How welfare reform affects young children: Experimental findings from Connecticut—A research note

As welfare‐to‐work reforms increase women's labor market attachment, the lives of their young children are likely to change. This note draws on a random‐assignment experiment in Connecticut to ask whether mothers' rising employment levels and program participation are associated with changes in young children's early learning and cognitive growth. Children of mothers who entered Connecticut's Jobs First program, an initiative with strict 21‐month time limits and work incentives, displayed moderate advantages in their early learning, compared with those in a control group. A number of potential mechanisms for this effect are explored, including maternal employment and income, home environment, and child care. Mothers in the new welfare program are more likely to be employed, have higher income, are less likely to be married, have more children's books in their home, and take their children to libraries and museums more frequently. However, these effects explain little of the observed gain in child outcomes. Other parenting practices and the home's social environment do explain early learning, but these remained unaffected by welfare reform. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

The Ground Game in the 2012 Presidential Election

Relatively little research has examined the effects of campaign-led field activity in a competitive election. In this article, we leverage a unique data set containing the location of every Barack Obama and Mitt Romney field office and county-level data on the presidential vote to understand how communication with voters in the field may have affected the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. We find that the presence of Obama field offices was associated with greater Obama vote share at the county level, although we cannot detect a similar relationship for Romney field offices. We conduct additional robustness tests to address the potential limitations of these observational data. Ultimately, we conclude that even if Obama’s field organization out-performed Romney’s, the aggregate impact of Obama’s field organization was not large enough to determine the outcome of the 2012 presidential election.     

Refederalizing Russia: Debates on the Idea of Federalism in Russia

Russia has been struggling to come to terms with the ethno-federalstructure it inherited from the USSR. Central and regional politicalactors have sought to restructure federal relations in a waythat marks a break from the pseudo-federalism of the past, andboth the 1992 Federation Treaty and the 1993 Constitution ofthe Russian Federation declared the establishment of a "federaldemocracy" This article investigates the process of refederalizationby examining debates over the idea of federalism in Russia.Despite an initial wide-ranging discussion, federalism is increasinglyseen in strategic terms by political elites. The federal systemis asymmetrical and bureaucratic, and it is based on a seriesof treaties between the center and constituent units, ratherthan on an effective constitution that binds the center andregions together.     

Rape Co-occurrence: Do Additional Crimes Affect Victim Reporting and Police Clearance of Rape?

Despite the increased research attention given to rape and violence against women, little is known about rape co-occurrence, or rape incidents that involve another crime. Although previous research has found certain incident characteristics increase the likelihood that a victim reports her rape to police and that the offender is arrested and prosecuted, the relationship between co-occurrence and these responses is unknown. Given this gap in the literature, the main goal of the present research is to provide an initial understanding of rape co-occurrence and its effect on victim reporting and police clearance. To explore these issues, this study uses two national data sources that collect the requisite incident-level information: the National Crime Victimization Survey and the Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s National Incident-Based Reporting System. Few rapes are found to co-occur with other crimes. When rapes do occur with other crimes, though, they are more likely than solo-occurring rapes to involve weapons, strangers, additional injury to the victim, and multiple offenders. Rapes that co-occur also are more likely to be reported to police and cleared by police than rapes that occur with no other crimes.

Psychosocial and Symbolic Dimensions of the Breast Explored through a Visual Matrix

This article explores knowledge about the breast in lived experience, addressing a gap in empirical research on a highly gendered cultural trope and embodied organ. We present findings from a study that used a free-associative psychosocial method—the Visual Matrix—in order to stimulate expressions of tacit aspects of the breast, aiming to generate an understanding of relations between embodied and enculturated experiences. Our data revealed how an aesthetic of the grotesque in one matrix allowed the mainly female group to use humour as a “creative psychic defence” against culturally normative and idealized aspects of the breast. This was expressed through symbolizations, affectively delivered in an exuberant mode, emphasizing the breast‘s potency and its potential for nurturance and “weaponization”. Through this feminine poetic, life and death became inseparable yet ambiguous dimensions of breasts. The breast’s life-affirming qualities included the sensual, the visceral, and the joyful—a material-semiotic knowing. This was incontrast to a second matrix, which expressed a more ambivalent and troubled response, and in which associations were weighted towards the spectacular breast of an ocular-centric culture that privileges hetero-masculine looking. We discuss differences between the two matrices in terms of psychosocial tensions between embodied and enculturated experiences.     

Hunting where the ducks are: activating support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary

ABSTRACT

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Republican primary defied the predictions of many politicians, pundits, and political scientists. Yet, while Trump’s nomination was hard to predict, it is not difficult to explain. We show that Trump’s campaign message succeeded by activating longstanding, but often unappreciated, sentiments among Republican voters about immigration and economic entitlements. In particular, his support was concentrated among Republican voters with hawkish views on immigration and relatively liberal views on economic policy. Moreover, these views preceded support for Trump, rather than the other way around. Drawing on an original panel survey, we show that attitudes about immigration and economic entitlements measured in 2011 strongly predicted support for Trump in 2016. Although Trump’s coalition struck many observers as odd, it was predicated on a set of attitudes that is not unusual among Republican voters. He simply hunted where the ducks are.