Institutional Change,Party Discipline,and the House Democratic Caucus, 1911–19

Abstract The House Democratic Caucus of 1911 to 1919 is a largely understudied institution in the literature on congressional party government, despite the claims of many scholars that the caucus functioned as a significant instrument of party government by binding legislators' floor votes. An analysis of roll‐call votes, new data from the caucus journal, and contemporary accounts from the period indicate that these claims are largely exaggerated, although the caucus did, on occasion, improve floor discipline within the party. I find that intraparty homogeneity on crosscutting issues was related to caucus success. In addition, I argue that the adoption and use of the binding caucus can best be understood from the “multiple goals” viewpoint of congressional politics. These findings have important implications for understanding the development of party‐based institutions in Congress.     

Improving the Legal Status and Coordination of the Activity of Ministries

Many years of experience with the functioning of the ministries have shown that, under the conditions of a powerful federal socialist state, they constitute the most desirable form of organization for the central agencies of branch administration. The ministries have undergone reorganization at various periods in the development of the agencies of Soviet state administration, sometimes without sufficient grounds and for reasons of a subjective nature. But the process of improvement of the organization of ministries, guided by leading party bodies, has not ceased.     

Assessing Pretrial Publicity Effects: Integrating Content Analytic Results

When a case has received pretrial publicity which has the capacity to bias potential jurors in the trial venue, a change of venue is one means of attempting to ensure that the defendant receives a fair trial. Content analysis of the pretrial publicity surrounding a case can provide the court with important information to consider when determining whether prejudice in the relevant community is too great for the defendant to receive a fair trial. This paper presents an approach to content analysis of pretrial publicity that draws upon both legal commentary and past empirical social science research. It is a systematic approach that could be employed by both the prosecution and defense when presenting arguments to the court about whether a change of venue should be granted. Information gleaned from content analysis of the publicity surrounding a specific case fills the gap between information provided by experimental research which has examined pretrial publicity effects and public opinion polls concerning the public's perception of the defendant in a particular case. Results from a content analysis can serve to validate public opinion survey data gathered from the same locales. To exemplify this content analytic approach, a content analysis conducted by the authors in preparation for the change of venue hearing in the case of Timothy McVeigh is presented.     

Congress, health care, and congressional caucuses: an examination of the Diabetes Caucus

Caucuses have become a critical feature of the congressional landscape, yet are neglected in the literature on health-policy making in Congress. The principal goal of the article is to use the Diabetes Caucus as a case study to highlight this significant yet underappreciated political actor in the health-policy realm in Congress. The exploration, which draws on information gathered from thirty-two interviews with members of the Diabetes Caucus and their staff, will contribute to an increased understanding of both Congress's operations in the health area and the potential impact of caucuses on health-policy making. The article emphasizes particular characteristics relating to the membership and objectives of the Diabetes Caucus. In addition, the study stresses that the group had the requisite political momentum to achieve legislative successes when a policy window opened in the 105th Congress because it served much like, in the terminology of John Kingdon, a "policy entrepreneur".     

Assessing Substitution and Complementary Effects Amongst Crime Typologies

This paper aims at assessing how offenders allocate their effort amongst several types of crime. Specifically, complementary and substitution effects are investigated amongst the number of recorded homicides, robberies, extortions and kidnapping, receiving stolen goods, falsity and drug-related crimes. Furthermore, the extent to which crime is detrimental for economic growth is also analysed. The case-study country is Italy, and the time span under analysis is from the first quarter of 1981 to the fourth quarter of 2004. A Vector Error Correction Mechanism (VECM) is employed after having assessed the integration and cointegration status of the variables under investigation. Empirical findings show that, in the long run, an increase in the overall welfare has a negative impact on the most serious crimes. In addition, the long-run elasticities reveal symmetric results in terms of positive and negative relationships amongst types of crime. In the short run, the cross-deterrence elasticities highlight a complementary effect between more serious crimes (i.e. robberies, extortions and kidnapping) and milder crimes (i.e. drug-related crimes and falsity) and a substitution effect amongst all other types of offences. Policy implications are drawn.     

The Cost of Majority‐Party Bias: Amending Activity under Structured Rules

All major legislation in the House necessitates a special rule from the Rules Committee before it can be brought to the chamber floor. These rules often strictly limit floor amendments to bills considered by the House. Scholars of political parties have argued that the House majority party can bias policy output away from the floor median through its usage of restrictive rules. In this article, we argue that in order to secure the passage of restrictive rules, the majority often makes concessions to centrist legislators through the amending process. We examine this theory using a newly collected data set that includes all amendments considered by the Rules Committee during the construction of structured rules in the 109th, 110th, and 111th Congresses (2005–2010). Our results are mixed, but they do suggest that moderate members of the majority party often receive concessions via amendments for their support of the majority party's agenda‐setting regime.     

