SCRUTINIZING PERFORMANCE: HOW ASSESSORS REACH JUDGEMENTS ABOUT PUBLIC SERVICES

Strengthening the accountability and improving the performance of public services is an important issue in many countries. A common response is to impose elaborate oversight or scrutiny arrangements. While we know a good deal about the formal operation of these arrangements, we know much less about the informal practices of scrutiny bodies and how they make judgements. This paper investigates scrutiny processes in three national audit bodies, three service inspectorates, and two inquiry committees in the UK. Judgement processes were analyzed along five dimensions: intuitive to analytical thinking; implicit to explicit assessment criteria; inductive and deductive methods; internal and external validity; and the principles used to make and evaluate judgements. These processes varied considerably, suggesting the need for a broader conception of the nature of and influences on scrutiny processes, which recognizes the inherent tensions in these processes and the skills required by those who engage in them.     

Crazy for Real Estate

Cultural factors, lack of household investment alternatives, and local governments’ reliance on property-related taxes are all contributing to soaring housing prices in urban China, despite the slew of regulatory measures of the government.     

Legal,Extra-Legal,and Organizational Factors in the Disposition of Juveniles

This paper examines the effect of legal, extra-legal, and organizational factors on the processing of delinquents in selected California counties. A brief review of each perspective is given followed by a discussion of the data base and variables included in the analysis. Overall, bivariate relationships stress the importance of legal compared to extra-legal characteristics. The analysis also reveals clear evidence of the importance of organizational differences in juvenile court processing. Multivariate analysis revealed few differences in this pattern with the exception of “race” where some degree of interaction was found to exist when controls for offense were introduced. An analysis of covariance model shows that case sequence, county, and referral source were the most important predictors of case outcome.     

DRIVING WHILE BLACK: BIAS PROCESSES AND RACIAL DISPARITY IN POLICE STOPS*

We estimate the degree of racial disparity in police vehicular stops separately for local and state police in North Carolina in the year 2000. We introduce four mechanisms that might produce racial disparities in police stops—racial profiling, race sensitive police deployment, cognitive bias and stereotyping, and prejudice. We then model the relative odds of police vehicle stops as a function of race, driving behavior, and other demographic statuses separately by police organization type, with controls for omitted variable bias at both the driver and spatial level. We find only weak evidence of racial disparity in stops by officers of the state highway patrol but stronger evidence in those made by local police officers.