Cultivating Public Service Motivation through AmeriCorps Service: A Longitudinal Study

The public service motivation literature has helped scholars and practitioners better understand who is attracted to public service and why. However, little is understood about how public service motivation in individuals may be cultivated or how it changes over time. This article uses panel data collected by the Corporation for National and Community Service to track the longitudinal effects of participation in the AmeriCorps national service program on participants’ public service motivation. Findings reveal that participation in AmeriCorps programs had positive effects on participants’ levels of commitment to the public interest and civic awareness immediately after the program; many of these program effects were sustained seven years later. However, when observed in isolation, the comparison group showed significant declines in levels of commitment to public interest and civic awareness over an eight‐year period, suggesting that public service motivation may initially decline upon entry into a public service career.     

Marital Satisfaction and Marital Discord as Risk Markers for Intimate Partner Violence: A Meta-analytic Review

A meta-analysis investigating the relationship between marital satisfaction/discord and intimate partner violence (IPV) in heterosexual relationships was conducted with 32 articles. Overall, a small-to-moderate effect size (r = −0.27) indicated a significant and negative relationship existed between marital satisfaction/discord and IPV. Moderator analyses found no differences between effect size based on construct examined (discord or satisfaction). However, the magnitudes of observed effect sizes were influenced by other moderator variables, including the use of standardized versus non-standardized measures, gender of the offender and victim, role in the violence (perpetrator versus victim), and sample type (clinical versus community). The data suggests that gender is an especially important moderator variable in understanding the relationship between marital satisfaction/discord and IPV.     

Suited to Serve: The Antecedents and Perceptions of Public Service Motivation in National Service

While research suggests that public service motivation may be a dynamic trait in individuals, particularly early in their careers, other recent research has found that PSM may be relatively stable upon entry into the workforce (Vogel and Kroll 2016). To identify more precisely the decision point among individuals considering a public service career, the present study uses the antecedents of public service motivation framework (Perry 1997) to predict participation in AmeriCorps, a voluntary national service program in the United States. Findings reveal that antecedent conditions of PSM, including the prevalence of seeing family members and mentors help others as well as participation in student government, predict whether an individual will join an AmeriCorps programs. Many of these self-reported motivations support the argument that people attracted to public service hold strong other-regarding values. These findings suggest that human resources managers would be wise to consider these antecedent conditions to public service motivation when identifying pools of talent for recruiting and selecting prospective employees.     

Capacity for Self-Control and Individuals' Interest in Exercising Self-Control

We identify and elaborate a conceptual distinction between capability for self-control and the desire to exercise it, and employ data from a city survey to explore the empirical viability of such a differentiation. Separate scales measuring ability and desire to exercise self-control both prove to be significant and moderately strong predictors of several measures of criminal/deviant behavior, showing independent, cumulative, and interactive relationships with each other. For some measures of crime/deviance, self-control capability is most effective when the individual's interest in exercising self-control is low but its effect is greatly reduced or eliminated when desire to exercise self-control desire is high. Combinations of capability for self-control and interest in exercising it prove to be particularly good predictors of the absolute level of misbehavior.     

Digital Rank-and-file: Party Activists' Perceptions and Use of the Internet

Political parties are in a transitional phase. A declining, socially restricted membership, decreasing levels of activism and a shift towards more individualistic modes of political engagement threaten the linkage role that parties have played in modern democracy. The development of the Internet in a period of change has meant that it quickly became intertwined with debates about reviving representative political organisations. Using data from a survey of party activists in the UK (N = 4,770), this article answers questions about the perception and use of new media by party activists, the Internet's potential for members' participation and engagement and the penetration of the Internet in pre-existing political careers. In general, the article asks which role new media are playing in the transition of political parties.