ALL OFFENDERS ARE EQUAL,BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS: VARIATION IN JOURNEYS TO CRIME BETWEEN OFFENDERS*

The results of this study reveal a major methodological problem with an established body of criminological literature—the journey to crime. The dominant finding of such research is that most crimes occur close to an offender's home. Consequently, journeys to crime typically display a distance-decay function that is assumed to exist between and within offenders. However, most journey-to-crime studies use nested data—individual offenders contributing multiple crime trips—yet employ analytic methods that fail to account for this property, leading to inference and aggregation concerns. In the study outlined in this article, we demonstrated the implications of using nested data for analyzing the journey to crime. We showed that once controlling for nesting, only a few (prolific) offenders display a distance decay pattern. Implications of the findings for theory and future research are discussed.     

Parties as Procedural Coalitions in Congress: An Examination of Differing Career Tracks

We examine the degree to which parties act as procedural coalitions in Congress by testing predictions from the party cartel theory (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994, 2002). We gain leverage on the question of party influence in Congress by focusing on three types of House members: reelection seekers, higher‐office seekers, and retiring members. We argue that retiring House members are no longer susceptible to party pressure, making them the perfect means (when compared to higher‐office seekers and reelection seekers) to determine the existence of party influence. Results from a pooled, cross‐sectional analysis of the 94th through 105th Congresses (1975–98) suggest that party influence is indeed present in Congress, especially where the party cartel theory predicts: on procedural, rather than final‐passage, votes. Moreover, we find that procedural party influence is almost exclusively the domain of the majority party. This latter finding is especially important because most prior studies have been limited to investigating interparty influence only.     

THE METHODOLOGICAL ADEQUACY OF LONGITUDINAL RESEARCH ON CRIME*

This paper argues that the increasing dominance in contemporary criminology of the longitudinal or cohort study is not justified on methodological grounds, that this research design has taken criminological theory in unproductive directions, has produced illusory substantive findings, and has promoted policy conclusions of doubtful utility. In addition, it is noted that longitudinal research is very expensive and therefore has high opportunity costs, costs that have not been properly evaluated. The positive thesis is that many of the apparent benefits of longitudinal research can be obtained by carefully designed and reasonably conceptualized cross-sectional studies, at substantially reduced cost.