Legislative success in open sky congresses: weak gatekeeping prerogatives and the loss of majority support

In legislatures with weak gatekeeping institutions and constrained plenary time, scheduling rules and majority requirements explain inter-party differences in the consideration and approval of law initiatives. In this paper a mixture survival model is used to analyse legislative success in a legislature with very weak gatekeeping prerogatives, the House of Representatives of Uruguay. Evidence is provided that the loss of majority support depletes plenary time more rapidly and yields an ideological drift that benefits the median voter of the House. The results inform recent debates on the endogenous formation of a plenary schedule in open sky legislatures.     

Coping,confidence, and change within the academy: a longitudinal look at police recruits

This study is based on surveys of police recruits representing four agencies across the United States. The recruits were surveyed at the beginning and end of their academy training and asked about coping strategies and the confidence they had in performing their jobs. Coping shifted significantly over time, with recruits utilizing task-oriented and outreach strategies less frequently at the end of the academy than at the beginning. Avoidance coping strategies were used more frequently by recruits at the end of the academy than at the beginning. Slight changes were also found in the influence of these strategies on job confidence over time, with avoidance coping having a stronger influence in the beginning of the academy than at the end. The role of demographic factors on coping was largely invariant over time, with only slight differences detected. Implications for policy and research are also discussed.     

Retrieving administrative data to assess long-term outcomes: a case study of the 23-year follow-up of the Milwaukee domestic violence experiment

Objectives

To describe how social scientists, criminal justice practitioners, and administrative agencies collected administrative data to follow-up a criminological experiment after two decades. To make recommendations that will guide similar long-term follow-ups.

Methods

A case study approach describes the processes of and sociological benefits to collecting administrative data to assess criminal justice and life-course outcomes.

Results

While maintaining experimental integrity, we developed, executed, and verified processes to retrieve arrest, mortality, and residential data for the experimental subjects, which enabled us to complete the longest ever follow-up of a criminal justice experiment.

Conclusions

When experiments have policy implications, administrative data may be preferable to survey data for assessing primary effects. Successful social science research can be conducted in conjunction with multiple administrative agencies.

     

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.     

Attributions of Negative Partner Behavior by Men Who Physically Abuse Their Partners

This study investigated the association between family violence and the attributions made for negative partner behaviors in an Australian context. Three groups of men were classified as physically violent (in counseling), non-physically violent (in counseling), and non-physically violent (in the community). The Relationship Attribution Measure was used to assess the attributional dependent variables of locus, stability, globality, intent, motivation, and blame. Significant differences between violent and nonviolent men on each of the attributional dimensions were found. Physically violent men were more likely than non-physically violent men (counseling) to attribute the negative behavior of their partners to unchangeable, intentional rather than unintentional, selfishly motivated, and blameworthy causes. However, these differences disappeared when marital satisfaction was controlled. The implications of this work for domestic violence intervention programs are discussed, along with a number of methodological issues and directions for future research.     

Families falling apart

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the senior United States Senator from New York. He is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy of the Committee on Finance, and of the Subcommittee on Water Resources, Transportation, and Infrastructure of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. He is also a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Senate Arms Control Observer Group. He is the author or editor of 14 books, including Beyond the Melting Pot(with Nathan Glazer) and his most recent work, Came the Revolution: Argument in the Reagan Era.