Welfare Reform in Delaware: "A Better Chance" for Whom?

Does welfare reform provide "A Better Chance"(ABC) for Delaware'swelfare recipients? Not in terms of meeting the program's objectives.The employment and earnings impacts are modest. ABC had relativelylittle impact on recipients with three to five years of previouswelfare experience. ABC recipients had some understanding ofthe broad parameters of the new rules, but not of many of thecritical details. Nearly one-half of the ABC participants werefinancially penalized for violating the rules. Sanctions didnot necessarily change their behavior, as only about 25 percentcured their sanction within six months. There is little evidencethat the state has moved forward on encouraging two-parent familiesand discouraging teenage pregnancy and unwed motherhood.     

Better Voting Methods Through Technology: The Refinement-Manageability Trade-Off in the Single Transferable Vote

The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is an attractive way of achieving representation that is proportional in terms of whatever characteristics of candidates voters value. Increasingly sophisticated methods of implementing STV have been advanced to overcome identified limitations of earlier methods. But every refinement comes at a cost of increased difficulty of understanding the vote-counting algorithm and increased cost of undertaking the count. This paper uses votes from actual elections to provide evidence about the frequency with which the choice of a particular STV method affects the outcome, and about the type of difference that different methods make. The most sophisticated STV method is CPO-STV, the comparison of pairs of outcomes by STV. This method avoids sequential exclusions and therefore overcomes the limitations of previous methods, that a paucity of votes in the early stages of a count can lead to the exclusion of a candidate who is the consensus choice of voters whose preferred candidates will be excluded at later stages of the count.     

The Sprawl Debate: Let Markets Plan

Sprawl issues ought not be a federal issue because land-usecontrol is local. Americans have been moving to both suburbanand private communities for many years, an expression of theconstitutional right to travel. They seek more direct controlover their personal property rights. Both trends are at oddswith the desire of planners to impose more controls via land-useand growth controls. Planners base their arguments on the needto control urban sprawl. Examining their arguments one-by-oneshows that they are empirically weak. The controls are ineffectiveand will do little to slow these shifts in residential location.The logic of the planners' position would be to control developmenteverywhere via state and even federal legislation, but thisis undesirable, unattainable, and probably unconstitutional.Sprawl will remain an issue over which state and local jurisdictionswill either continue to fight or find an uneasy accommodation.     

Why a managerialist pursuit will not necessarily lead to achievement of MDGs

With case studies on Millennium Development Goal (MDG)-oriented reform projects in Vietnam, this article focuses upon a persistent dilemma in attempting to turn worthy goals into implementable programmes and sustainable results. How to achieve these goals is uncertain, but modern performance management, as expressed in Logical Frameworks, demands certainty. The article suggests how an open management style can allow for pragmatic adaptation to circumstances; or, more radically, how Log Frames could be redesigned to focus upon interpretation of contextual challenges. But such a dynamic requires a high degree of delegation and an acceptance that accountability must also be an interactive learning process.     

Charting a Future Course for US-Japan Relations

This article first examines specific recent issues facing the two countries, namely the Senkaku Islands fishing boat incident and the relocation of the Futenma Marine air base in Ginowan city, Okinawa, and then proceeds to make some observations on the larger issue of the future of the alliance.     

Deprogramming: from private self-help to governmental organized repression

This paper examines deprogramming, a multi-faceted form of derecruitment from unpopular religious groups (“cults”) developed in the United States and then spreading to other nations, as a form of social control of new religious movements. The early history of deprogramming in the United States is discussed, and then its more recent application in Japan against members of the Unification Church is detailed. A continuum is presented that has self-help remedies at one end, and governmental repression at the other. Self-help forms of deprogramming are illustrated mainly by the United States which has First Amendment protections for religious groups which afford some protection from governmental intervention. Governmental forced derecruitment is illustrated by China’s effort to stamp out the Falun Gong through a very systematic official governmental program involving many institutions operating with full support of the government and the Chinese Communist Party. In between these extremes are cases such as Japan’s social control efforts, and some within the United States, where governmental officials and agencies turn a “blind eye” to self-help remedies, allowing them to operate, or even engage in covert activities to suppress unpopular religious groups.     

The law and the sublime: Rethinking the self and its boundaries

Christine Battersby has argued that it is Kant (and not Descartes) who provides the paradigm model of what it is to be a self in modernity. The Kantian self is established in opposition to its other. The body is commonly envisaged as a container, with selfhood as something that is defended against the outside. In contrast, she proposes a feminist reworking of such a model of selfhood, applicable to both men and women, in which the self and other emerge over time through patterns of relationality. This paper introduces Battersby’s work by focusing upon her early analysis of Kantian aesthetics, in particular the sublime. The aim is to draw out some of the legal and political implications of her work, particularly with regard to the common law’s developing conception of privacy. This is carried out by distinguishing her ontological position from the psychology of Carol Gilligan and then by considering the overlapping concerns of Jennifer Nedelsky in the area of legal theory.

The relationship between intelligence,memory and interrogative suggestibility in young offenders

Abstract

The study investigated the relationship between interrogative suggestibility and relevant cognitive factors as proposed by Gudjonsson and Clark (1986). The subjects were fifty-eight adolescent young offenders resident in a national children's centre with secure facilities. All were administered the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. Interrogative suggestibility correlated negatively with intelligence and recall memory. Limited evidence of range effects was found for the relationship between intelligence and suggestibility, but not for the relationship between recall memory and suggestibility.     

The Multiple Institutional Logics of Innovation

ABSTRACT

How do decentralized systems deal with innovation? In particular, how do they aggregate the myriad experiences of their component parts, facilitate diffusion of information, and encourage investments in innovation? This is a classic problem in the study of human institutions. It is also one of the biggest challenges that exists in the governance of decentralized systems: How do institutions shape individual behavior around solving problems and sharing information in a fashion that is reasonably compatible with collective well-being? We use a particular decentralized institution (the U.S. House of Representatives), wrestling with a novel problem (how to utilize the Internet), to explore the implications of three archetypical principles for organizing collective problem solving: market, network, and hierarchy.