A SURVEY OF UNIFIED FAMILY COURTS

The American Bar Association Coordinating Council on Unified Family Courts, with the assistance of Hofstra University's Center for Childre. Family and the Courts, recently conducted a survey of various courts and jurisdictions that either implemented or experimented with a unified family court structure. The purpose of the project was to get a sense of the state of unified family courts with the goal of building more support for the unified family court concept based on demonstrated effectiveness. The findings of the survey have been summarized in this article. The survey, survey data, and list of survey respondents can be found in the article's appendices.     

AN ADAPTIVE-LEARNING APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION

This conceptual piece reviews the muddle in reform thinking in environmental regulation. It suggests that rhetoric and relief posturing will not lead to an improvement in regulatory performance, and various market mechanisms, while promising, are ill-suited to current organizational processes. Authentic reform efforts, it contends, should place greater reliance upon an adaptive learning approach to environmental policy development and implementation. Conceptual elements of such an approach are sketched out.     

A New Zealand Tragedy: Problems of Political Responsibility

New Zealand's state sector reforms, designed to enhance accountability and efficiency, have attracted considerable international attention. However, an unprecedented tragedy in April 1995 involving the deaths of 14 young people, and which resulted from the failings of the department of conservation, has raised doubts about whether the reforms actually clarified or clouded issues of political and managerial responsibility.     

Reassessing ideological bias in campaign participation

Until 1964, ideological conservatives tended to participate in presidential campaign activities at higher rates than liberals. Since then, Beck and Jennings (1980, 1984) have shown the variable nature of the participation-ideology relationship, arguing that ideologically extreme candidates have successfully mobilized their followers in particular elections. In this paper, we explain the anomaly of the 1980 election in which strong liberals participated at higher rates despite a very strong conservative on the Republican side. Using data collected over time in 1980 by the University of Michigan's Center for Political Studies (CPS/NES), we broaden the Beck-Jennings model to include participation during the primary season and hypothesize that mobilization of ideological groups may result from ideological candidatesand the competitiveness or closeness of a nomination contest. We find that the ideological candidate model explains general election participation to a significant degree, while competitiveness considerations are more important for mobilization during the primaries.