Service v. Security Focus in Training Assessments

ABSTRACT

As jails have moved to professionalize their staffs the role of the correctional officer has become broader in scope and now encompasses both service and security functions. However, some research suggests that female correctional staff may have more of a “service” orientation than males. In our analysis of one dataset from exclusively women's jail facilities we investigate correctional officer preferences for training (service v. security) to see if they differ by gender. We find that both male and female correctional officers generally rank service type training over security and that they differ little in their overall assessment of initial training provided and usefulness of in-service training. We also find that minority officers may be more likely to value service training than their nonminority counterparts.     

Staggered Terms for the US Senate: Origins and Irony

This article provides the first detailed study of the origins of staggered Senate terms, which typically have been interpreted as part of the framers’ intent to create an insulated, stable, and conservative Senate. I draw upon three sources of evidence—the meaning and application of “rotation” in revolutionary America, the deliberations and decisions at the Constitutional Convention, and the arguments during Ratification—to show that the origins of and intentions behind staggered terms offer little support for the dominant interpretation. Instead, staggered terms, a mechanism to promote “rotation” or turnover of membership, were added to the Constitution as a compromise to offset, not augment, the Senate's longer terms by exposing a legislative chamber with long individual tenure to more frequent electoral influence and change.     

Laws and Roll Calls in the U.S. Congress, 1891–1994

Recent empirical studies of lawmaking activity by legislatures rely heavily on roll call based measures and assume that roll call activity reflects lawmaking activity. We question this assumption for the case of the U.S. Congress. We examine several plausible sources of dissonance between the set of enacted public statutes and the universe of recorded votes in the U.S. Congress, using a comprehensive dataset of public enactments and roll call activity between 1891 and 1994. Because only 11.9% of the bills signed into law receive a recorded vote in the House, only 7.9% receive a recorded vote in the Senate, and only 5.5% receive a recorded vote in both the House and Senate, we provide guidance as to when studying voting behavior is likely a reasonable proxy for lawmaking behavior. There are sometimes important differences between the laws that do and do not receive a roll call that researchers should account for when using roll calls to study lawmaking in the U.S. Congress.     

State-based Representation and National Policymaking: The Evolution of the Australian Senate and the Federation

Ostensibly, Australia's constitutional framers designed the upper house as the ‘guardian of states' interests', ensuring that the smaller states were adequately represented in the federation. In recent decades the Senate has positively reinvented itself as a guardian of democracy, and is commonly known as the ‘house of review’. This study examines the changing representative role of senators and the Senate through surveys and interviews of current and former senators. The Senate has also become more of a guardian of the national interest, with proportional representation, larger constituencies and longer terms being the key institutional factors.     

Remaking the House and Senate: Personal Power,Ideology, and the 1970s Reforms

Although much has been written on the critical congressional reforms of the 1970s, few studies have analyzed support for reform systematically. In this article, we draw upon previously untapped sources of information that make an individual‐level, quantitative analysis possible. We analyze 20 indicators that measure support for a wide variety of reforms in both chambers. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent pattern: in virtually every case, junior members and liberals were more pro‐reform than were senior members and conservatives. Also, Republicans were often more likely than Democrats to back reform. Our findings challenge the view that the reform movement was essentially a Democratic party phenomenon; liberals and junior members in both parties—not just Democrats—supported reform.     

Examining Legislative Cue‐Taking in the US Senate

We examine congressional cue‐taking theory to determine its extent, conditionality, and various forms in the US Senate. Using a novel data‐collection technique (timed C‐SPAN footage), we focus on temporal dynamics via event history analysis. Examining the effects of senator characteristics across 16 votes from the 108th Congress, we find that committee leadership and seniority generally predict cue‐giving, while other types of characteristics predict cue‐giving on certain types of votes. Our results underscore the importance of considering the order and timing of voting when studying congressional behavior.     

Parliamentary Rule: The US Senate Parliamentarian and Institutional Constraints on Legislator Behaviour

This article analyses the extent to which institutional rules constrain member behaviour in the United States Senate by examining the evolution of its parliamentarian. Interestingly, the US Senate parliamentarian has received surprisingly little scholarly attention given the important role she performs in the legislative process. The subsequent analysis thus provides a new understanding of the parliamentarian's role in the legislative process and the interplay between institutional rules and member behaviour in the Senate. To this end, the following analysis is situated within the context of the two primary theoretical approaches to understanding how institutional rules constrain member behaviour: path dependency and majoritarianism. These contrasting approaches provide expectations about the extent to which members will defer to the parliamentarian's interpretation of Senate rules rather than exercising their own discretionary control over those rules. Examining the evolving relationship between the parliamentarian and individual members affirms the centrality of institutional rules as a constraint on member behaviour over the past several decades. Yet such an examination also yields two surprising, and potentially contradictory, observations. First, individual senators in both parties have increasingly deferred to the parliamentarian to interpret the Senate's rules. This is surprising given that the Senate has simultaneously become more individualistic, partisan, and ideological over the same period. Second, the majority party has recently disregarded the norm of parliamentary constraint reflected in past practice and demonstrated a willingness to ignore Senate rules when doing so was necessary to achieve legislative success. This could signify a potential shift in how majorities view the constraints imposed by Senate rules if current trends of legislative dysfunction continue.     

POSTAL 2 plays in US court - Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association

In an unprecedented legal development, the case of violence in video games has now reached the highest American court. The US Supreme Court is set to decide whether states can restrict minors from buying violent video games in the case of Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association. The decision could have serious implications on the future of First Amendment rights and children’s ’welfare. To resolve Schwarzenegger, the Justices will need to decide how much First Amendment protection should be extended to violent video games and whether minors have a greater constitutional right to violence than they do to obscenity.     

