Examining Legislative Cue‐Taking in the US Senate

We examine congressional cue‐taking theory to determine its extent, conditionality, and various forms in the US Senate. Using a novel data‐collection technique (timed C‐SPAN footage), we focus on temporal dynamics via event history analysis. Examining the effects of senator characteristics across 16 votes from the 108th Congress, we find that committee leadership and seniority generally predict cue‐giving, while other types of characteristics predict cue‐giving on certain types of votes. Our results underscore the importance of considering the order and timing of voting when studying congressional behavior.     

Repeat victimization among adolescents and young adults

Prior research has shown that victimization incidents are disproportionately concentrated among relatively few victims and that prior victimization is a consistent predictor of future risk. This paper expands existing knowledge on victimization by describing temporal patterns of risk and by developing and testing alternative explanatory models of the link between past and future risk. Analyses based on panel data from the National Youth Survey support both state dependence and heterogeneity interpretations of the correlation in risk over time. In other words, prior victimization predicts future risk in part because it alters something about the individual, and because it indicates an unmeasured propensity for victimization that persists over time. The theoretical implications of these findings, including the feasibility of a victim labeling perspective, are discussed.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Phoenix, 1993.An exception to this lack of attention is the vast literature in the area of domestic abuse.     

State support under the new federalism

The new federalism will reduce total intergovernmental revenues to local governments. The reduction will be due to both the transfer to the states of much of the federal aid which previously flowed directly to local governments and reductions in total federal aid levels. Pass-through requirements on the shifted aid will not affect this general result but may soften the impact in many states. Because of differences in the extent to which state governments substitute federal pass-through aid for state aid from own-source revenues and in the degree to which different sources of revenues are treated differently by the states, local revenue reductions will vary greatly from state to state. The losses for local governments will range from 100% of the shifted aid in some states to as little as 15–20% in others.     

The states' scramble for federal funds: Who wins,who loses?

Interstate differences between federal expenditures and receipts are very large, generally favoring the southern and western states. The more slowly growing states of the northeast and midwest point to these imbalances as one source of their economic difficulties. The major source of disparity lies in revenue patterns, not in expenditure allocations. Reallocating federal expenditures on an equal per capita basis would reduce regional disparities in flows of federal funds by only about 25 percent. The principal regional beneficiary of equalized expenditures would be the midwest states of the Great Lakes region. However, contrary to the expectations of proponents of such redistribution, the southeastern states would also be major beneficiaries while the larger states of the mideast and New England would be hurt. Selective expenditure changes might be targeted more effectively to individual regions or states; but finding consistent, generally acceptable principles upon which to base such changes is a formidable problem.