Letters of Intent: Election Campaigning and Orchestrated Public Debate in Local Newspapers' Letters to the Editor

Drawing on the findings of an extensive study of local and regional newspaper reporting of the 2001 UK general election, this article contests the widely held view that readers' letters' pages provide a public forum for discussion and debate initiated by readers. The article argues that during election campaigns, local parties may become highly influential in shaping the contents of letters pages as part of their broader media based campaigning strategy. For their part, editors select letters not simply according to their newsworthiness but to reflect the identity of the newspaper, to meet the perceived preferences of readers, as well as the more prosaic requirements of availability of space and editorial imperatives concerning balance. A fivefold typology of readers' letters is constructed and illustrated by reference to newspaper discussions of, among other matters, British membership of Europe and issues around taxation.     

EGOHOODS AS WAVES WASHING ACROSS THE CITY: A NEW MEASURE OF “NEIGHBORHOODS”

Defining “neighborhoods” is a bedeviling challenge faced by all studies of neighborhood effects and ecological models of social processes. Although scholars frequently lament the inadequacies of the various existing definitions of “neighborhood,” we argue that previous strategies relying on nonoverlapping boundaries such as block groups and tracts are fundamentally flawed. The approach taken here instead builds on insights of the mental mapping literature, the social networks literature, the daily activities pattern literature, and the travel to crime literature to propose a new definition of neighborhoods: egohoods. These egohoods are conceptualized as waves washing across the surface of cities, as opposed to independent units with nonoverlapping boundaries. This approach is illustrated using crime data from nine cities: Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, St. Louis, and Tucson. The results show that measures aggregated to our egohoods explain more of the variation in crime across the social environment than do models with measures aggregated to block groups or tracts. The results also suggest that measuring inequality in egohoods provides dramatically stronger positive effects on crime rates than when using the nonoverlapping boundary approach, highlighting the important new insights that can be obtained by using our egohood approach.     

Attitudes Toward the Police: A Comparison of Canadian and American Adolescents

The present inquiry is an attempt to determine the attitudes which adolescents in Canada and the United States have toward the police and the determinants of these attitudes. In addition to providing a diverse sample of youths from two countries, each with unique policing structures and policies, the study represents the first attempt to assess the attitudes twoard the police held by a sample of Canadian adolescents. The sample for the inquiry consists of 869 youths from a rural Rocky Mountain State and three West Coast cities in the United States and 1200 youths from a major metropolitan area on the West Coast of Canada.

To assess the attitudes which adolescents hold toward the police in their respective countries and areas, a 16–item Likert scale was employed along with a series of questions eliciting a variety of social-biographical, experiential (type and extent of contacts with police) information as well as the prestige rating of the police. Analysis of the data indicates that the majority of adolescents in both countries have positive attitudes toward the police, regardless of the type of police force (Canadian RCMP, Canadian Municipal, U.S. Sheriff, U.S. Municipal) they are policed by. In addition, none of the social-biographical variables in either sample contributed significantly to the attitudes which were held toward the police, nor were certain juveniles more likely to have more negative experiences with the police. Rather, the primary determinant of juvenile attitudes toward the police in both countries seems to be the type of contact which the adolescent had with the police. The findings have significant implications for the police literature and police operational policy which are discussed.     

Deinstitutionalization and Its Impact on Swedish Corrections

The dominant approach in Swedish corrections is to deinstitutionalize as many offenders as possible. This started in the 1960's when Sweden decided that rehabilitation, and secondarily deterrence, would be the overriding goals of its correctional program. This has remained true despite the statistical evidence indicating that the goal of rehabilitation has not been achieved to any significant extent. The dominant belief in Sweden is that prison is harmful and counterproductive when the overall aim is to reintegrate the offender into society.     

THE NEW GOVERNANCE ARRANGEMENTS FOR NHS FOUNDATION TRUST HOSPITALS: REFRAMING GOVERNORS AS META‐REGULATORS

New governance arrangements for NHS Foundation Trusts (FTs) aimed to replace centralized state ownership of acute English hospitals with a new form of social ownership. Under this, trusts would exist as independent public interest organizations on the model of mutuals and co‐operative societies. Assessing the impact of the new arrangements on the management structure of four acute hospitals, we demonstrate that FTs have failed to deliver social ownership and local accountability on this model. We suggest that policy‐makers should re‐frame the governance apparatus associated with mutualism and social ownership in terms of the concept of meta‐regulation. By re‐framing governors as meta‐regulators, regulatory institutions would acquire new powers to steer FTs towards sustainable forms of compliance via non‐coercive, non‐intrusive means.     

Determinants of regime type in newly independent states

Abstract.  Since 1945, newly independent states have differed from longer lived states in their greater risk of violent conflict and more challenging environment for democratisation. The authors of this article theorise that certain economic, demographic, violence-related and external factors should affect the regime type (level of democracy versus autocracy) in newly independent states. Examining exclusively newly independent states that have undergone major political transitions allows one to determine factors favouring democracy over autocracy under such volatile circumstances. The authors test several hypotheses, using cross-sectional and cross-sectional time-series analyses, and find that economic development elevates the level of democracy in new states. Cultural heterogeneity has no effect, but external factors play an important role. Genocide and politicide reduce democracy, while civil wars have the opposite effect. These findings prove robust to alternative measurements of the dependent variable and alternative model specifications.     

ASSESSING MESSNER AND ROSENFELD'S INSTITUTIONAL ANOMIE THEORY: A PARTIAL TEST*

In Crime and the American Dream, Messner and Rosenfeld contend that culturally and structurally produced pressures to secure monetary rewards, coupled with weak controls from noneconomic social institutions, promote high levels of instrumental crime. Empirically, they suggest that the effects of economic conditions on profit-related crime depend on the strength of noneconomic institutions. This investigation evaluates this proposition with cross-sectional data for U.S. states. In brief; the nonlinear models show considerable, indirect support for Messner and Rosenfeld's institutional anomie theory, revealing that the effects of poverty on property crime depend on levels of structural indicators of the capacity of noneconomic institutions to ameliorate the criminogenic impact of economic deprivation. The implications of these findings are discussed.