The Politics of Obstruction: Republican Holds in the U.S. Senate

A defining feature of the modern US Senate is obstruction. Almost all pieces of legislation considered in the Senate are affected either directly or indirectly by obstruction. Obstruction takes many forms in the modern Senate, but one of the most prevalent, yet least studied, is the hold. Using a newly created dataset on Republican Senate holds, we cast light on this important practice. Our results suggest that a variety of factors including timing, party status, and a senator's voting record are related to both the prevalence of holds and the success of legislation subject to holds in the Senate.     

Issue Attention and Legislative Proposals in the U.S. Senate

This analysis of bill sponsorship across a variety of issues and Congresses shows that committee membership is the single most important factor shaping a senator's level of issue attention. Constituency demand is of secondary importance. Ideology, partisanship, and national conditions play little or no role. Consistent with a theoretical cost‐benefit framework, the results suggest that senators are motivated by the prospect of electoral and policy rewards from successful legislation rather than from mere position taking. The findings attest to the enduring importance of the committee system in a highly individualistic and increasingly partisan Senate.     

Different Houses: The Distribution of Earmarks in the U.S. House and Senate

Nearly all studies of pork‐barrel politics in the U.S. Congress focus on the House, biasing our conception of how politics influences federal spending and skewing our attention toward factors that are active in the House. This article highlights differences between the Senate and House in how pork is allocated. We identify four important differences between the House and Senate, generate hypotheses regarding how each difference should influence the distribution of pork projects, and test these hypotheses using data from earmarks in the Appropriations bills passed by the two chambers for fiscal year 2008. The results support three of our four hypotheses, suggesting that senators are driven by different motivations than House members. These results imply that theoretical accounts of pork‐barrel spending need to account for these interchamber differences. Our findings also highlight how studies of legislative behavior, more generally, need to account for important differences in legislative structure and organization.     

Pink‐Collar Representation and Budgetary Outcomes in US States

Legislatures worldwide are dominated by wealthy elites, who are often out of touch with the needs and problems of citizens. Research shows that the underrepresentation of the working class matters in terms of policy processes and outcomes. Yet the research on class has largely focused on blue‐collar representatives, who are primarily men. Working‐class women are more likely to hold pink‐collar jobs, or low‐status occupations dominated by women. We argue that pink‐collar legislators are uniquely positioned to legislate over education and social service policy. To test our argument, we combine a new coding of working‐class backgrounds that accounts for pink‐collar representation with state spending data on education and social services from US states over time. Modeling compositional budget data, we find that class and gender intersect to shape policy outcomes via state budget allocations, with women's pink‐collar representation associated with increased spending on both education and social services.     

The Calculus of Cosponsorship in the U.S. Senate

We investigated why a legislator would be willing to vote “yea” on final passage of a bill but would choose not to cosponsor that bill. We tested a series of hypotheses regarding the cosponsorship decisions of individual senators, using a dataset that includes every major initiative that was introduced and received a floor vote in the Senate between 1975 and 2000. We found that senators are more likely to cosponsor bills when their preferences diverge from the Senate median but are closer to those of the bill's sponsor. Also, senators are more likely to cosponsor bills when they sponsor a higher number of bills overall, when they become more connected with colleagues, and when their constituents increase demand for legislation within particular policy areas. Senators are less likely to cosponsor bills if they received a higher percentage of the general election vote in their most recent election.     

Majority Party Power and Procedural Motions in the U.S. Senate

While the metaphor of House parties as cartels is widely accepted, its application to the Senate is difficult as the majority party lacks the power to unilaterally manipulate rules and pass legislation. Nevertheless, several scholars have argued that the Senate majority party is able to employ nondebatable motions to table to exclude unwanted amendments with procedural rather than substantive votes. Does the motion to table yield negative agenda control or special party influence? Using an analysis of individual Senators' behavior on thousands of votes and an assessment of interest group scores, we find that motions to table do not elicit higher party influence or provide much political cover. A desire to speed up the legislative process, rather than to insulate members from electoral scrutiny, seems to motivate the use of motions to table.     

美国联邦最高法院对Harper ＆ Row出版股份公司等诉Nation企业等侵犯版权案的判决

著作权(或版权)是指作者对其创作的文学、艺术和科学作品依法所享有的权利。关于著作权法或版权法为何要保护作者的这一权利的问题,学理上有不同的观点,其中以“激励说”最为引人注目。就目前世界各国著作权法的具体规定来看,“激励说”占有着相当重要的地位。依据这一学说,国家制定著作权法(或版权法)赋予作者对其独创作品在一定期限内享有垄断性或排他性的权利,其宗旨是促进本国的科技和文化事业的发展。也就是说,国家以法律保护作为手段,以期达到发展和繁荣本国文化事业之目的。因此,如何平衡作者的利益与社会的利益之间的矛盾,也就成了著作权法所无法回避的问题。毫无疑问,作者在创作过程中经过了艰苦的思维,付出了辛勤的汗水,甚至投入了大量的资金,如果其所创作的作品得不到法律的有效保护,则作者的创造性劳动就难以得到回报,作者也就缺乏创作动力。由此看来,对作品加以保护是必要的。然而,作者的所谓“独创”是在前人留下的基础上进行的,那种不依赖前人所积累的知识而进行的抽象的创作是不存在的,也是不可能的。所以,为了社会的利益,为了鼓励更多的作品的创作,并降低创作成本,从而有利于知识的学习和传播,各国著作权法在对作者的著作权施加时间上的限制的同时又规定了对作品的合理使用。