SPECIFICATION PROBLEMS,POLICE LEVELS,AND CRIME RATES*

Research on the relationship between police and crime, like many criminological topics, is subject to uncertain causal direction and omitted controls. We recommend procedures that mitigate these problems: the Granger causality test, proxies for missing variables, robustness checks, and making data available to other researchers. Because specification problems are common in the social sciences, this strategy has applicability beyond the issue of police and crime. We analyze yearly police data and UCR crime rates, at the state and city levels, pooled over two decades. We find Granger causation in both directions. The impact of crime on the number of police is slight, but the impact of police on most crime types is substantial. The latter result is more robust at the city level.     

The Line‐Item Veto in Georgia: Fiscal Restraint or Inter‐Branch Politics?

This article about use of the line‐item veto in Georgia concludes that the item veto has been used not as an instrument for reducing the budget total or the size of state government, but as an instrument for protecting the executive budget. Using appropriations data and drawing upon interviews with participants in the budget process, including seven governors, the authors present evidence that in Georgia the item veto (1) is not frequently used, (2) when used, is more likely to remove legislative language than delete dollar amounts, and (3) enables the spending priorities and fiscal policy preferences of the governor to prevail as state policy.     

DELINQUENT PEER INFLUENCE ON OFFENDING VERSATILITY: CAN PEERS PROMOTE SPECIALIZED DELINQUENCY?

The consistent and robust relationship between peers and frequency of offending is often cited as evidence that friends play an important role in adolescent behavioral tendencies. But Warr (2002) has argued that the empirical support for peer perspectives remains equivocal in part because research has not demonstrated that individuals and their peers display similarities in the qualitative form of their delinquent behavior (i.e., the tendency to specialize in delinquent acts). By using data from the Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.) evaluation (N = 1,390) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (AddHealth) (N = 1,848), this study seeks to fill this void in the literature by examining whether having friends who display specialization in specific delinquent acts relative to other offense types predicts an individual's own tendency to display specializing in those same crime types. Consistent with peer influence perspectives, the results of multilevel latent‐trait models (Osgood and Schreck, 2007) suggest that individuals who associate with friends who demonstrate specialization in violence, theft, and substance use are more likely to display greater levels of specialization in those offense types themselves.     

The Damage Done: Cocaine Methods in Detroit

The pro-competitive antitrust doctrine has originated in the free-market economies of Western capitalist countries but with economic transformations in Eastern Europe the doctrine ceased to be an exclusive Western concept. Using the example of the Polish law on combating Trust in the National Economy of 1987, the author demonstrates the spread of the antitrust doctrine from capitalism to socialism. Apart from these changes, the doctrine has been spreading on the international level because increasingly it has found application not only within particular countries but also with regard to trade and commerce between and among countries. The multidimensional nature of the antitrust doctrine has important implications for combating both domestic and international antitrust crime. The efficiency of efforts to combat abuse of a dominant market position, limiting access to the market or other forms of restraining competition will depend increasingly on the degree to which organs responsible for fighting antitrust crimes are willing to benefit from the multi-dimensional nature of the antitrust doctrine.     

TESTING A BAYESIAN LEARNING THEORY OF DETERRENCE AMONG SERIOUS JUVENILE OFFENDERS*

The effect of criminal experience on risk perceptions is of central importance to deterrence theory but has been vastly understudied. This article develops a realistic Bayesian learning model of how individuals will update their risk perceptions over time in response to the signals they receive during their offending experiences. This model implies a simple function that we estimate to determine the deterrent effect of an arrest. We find that an individual who commits one crime and is arrested will increase his or her perceived probability of being caught by 6.3 percent compared with if he or she had not been arrested. We also find evidence that the more informative the signal received by an individual is, the more he or she will respond to it, which is consistent with more experienced offenders responding less to an arrest than less experienced offenders do. Parsing our results out by type of crime indicates that an individual who is arrested for an aggressive crime will increase both his or her aggressive crime risk perception as well as his or her income‐generating crime risk perception, although the magnitude of the former may be slightly larger. This implies that risk perception updating, and thus potentially deterrence, may be partially, although not completely, crime specific.     

Polls,coalition signals and strategic voting: An experimental investigation of perceptions and effects

Polls and coalition signals can help strategic voters in multiparty systems with proportional representation and coalition governments to optimise their vote decision. Using a laboratory experiment embedded in two real election campaigns, this study focuses on voters' attention to and perception of polls and coalition signals. The manipulation of polls and coalition signals allows a causal test of their influence on strategic voting in a realistic environment. The findings suggest that active information acquisition to form fairly accurate perceptions of election outcomes can compensate for the advantage of high political sophistication. The theory of strategic voting is supported by the evidence, but only for a small number of voters. Most insincere vote decisions are explained by other factors. Thus, the common practice to consider all insincere voters as strategic is misleading.     

Traditional Leaders and the Culture of Governance in South Africa

The global neoliberal economic and political order impregnated the emergence of democracy in South Africa. One of the hallmarks of this order is that the capacity of the state to transform society is constrained, particularly in the rural hinterlands. The incapacity of the state to extend its grip, both economically and politically, has provided traditional leaders with an opportunity to both recast themselves as intermediaries between state and society and elevate themselves to decision makers on behalf of large communities. The article examines the way in which traditional leaders have repositioned themselves in the new democracy, what their source of support is, and why the African National Congress government has come to support these efforts.