Pi Alpha Alpha activities and effectiveness: results from a national survey of chapter advisors

Pi Alpha Alpha (PAA) is the national academic honor society for public administration. This study presents the results of a comprehensive survey of PAA Chapter advisors focusing on inductee characteristics, induction requirements, chapter activities, chapter officers, and suggestions for improving PAA chapter effectiveness. NASPAA sponsored the survey and provided relevant logistical support. The results indicate that PAA is meeting its major objectives, but several areas require attention including enhancing the activity mix, improving recruitment practices for chapter officers, and a dedicated means for disseminating information on chapter activities through a newsletter and a chapter directory.     

Legal Constraints on the Use of Race in Biomedical Research: Toward a Social Justice Framework

This article addresses three questions concerning the legal regulation of the use of race as a category in biomedical research: how does the law currently encourage the use of race in biomedical research?; how might the existing legal framework constrain its use?; and what should be the law's approach to race-based biomedical research? It proposes a social justice approach that aims to promote racial equality by discouraging the use of "race" as a biological category while encouraging its use as a socio-political category to understand and investigate ways to eliminate disparities in health status, access to health care, and medical treatment.     

Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses

William Roberts Clark University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies, ISR 4202 Box 1248, 426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248 Matt Golder Florida State University, Department of Political Science, 531 Bellamy Building, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2230 e-mail: thomas.brambor{at}nyu.edu e-mail: wrclark{at}umich.edu e-mail: matt.golder{at}nyu.edu (corresponding author) Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitativepolitical science literature. This is so for good reason. Institutionalarguments frequently imply that the relationship between politicalinputs and outcomes varies depending on the institutional context.Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditionalhypotheses as well. Although conditional hypotheses are ubiquitousin political science and multiplicative interaction models havebeen found to capture their intuition quite well, a survey ofthe top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggeststhat the execution of these models is often flawed and inferentialerrors are common. We believe that considerable progress inour understanding of the political world can occur if scholarsfollow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicativeinteraction models presented in this article. Only 10% of thearticles in our survey followed the checklist.     

Restorative Sentencing: Exploring the Views of the Public

Within the past decade, restorative justice has emerged as a truly global phenomenon. Although retributive justice has dominated the penal landscape, more recently, restorative principles at sentencing have attracted increased attention. Restorative sentencing emphasizes the importance of compensation and reconciliation between victims and offenders and pays less attention to establishing proportionality between the seriousness of the offense and the severity of the sentence imposed. Although voluminous (and proliferating), the scholarly literature on restorative justice has to date neglected one critical issue: public opinion with respect to this justice paradigm. Public opinion researchers too, have generally overlooked this topic. The goal of this paper is to determine which elements of the new paradigm generate public approval, and which features are likely to encounter or provoke public opposition, drawing upon related international research published in English over the past 20 years (1982–2002). The review reveals widespread support for restorative sentencing options, such as community service, compensation, and restitution, particularly when applied to young offenders. However, it also seems clear that public support for these alternatives to punitive sentencing options declines as the seriousness of the offence increases, suggesting strong public adherence to the retributive principle of proportionality in sentencing.     

Lockbox Government: Segregated Funding Strategies and the Decline of Governmental Flexibility

Proponents of "reinvention" assert that it will produce governments that are more agile, better able to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, and able to produce public services at much lower cost. However, attempts to make government "work better and cost less" have had limited success. Policy-makers have consequently invested their creative energy in another class of institutional innovations: segregated funding strategies, which protect agencies and programs from the impact of fiscal restraint by excluding them from normal budgeting processes. The proliferation of budget "lockboxes" may actually introduce new rigidities into the public sector and erode democratic influence in policy-making. On the other hand, there may be some circumstances in which these devices can be justified as a method of ensuring that critical long-run interests receive appropriate attention.