The Practice of One Ombudsman

This essay delineates the influences and constraints upon theauthor's practice as an ombuds in two different Canadian universities overmore than twenty years. My hope is that an account of my practice as itevolved day by day will help to shed light on the divergences in practiceamong particular groups of ombuds practitioners, notably government orlegislative ombudsmen; corporate ombudsmen; and academic ombudspersons inboth Canada and the United States.     

Empirical analysis of current approaches to incidental findings

This paper presents results found through searching publicly available U.S. data sources for information about how to handle incidental findings (IF) in human subjects research, especially in genetics and genomics research, neuroimaging research, and CT colonography research. We searched the Web sites of 14 federal agencies, 22 professional societies, and 100 universities, as well as used the search engine Google for actual consent forms that had been posted on the Internet. Our analysis of these documents showed that there is very little public guidance available for researchers as to how to deal with incidental findings. Moreover, the guidance available is not consistent.     

Youth justice conferencing and police referrals: The gatekeeping role of police in Queensland, Australia

Youth justice conferencing in Queensland, Australia relies on the discretionary referral of young offenders by the police. The low rate of police referrals to conferencing is an ongoing concern for conference organizers. The research presented in this study explored Queensland police officers' training, experience, understandings of youth justice conferencing, and their individual discretionary policing style. The impact of these factors on officers' attitudes towards conferencing and their reported likelihood of referring to conference were examined. One hundred eighty-four Queensland police officers stationed in police regions where conferencing was available participated in the study. Of these officers, 15 percent had never heard of conferencing. Of officers who had heard of conferencing, 35 percent had received training, 21 percent had referred a young person to a conference, and 20 percent had attended a conference. Officers' understandings of conferencing were significantly related to their reported likelihood of referring a young person to a conference. The results indicated that to increase police referrals of young people to conferences, police need to be exposed (both through training and attendance) to the philosophy of and procedures involved in conferencing.     

Geographic Politics in the U.S. House of Representatives: Coalition Building and Distribution of Benefits

This article argues that scholars need to consider the structure of House representation to better understand distributive politics. Because House districts (unlike states) are not administrative units in the federal system, House members cannot effectively claim credit for most grant-in-aid funds. Instead, their best credit-claiming opportunities lie in earmarked projects, a small fraction of federal grant dollars. As a consequence, I expect to find: (1) political factors have a much greater effect on the distribution of earmarked projects than on federal funds generally; and (2) project grants are a better support-building tool for coalition leaders than allocations to states. I test this argument with a study of the 1998 reauthorization of surface transportation programs and find strong support for both hypotheses .