How a Presidential Primary Debate Changed Attitudes of Audience Members

This article examines the effect of primary season presidential debates on voters' attitudes toward presidential candidates. Employing a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design, we examine the 1996 Arizona Republican primary debate. We find that the debate led respondents to change their viability and electability assessments of the candidates and produced significant changes in respondents' vote preferences. In addition, we demonstrate that changes in viability, changes in electability, as well as differences between expected and actual debate performance influenced the vote preferences of audience members. We conclude by speculating about the debate's effect on the Arizona Republican primary, and by noting the potentially important differences between the impact of general election and primary debates.     

Of Distributive Politics and Pork Barrel System: Why Not Epistemic Governance Approach?

The paper attempts to situate distributive politics in the context of epistemic governance. The paper also seeks to analyze the various structures and systems, actors, agents and stakeholders, and norms and behaviors involved within the realm of theory and praxis in distributive politics. It borrows from the epistemic work targets espoused by Alasuutari and Qadir (2014), namely the environment, actors and virtues. Finally, the paper proposes an epistemic governance as policy approach in distributive politics as it tries to argue the shift of power from the hands of the political elites to the hands of the politically astute epistemes.     

Women in Defense of Workers: Ella Winter,the literary left,and labor journalism in California

Left-wing, middle-class journalists such as Ella Winter contributed decisively to the labor rebellion of the 1930s. In contrast to mainstream labor reporting, they practiced a form of anti-fascist, working-class journalism that consistently linked the drive for collective bargaining to a larger movement for social and economic justice. Winter and other writers such as Miriam deFord and Emily Joseph carried forward a tradition of labor defense, socialist feminism, and free speech advocacy that originated in the bohemian left of the early twentieth century. Rather than reducing women’s activism to communist intrigue or the exigencies of the economic crisis, this essay seeks out the deeper roots of women’s working-class journalism in the 1930s. It finds them in the democratic and aesthetic aspirations of the pre-Bolshevik left, even while it addresses the critical impact that the crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism had on socialist feminist writers. Functioning as mediators, organizers, and witnesses to the movement, they bridged the gap between the middle and working classes, chronicling the experiences and articulating the aspirations of a multiracial proletariat. For these writers, radical commitment and responsible social commentary seemed entirely compatible. Out of this conviction, Winter and others helped build a cross-class coalition in California. In addition, they carved out lives of social purpose that allowed them to achieve a measure of female independence and professional achievement.     

The Penal Voluntary Sector in England and Wales: Adaptation to Unsettlement and Austerity

This article draws on some findings from research which investigated penal voluntary sector adaptation to the mixed market in criminal justice services. The article firstly reprises the main trends for aligning state relationships with the voluntary sector from the 1980s to the present. We then outline some findings about adaptive experiences, situations and practices of the voluntary sector in criminal justice resettlement in the light of considerable upheaval. The research found that service providing voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) either outwardly comply with, or, in a minority of cases, actively embrace, competitive marketised models of service delivery. Secondly, the sector has normalised commercial approaches to organisational efficiency as well as aligned with bureaucratic practices common to the statutory sector. Despite charges that they are effectively co‐opted by both state and market interests, many have reported conflicts between prioritising long‐term financial viability with their founding ‘ethos and values’. We conclude that while many VSOs have successfully adjusted to market and bureaucratic norms, aspects of that repositioning have been at a cost to their traditions of relative autonomy, localism and distinctiveness, to the possible detriment of a vigorous civil society.