Party Effects in State Legislative Committees

Legislative scholars have theorized about the role of committees and whether they are, or are not, tools of the majority party. We look to the states to gain more empirical leverage on this question, using a regression discontinuity approach and novel data from all state committees between 1996 and 2014. We estimate that majority‐party status produces an 8.5 percentage point bonus in committee seats and a substantial ideological shift in the direction of the majority party. Additionally, we leverage a surprisingly frequent, but as if random occurrence in state legislatures—tied chambers—to identify majority‐party effects, finding similar support for partisan committees. We also examine whether the extent of committee partisanship is conditional on party polarization or legislative professionalism, but we find that it is not. Our results demonstrate that parties create nonrepresentative committees across legislatures to pursue their outlying policy preferences.     

Enhancing Witness Memory with Focused Meditation and Eye-Closure: Assessing the Effects of Misinformation

Despite the decline in popularity of hypnosis as an investigative interviewing technique, this paper builds on previous research showing that some of the techniques employed in traditional hypnotic interviewing may still be useful in the development of simple, brief memory facilitation procedures for use by the police. Three experiments are described that investigate the effects of a short Focused Meditation with eye-closure technique in situations where participants are presented with misleading information. In the first study, which utilized a standard misinformation paradigm, a significant memory facilitation effect was shown with Focused Meditation, though the effect was not significant for eye-closure alone. There were no increases in errors when the Meditation and eye-closure procedures were used alone or in combination. The second experiment showed that a combined Focused Meditation with eye-closure technique reduced misinformation effects associated with fictitious events, and a third showed that the same technique reduced interrogative suggestibility effects as measured by the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale, whilst facilitating free recall memory. It is concluded that a Focused Meditation with eye-closure technique may potentially have applications in the field where brief alternatives to the Cognitive Interview are required.     

Contractual Interpretation,Registered Documents and Third Party Effects

This article considers whether extrinsic material should be available in interpreting registered documents when these may be contractual in nature or relate to contractual agreements. Many registers, for example the current scheme for recording land title, are intended to facilitate the reliance of third parties on their content, an objective that suggests that extrinsic material should be excluded. Such an approach, however, could itself cause unfairness and conflicts with the way that contractual documents are normally interpreted. Exploring this question leads us to consider the contextual approach to contractual interpretation generally and whether it should take account of the contemplated effects of contractual language on third parties. After concluding in the affirmative, we then ask whether this is sufficient as an approach to interpreting contractual documents entered into a register.     

Assessing the President's Role as Party Agent in Congressional Elections: The Case of Bill Clinton in 2000

Presidents have become their parties' chief fund‐raisers and thus have the capacity to further their parties' collective fortunes by imposing a more efficient distribution of campaign resources than might otherwise prevail. In order to succeed, presidents must, first, accurately target their efforts where they will best improve candidates' prospects for winning seats, and second, either directly or indirectly (through signaling to other donors) generate sufficient new resources to affect the election outcome. Analyses of Bill Clinton's extensive fund‐raising efforts during the 1999–2000 election cycle confirm that presidents can indeed use their unmatched fund‐raising ability to help their parties win congressional contests they might otherwise lose. But analysis of the Clinton record also shows that presidential fund‐raising activities may be shaped by other purposes that lead to a distribution of effort that is suboptimal for the party.     

Coordination: Its Essence and Practice

At the present stage in our country's development, when major problems of the national economy are being resolved, particular significance attaches to Lenin's premise of proper combination of the interests of the country as a whole with those of local concern. "The lack, in the localities, of harmonized work among the various departments," wrote Vladimir Il'ich Lenin, "is one of the great evils interfering with economic development. An enormous amount of attention must be paid to this question" (Poln. sobr. soch. [Complete Works], vol. 43, p. 278). The timeliness of this instruction by Lenin is beyond question. It also pertains directly to the work of the local soviets, particularly their activity of coordination. As we know, the new laws on the local soviets have granted them the right, within the limits of their jurisdiction, to coordinate enterprises and organizations belonging to higher levels insofar as their efforts are directed toward the development of the economy within their geographic boundaries, and above all in the spheres having to do with services to the population.     

法治财政建设中党规与国法的功能适配

在党领导一切和依宪治国相统一的背景下,规范化、法治化的党政关系是时代发展的必然.从财政法治建设的视角检视,尽管党的政治领导已经有较为成熟模式,但在具体事务上的党政分工并不清晰.基于我国政治现实,党务财政已经成为财政体系的组成部分.但执政党的自身政治定位决定了,其对财政事务的领导适宜规划、引导和督促,而非直接介入具体事务...     

