Book reviews

Realism, Idealism and International Politics: A Reinterpretation

By M. Griffiths, Routledge: London, 1992, 206pp(hbk), £35.00

International Conflict Resolution: The US‐USSR and Middle East Cases

By Louis Kriesberg, Yale University Press: 1992.

Deterring Democracy

By Noam Chomsky, Vintage Press, 1992, 439pp £7.99(pbk) ISBN 0–09–913501–9.

Arab Military Industry: Capability, Performance, and Impact

By Yezid Sayigh. Brassey's, London, £38.00/$49.50. ISBN 0–08–041777–9.

The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia 1988–91

By Bernard Wheaton and Zdenek Kavan, Westview Press, 1992.

Peace Without Hiroshima: Secret Action at the Vatican in the Spring of 1945

By Martin S. Quigley. Madison Books: Lanham, Maryland, 1991. 169pp.

Historical Discord in the Nile Valley

By Gabriel R. Warburg, London: Hurst & Company Ltd, 1992, £27.50.

To Loose the Bands of Wickedness: International Intervention in Defence of Human Rights

Nigel Rodley (Ed). Brassey's (UK), 1992. 287pp(HBk). ISBN l‐85753‐()47‐().     

The Impact of Job Characteristics on Private Prison Staff: Why Management Should Care

The number of private prisons run by corporate security businesses has increased rapidly throughout the past two decades. There has been a parallel increase in literature, both pro and con, comparing the efficiency and effectiveness of private and public prisons; however, private prison staff has been largely ignored. OLS regression analysis of a survey of 160 employees at a Midwestern private prison facility showed that the job characteristics of job stress, supervision, and job variety were far more important than personal characteristics of race/ethnicity, gender, age, tenure, education and position in influencing staff job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Specifically, job stress had the largest impact on job satisfaction, while quality of supervision had the greatest impact on organizational commitment.     

Reconceptualising the Custody Threshold in England and Wales

The custody threshold provision in England and Wales was intended to operate as a limit on the use of custodial sentences, preserving what is the system’s most severe sanction for the most serious offences. However over the past few decades it has become apparent that the custody threshold is failing. Academics have discussed the reasons for this failure, which has seen the prison population double in space of a quarter of a century. This piece explores the custody threshold in the context of the use of custody in other Western European jurisdictions. It examines the courts’ response to the provision and various judicial attempts to amplify Parliament’s language. The authors then consider the academic critiques of the custody threshold provision, analysing the extent to which said criticism can be seen as a solution to the problem, before offering a new critique of their own. Finally, in a move towards more a more principled approach to the custody threshold, the piece offers a solution which would, it is argued, make the provision more effective and more theoretically sound.     

How much power do oppositions have? Comparing the opportunity structures of parliamentary oppositions in 21 democracies

A political system cannot be imagined without opposition. Despite this crucial position in politics, political science has largely neglected to study oppositions. Attempting to fill this gap, this article analyses the institutional opportunities of parliamentary oppositions. It offers a parsimonious framework by distinguishing two dimensions of opposition influence: some institutions enable oppositions to control governments, while others offer opportunities to present alternatives. A comparison of oppositions’ opportunities in 21 democracies shows that countries fall into four groups along these dimensions: in majoritarian democracies, weak control mechanisms are countered by excellent opportunities to publicise alternatives. Consociational democracies are characterised by strong control mechanisms, but provide only weak opportunities to present alternatives. Moreover, in Southern Europe, control mechanisms and opportunities to present alternatives are weak, while both are pronounced in Nordic Europe. The results are summarised in three indices that can easily be applied in future research examining oppositions and their power.     

Same Routines,Different Effects: Gender,Leisure, and Young Offending

The current study seeks to extend routine activity theory by examining how gender conditions the relationship between leisure activities and adolescent delinquency. Using OLS regression with a sample of high school students from Toronto (n = 2,209), we find that (1) engaging in more unstructured and unsupervised activities with peers is associated with delinquency more strongly for boys than for girls, but is associated with substance use equally across gender; (2) this pattern is likely due to gender differences in the locations or contexts of leisure activities; and (3) prosocial leisure activities are associated with less delinquency only for boys. In general, routine activity theory appears apt at explaining the substance use of boys and girls, but is less capable of explaining the property and violent offending of girls. We discuss our findings and their implications for the growing body of research extending routine activity theory to explain gender differences in delinquency.     

A step towards improving workflow practices for volume crime investigations: outcomes of a 90-day trial in South Australia

The provision of forensic science services in volume crime investigations works most successfully as a partnership between police agencies and external forensic laboratories as opposed to a client/provider model where unlimited demand ignores finite resources. The principles of Lean Six Sigma have been applied in various laboratories to improve workflow through identification of wasteful work practices. These strategies are aimed at process optimisation through the application of triaging, a concept that has rarely been studied yet referenced strongly in the literature. The South Australia End to End 90-Day Trial: facilitating quicker justice through timely evidence processing, is a collaborative approach between South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia. This trial applied evidence-based policing principles, a law enforcement philosophy that uses research undertaken with scientific processes to inform law-enforcement decision-making. The results demonstrate how a review of processes and the removal of non-value adding activities can improve service delivery while not exhausting those ‘finite resources’.     

A Bridge Too Far? Examining Bridging Assumptions in Common-Space Estimations

While most common-space estimations rely upon members who served in both the House and Senate as “bridges” to scale the remaining members, this assumes that these “bridge members” do not change their preferences when they change chambers. Such an assumption conflicts with standard notions of representation, that is, that legislators’ votes reflect (at least to some degree) the wishes of their constituents. We examine the constancy of this common-space voting assumption by focusing on a subset of House members who move to the Senate: those who come from statewide House districts. Using these members as the bridge actors—and thus bridging by constituency explicitly—in a one-dimensional item response theory model, we find that the standard assumption of chamber switchers in common-space estimations is technically, but immaterially, false. While there are statistically distinguishable differences in House and Senate voting records for chamber switchers, they are not sufficiently large to meaningfully undermine bridging.     

Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal

Michael H. Crespin Department of Political Science, Michigan State University, 303 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824 e-mail: e-mail: crespinm{at}msu.edu Jeffery A. Jenkins Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208 e-mail: e-mail: j-jenkins3{at}northwestern.edu Ryan J. Vander Wielen Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1027, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130 e-mail: e-mail: rjvander{at}artsci.wustl.edu This paper replicates the findings that appeared in the article"Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the ContemporaryCongress," published in the American Journal of Political Science(44:316–325), in which Lawrence Rothenberg and MitchellSanders incorporated a new research design and, contrary toall previous studies, found evidence of ideological shirkingin the U.S. House of Representatives. We investigate the robustnessof their results by reestimating their model with Congress-specificfixed effects and find that their results no longer hold.