Political Scandal: A Theory

We study a model that characterizes the conditions under which past misbehavior becomes the subject of present scandal, with consequences for both the implicated politician and the parties that work with him. In the model, both authentic and fake scandals arise endogenously within a political framework involving two parties that trade off benefits of continued collaboration with a suspect politician against the possibility of reputational fallout. Rising polarization between the two parties, we show, increases the likelihood of scandal while decreasing its informational value. Scandals that are triggered by only the opposing party, we also find, are reputationally damaging to both parties and, in some instances, reputationally enhancing to the politician. The model also reveals that jurisdictions with lots of scandals are not necessarily beset by more misbehavior. Under well‐defined conditions, in fact, scandals can be a sign of political piety.     

Student Age and the Collegiate Pathway

Using a rich data set of all SAT test takers from the 2004 through 2008 high school graduation cohorts, we investigate the impact of state‐specific school age‐of‐entry laws on students’ pathways into and through college. We document that these laws do not impact the probability that a student takes the SAT; however, we find strong evidence that students who are expected to be the oldest in their school cohorts based on their state residency and birthdays have a greater probability of taking an Advanced Placement (AP) exam and tend to take more AP exams. We also find that relatively younger students are more likely to attend two‐year colleges before attending four‐year colleges and are less likely to have earned bachelor's degrees four years beyond high school graduation, but eventually catch up to their older peers six years beyond high school graduation.     

Serious and Violent Juvenile Crime: A Comprehensive Strategy

Abstract OJJDP is actively involved in the Department of Justice's “Pulling America's Communities Together” (PACT) program. Developed at the direction of Attorney General Janet Reno, this initiative is designed to provide training, technical assistance and program development resources to participating jurisdictions address violence in their communities. Four jurisdictions have been selected to date: Denver, Omaha, Atlanta, and the District of Columbia. In addition to making its wide range of training and technical assistance resources available to these jurisdictions, OJJDP is helping the sites assess their juvenile justice systems and develop plans to implement the Comprehensive Strategy. To help jurisdictions begin assessing their systems and existing youth violence problems, OJJDP is preparing a juvenile violence fact book, called “The State of Juvenile Justice.” In addition to presenting statistical data on the nature and scope of the problem across America, the fact book will encapsule program and policy positions of major juvenile justice professional associations regarding youth violence. Such knowledge will assist local jurisdictions in developing their own positions, strategies and programs. In addition to NCJFCJ, other groups such as the American Probation and Parole Association, the National Juvenile Detention Association, the American Correctional Association, and the Coalition of Juvenile Justice State Advisory Groups have been invited to participate in development of The State of Juvenile Justice document.     

Campaign activities and state election outcomes

This research first clusters campaign activities in state legislative elections into five empirically justified and conceptually meaningful clusters: direct attempts to persuade voters, obtaining the support of other elites, attempts to increase turnout, seeking endorsements from other political officials, and fund raising. Indices created from these clusters are then compared to the situational factors of incumbency and competition as predictors of election outcomes. Data are surveys of candidates for the Louisiana legislature in which they were asked about the conduct of their campaigns and their relative emphasis on various activities. Incumbency was by far the best predictor of what percentage of the vote a candidate obtained, and in open seat contests, expenditures and competition best predicted outcome. Overall, the campaign activities had very little relationship to outcome when controlling for situational factors. Variations occurred between the House and Senate races with implications for challengers' strategies and campaign financing.     

Toward a post-industrial planning theory

Post-industrial tendencies indicate changes in the composition of the labor force and changes in world-view. Increasingly, next to highly intellectual work and rational ways of thinking can be found work with affective content and existentially based ways of understanding. Rationalism loses effectiveness as a guide to social action because it leads to fragmentation of the experienced world. Existentialism holds out the promise of synthesizing experience into a coherent image. Because planning involves the translation of knowledge into action, these changes in cultural values and ways of understanding call for innovations in planning theory. Challenges to rationalism require creating a new constitution for planning. Synthesis of rationalism and existentialism requires articulation of an existental planning theory. Embracing existing social conflicts is necessary for accomplishing both tasks.     

Interbranch Negotiations over Policies with Multiple Outcomes

Whereas presidents represent the entire nation, members of Congress serve districts and states. Consequently, presidents and members of Congress often disagree not only about the merits of different policies but also about the criteria used to assess them. To investigate the relevance of jurisdictional?and by extension criterial?differences for policymaking, we revisit classic models of bargaining under uncertainty. Rather than define uncertainty about the mapping of one policy into one outcome, as all previous scholars have done, we allow for every policy to generate two politically relevant outcomes, one local and another national. We then identify equilibria in which the president's utility is increasing in the value that a representative legislator assigns to national outcomes. As an application of this theory, we analyze budgetary politics in war and peace. We find that during periods of war, when members of Congress assign greater importance to the very same national outcomes that preoccupy presidents, congressional appropriations more closely reflect presidential proposals.     

Youth Gangs: Nationwide Impacts of Research on Public Policy

American Journal of Criminal Justice - This article examines the public policy benefits of gang research. In particular, the author highlights the benefits of longitudinal research on gang members...     

Short term forces and changing partisanship

This research stemmed from the growing realization that party ID is not purely the long-term force originally conceptualized. The current conception is that it is a combination of a standing decision and responses to political events. The research addresses two questions: For what proportion of partisan changers is party ID a lagging, stable attachment to be changed only after a period of disaffection from one's party? What is the relative power of the various time 1 short term forces to alter party ID time 2? Among the short term forces, time 1voting behavior showed the strongest relationship to future change in ID. Criteria were established to identify changers whose change was based in past attitudes or behavior. For these criteria a typology was created to categorize the possible time 1 reasons and motivations for changing partisanship. The distribution of changers among categories illustrated that past voting behavior is the major instrument of partisan change. Only a small percentage were motivated by attitudes alone. Thus, overall the distribution confirmed the conception of party ID as lagging and stable. However, a substantial minority, 31 percent, showed no prior signs of partisan change.