so much, by dint of internal turmoil, as simply because "the world has become different."¹     

Arts Organizations and Branding: Creating a New Joint Brand for Three Arts Organizations

This article investigates brand architecture by analyzing stakeholder perceptions of brand images when a new joint brand is created for the existing brands of three arts organizations. The theoretical framework is based on previous literature on brand architecture and brand image. The empirical study is based on a quantitative, 418-respondent survey among stakeholders of these three arts organizations. The study makes two major theoretical contributions. First, the results show that the new joint brand can be endorsed by the existing sub-brands, contrary to brand-architecture literature. Second, even in the case of a new brand, stakeholders perceive the functional attributes as important.