Assessing Stability and Change in Criminal Offending: A Comparison of Random Effects, Semiparametric, and Fixed Effects Modeling Strategies

An important theoretical problem for criminologists is an explanation forthe robust positive correlation between prior and future criminaloffending. Nagin and Paternoster (1991) have suggested that the correlationcould be due to time-stable population differences in the underlyingproneness to commit crimes (population heterogeneity) and/or thecriminogenic effect that crime has on social bonds, conventionalattachments, and the like (state dependence). Because of data andmeasurement limitations, the disentangling of population heterogeneityand state dependence requires that researchers control for unmeasuredpersistent heterogeneity. Frequently, random effects probit models havebeen employed, which, while user-friendly, make a strong parametricassumption that the unobserved heterogeneity in the population follows anormal distribution. Although semiparametric alternatives to the randomeffects probit model have recently appeared in the literature to avoid thisproblem, in this paper we return to reconsider the fully parametric model. Viasimulation evidence, we first show that the random effects probit modelproduces biased estimates as the departure of heterogeneity from normalitybecomes more substantial. Using the 1958 Philadelphia cohort data, we thencompare the results from a random effects probit model with a semiparametricprobit model and a fixed effects logit model that makes no assumptions aboutthe distribution of unobserved heterogeneity. We found that with this dataset all three models converged on the same substantive result—evenafter controlling for unobserved persistent heterogeneity, with models thattreat the unobserved heterogeneity very differently, prior conduct had apronounced effect on subsequent offending. These results are inconsistentwith a model that attributes all of the positive correlation between priorand future offending to differences in criminal propensity. Sinceresearchers will often be completely blind with respect to the tenabilityof the normality assumption, we conclude that different estimationstrategies should be brought to bear on the data.     

Who Wins? Party Effects in Legislative Voting

Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress. Recent efforts have extended the debate to the more specific question of whether or not party influences are sufficiently strong to move policy outcomes away from the median position. In this article, we specify four theories of legislative behavior. One is a preference‐based, or partyless, theory of behavior. This theory posits that there are no party effects independent of preferences and that equilibrium outcomes are located at the chamber's median. The other theories rely on different conceptions of the foundations of party effects and yield distinctive predictions about the legislators who will support bills on final passage votes. After testing, our conclusion is that strong party influences can be found in final passage voting in the House: the partyless theory receives little support, but a model based on majority party agenda control works well. Legislative outcomes are routinely on the majority party's side of the chamber median.     

The Effects of Scale Carving on Instruments Assessing Violence

Little research has examined the properties of survey instruments when the full instrument is not administered (scale carving). The purpose of the present study was to test scale carving effects on survey instruments. Participants completed carved and whole versions of two instruments measuring violent behaviors and attitudes at two sessions. Findings indicated that administering select subscales rather than the entire instrument affects psychometric properties of certain instruments. For instance, mean scores of certain instruments differed depending upon whether the instruments were administered in their entirety or in carved versions. Reliability coefficients did not differ between carved and whole versions, and correlation coefficients were moderate. Therefore, psychometric properties of carved instruments should be assessed prior to their use in research.     

贸易自由化与环境政策协调发展论——兼评WTO贸易导向的协调模式

贸易自由化对社会经济福利的发展以及环境保护的重要性决定了两者协调的必要性。两者在终极目标和利益主体上存在着可协调性,协调贸易自由化与环境政策必须坚持共同的义务与责任原则、差别的义务与责任原则、适度贸易自由化的原则和环境政策的整体经济性原则。WTO贸易与环境政策的协调发展过度关注环境问题,以及协调机制的内在缺陷,阻碍了贸易体制的发展和完善,无益于以贸易方式解决环境问题,必须改革完善协调机制,实现WTO贸易与环境政策协调发展模式中"贸易导向"的自觉。     

多权力格局的冲突与协调——以本轮房地产调控为中心所展开

房居事关民生,中央政府已出台一系列政策,仍无法控制房价的飞涨.需求和供给能解释大部分高房价,但仍无法解释为什么中央政策的失效.高房价是一系列主体的行为所导致,政府之间、政府部门间的冲突放纵了房价的上涨.更深刻的原因在于我国政制的不足,权力行使应被制约,但也要使它有效协调运作.     

Assessing the Effects of Court Date Notifications within Pretrial Case Processing

Jurisdictions at every level throughout the U.S. are paying an increasing amount of attention to pretrial case processing. The primary areas of attention appear to be on risk assessment development and classification, the effects of pretrial detention, and the effectiveness of various strategies that may impact a defendant’s failure to appear for their assigned court dates. The current study is a randomized experimental trial designed to test the effects of court notification strategies, using failure to appear (FTA) as the primary outcome of interest. Our findings do not reveal a palpable effect for court notification strategies (telephone calls, and text messaging, with other conditions layered in), but do indicate and reinforce the utility of an actuarial method of risk classification when predicting likelihood of FTA.