Assessing the Needs of Women Recently Released From Prison

The growing number of females incarcerated in the United States suggests that greater importance needs to be placed on preparing practitioners and communities for their eventual release from prison. Female offenders present a unique set of needs, including greater mental health, substance abuse, and medical health problems than their male counterparts. Furthermore, women may possess unique needs at various points of their involvement with the criminal justice system (i.e., before, during, and following a period of incarceration). The current study examines the needs of female offenders while they are reentering the community from the perspective of community service providers who work directly with recently incarcerated women. Survey results reveal that community service providers identify needs in 7 domains. Prevalence and urgency measures provide unique profiles of the needs of female offenders, and respondent reports of the effectiveness of the existing community-based service sector lead to numerous implications and suggestions for future research.     

How politicians see their relationship with top bureaucrats: Revisiting classical images

The relationship between politicians and bureaucrats is an enduring concern in political science. Central to this debate, Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman (APR) in 1981 developed four images to characterize political-bureaucratic relations. We argue that the one-dimensional focus on roles in their images comes with important limitations. To deal with these limitations, we collect survey responses from 3,384 local politicians from four countries on seven dimensions of the political-bureaucratic relationship. We then use cluster analysis to develop six images bottom-up. Five of our images are largely consistent with APR's image II and III. Yet, they differ in the extent to which politicians trust the bureaucracy, consider them loyal, and see them as an important source of information. A sixth image is not consistent with any of APR's images. We find that both systemic (country, municipality size) and individual factors (ideology, position, seniority) contribute to differences in images. Overall, our images suggest that political-bureaucratic relations vary more between and within political systems than suggested by APR's images.     

Voting for the Radical Right in Swedish Municipalities: Social Marginality and Ethnic Competition?

Sweden is no longer a negative, exceptional case regarding the presence of radical right‐wing populist parties. The Sweden Democrats has continually grown stronger, and in 2010 they won seats in the Swedish parliament. However, their electoral support varies considerably across Sweden. This study analyses their electoral support in 290 Swedish municipalities in order to explain this variance. Support is found for the social marginality hypothesis: electoral support for the Sweden Democrats tends to be negatively correlated with the average level of education and with the Gross Regional Product per capita, and positively correlated with the unemployment rate. The ethnic competition hypothesis, that there is a positive correlation between the proportion of immigrants and electoral support of the Sweden Democrats, is also supported.     

How Lasting Is Voter Gratitude? An Analysis of the Short‐ and Long‐Term Electoral Returns to Beneficial Policy

Dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare‐improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding in Germany, to provide an upper bound for the short‐ and long‐term electoral returns to targeted policy benefits. We estimate that the flood response increased vote shares for the incumbent party by 7 percentage points in affected areas in the 2002 election. Twenty‐five percent of this short‐term reward carried over to the 2005 election before the gains vanished in the 2009 election. We conclude that, given favorable circumstances, policy makers can generate voter gratitude that persists longer than scholarship has acknowledged so far, and elaborate on the implications for theories of electoral behavior, democratic accountability, and public policy.