Being Positive About Positivism

Book reviewed in this article:
Matthew H. Kramer, In Defense of Legal Positivism: Law Without Trimmings     

Can White Guilt Motivate Action? The Role of Civic Beliefs

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Limited research has investigated factors that shape White youth’s civic action aimed at social change. Investigating the relation between Whiteness and...     

The influence of red tape on bureaucratic behavior: An experimental simulation

Understanding how certain organizational and individual attributes shape responses to red tape is an area that has received little research attention. This study uses an experimental simulation to address these questions. It examines the effect of red tape upon the propensity to provide assistance to clients in a simulated public assistance agency. The findings showed that increasing levels of red tape produce in a corresponding reduction in benefits provided to clients, but that this relationship is strongly moderated by the respondent's perceptions of clients. Clients perceived as more sympathetic consistently received higher levels of benefits than those perceived as less sympathetic. Education and professional training also played a role in influencing award decisions. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Auditing of Public Policy and the Politics of Auditing: The U.S. GAO and Israel's State Comptroller

A purist conception of audit independence appears to be obsolete. A survey of audit activities of the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) and Israel's State Comptroller describes pressures on audit bodies to examine sensitive policy issues and to enter partisan and personal squabbles between elected officials. The critique of the GAO by the National Academy of Public Administration recommends that legislators refrain from asking the audit body to deal with politically sensitive issues. In order to salvage something from the principle of audit independence, it appears more realistic to urge diligence on the part of the supreme auditor.     

Measuring Neoliberalism: Development and Initial Validation of a Scale of Anti-Neoliberal Attitudes

Critics of neoliberalism argue that so-called meritocratic and identity-neutral social policies and political positions actually reinforce and exacerbate intersecting inequalities, namely racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and ethnocentrism/xenophobia. The purpose of these studies was to develop and initially validate a scale of neoliberal attitudes from a wide range of existing instruments that reflect anti-neoliberal theory. A series of three studies resulted in a 25-item instrument—the Anti-Neoliberal Attitudes Scale (ANAS)—that exhibits initial evidence of construct validity, internal consistency, and test–retest reliability. Exploratory factor analysis with students from two universities revealed a four-factor structure of Racism and Sexism Awareness, Communitarian Values, Multicultural Ideology, and Inequality Consciousness. However, a confirmatory factor analysis with an independent sample of undergraduate students suggests a bifactor model in which the general factor explains most of the variance and that the instrument should be treated as a single scale, rather than independent subscales. Significant correlations with measures of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation suggest convergent validity. Temporal stability was established via a test–retest analysis in an independent sample of undergraduate students. Finally, responses from a sample of MTurk workers provided evidence of the ANAS’s incremental validity when compared to an existing measure of neoliberal beliefs. Implications for future empirical work on the psychological dimensions of neoliberalism are discussed.

     

Is There an Emerging Age Gap in US Politics?

There is evidence of a realignment among voters entering the electorate in recent years, with younger voters deviating from older voters in their ideological and partisan preferences. Younger voters today tend to be more liberal and more supportive of Democratic candidates than other age groups. Younger Americans are generally favor a more activist government, as demonstrated by their views on equality, the role of government, health care, and spending for public schools and child care. The leftward movement of younger Americans ideologically is also the result of the increasing political emphasis on cultural issues. Younger Americans as a group are less religious and less conservative on social issues than other age cohorts. They put less emphasis on traditional values and are more tolerant than other age groups on social issues such as gay rights. Older voters, on the other hand, tend to be more conservative on policy issues and less supportive of Democrats than they used to be. At the state level, the partisan polarization in the United States is even greater among younger Americans than it is for the nation as a whole. This suggests that if younger Americans follow other generations in keeping the same partisan voting patterns throughout their life, the blue states will become bluer and the red states redder.

Zwischen Kultur, Rationalität und Neo-Pluralismus: Neuerscheinungen zum politischen System Japans

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Battered woman and public opinion: Some realities about the myths

Expert testimony regarding the battered woman syndrome is often presented at trial on behalf of women charged with killing their batterers. Where courts have admitted such testimony into evidence, they have done so on the theory that the testimony is needed to dispel common myths regarding battered women—e.g., erroneous beliefs that battered women are masochists, who are somehow responsible for the battering they suffer and could avoid being battered by simply leaving their batterers. To date, however, there is no published empirical evidence that either jurors or members of the public at large hold such erroneous beliefs. The results of this study provide empirical support for the judicial hypothesis. These results suggest that many members of the general public eligible for jury duty do, in fact, hold erroneous, stereotyped beliefs about battered women.