Recent reforms in Singapore's administrative elite: Responding to the challenges of a rapidly changing economy and society

The article examines the recent changes made to the elite corps of the Singapore Civil Service, the Administrative Service, in response to the challenges it faces as a result of the rapid economic and social transformation of the country over the last 30 years. One challenge is to overcome the shortfall of personnel in the Administrative Service resulting from the availability of more attractive and lucrative careers in the burgeoning private sector. A second challenge facing the Administrative Service is to remain attuned to the new needs and circumstances of the economy and the society at large. For this reason, Administrative Service officers are required to work in commercial or community‐based organisations for part of their careers.     

On the Meaning of Survey Reports of Roll‐Call “Votes”

Contemporary efforts to evaluate representation often compare survey measures of how citizens say they would vote on legislation to what elected officials do in office. These comparisons generally suggest poor representation. We argue here that this common design is unlikely to effectively evaluate representation because responses to survey questions differ in important aspects from voting in legislatures. Measurement error and construct validity undermine the comparison. Three survey experiments show that providing partisan and nonpartisan information readily available to legislators materially changes respondents' expressed preferences on roll‐call votes. With information, expressed policy positions are both less centrist and more closely matched to legislator behavior in their preferred party. Respondents also appear aware of their own lack of knowledge in evaluating roll‐call policy votes. The treatment effect of information decreases in confidence judging policy in that area. We show similar patterns for respondent opinions on Supreme Court decisions.     

Cultural Stress,Emotional well-being,and Health Risk Behaviors among Recent Immigrant Latinx families: The Moderating Role of Perceived Neighborhood Characteristics

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Latinx families can experience cultural stressors, which can negatively influence their emotional and behavioral health. Few studies have examined if perceived...     

Personal Identity Development in Hispanic Immigrant Adolescents: Links with Positive Psychosocial Functioning,Depressive Symptoms,and Externalizing Problems

The present study was designed to examine trajectories of personal identity coherence and confusion among Hispanic recent-immigrant adolescents, as well as the effects of these trajectories on psychosocial and risk-taking outcomes. Personal identity is extremely important in anchoring young immigrants during a time of acute cultural change. A sample of 302 recently immigrated (5 years or less in the United States at baseline) Hispanic adolescents (M_age?=?14.51 years at baseline; SD?=?0.88 years, range 14–17) from Miami and Los Angeles (47?% girls) completed measures of personal identity coherence and confusion at the first five waves of a six-wave longitudinal study; and reported on positive psychosocial functioning, depressive symptoms, and externalizing problems at baseline and at Time 6. Results indicated that identity coherence increased linearly across time, but that there were no significant changes in confusion over time and no individual differences in confusion trajectories. Higher baseline levels of, and improvements in, coherence predicted higher levels of self-esteem, optimism, and prosocial behavior at the final study timepoint. Higher baseline levels of confusion predicted lower self-esteem, greater depressive symptoms, more aggressive behavior, and more rule breaking at the final study timepoint. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of personal identity for Hispanic immigrant adolescents, and in terms of implications for intervention.     

Representativeness and Motivations of the Contemporary Donorate: Results from Merged Survey and Administrative Records

Only a small portion of Americans make campaign donations, yet because ambitious politicians need these resources, this group may be particularly important for shaping political outcomes. We investigate the characteristics and motivations of the donorate using a novel dataset that combines administrative records of two types of political participation, contributing and voting, with a rich set of survey variables. These merged observations allow us to examine differences in demographics, validated voting, and ideology across subgroups of the population and to evaluate the motivations of those who donate. We find that in both parties donors are consistently and notably divergent from non-donors to a larger degree than voters are divergent from non-voters. Of great interest, in both parties donors are more ideologically extreme than other partisans, including primary voters. With respect to why individuals contribute, we show that donors appear responsive to their perception of the stakes in the election. We also present evidence that inferences about donor ideology derived from the candidates donors give to may not closely reflect the within-party policy ideology of those donors. Overall, our results suggest that donations are a way for citizens motivated by the perceived stakes of elections to increase their participation beyond solely turning out.     

The Participatory Effects of Redistricting

While the effects of legal and institutional arrangements on political participation are well documented, little attention has been given to the potential participatory effects of one of the United States' most important electoral laws: constitutionally mandated reapportionment. By severing the ties between constituents and their incumbents, we argue, redistricting raises information costs, leading to increased levels of nonvoting in U.S. House contests. Survey data from the 1992 American National Election Studies show that redrawn citizens are half as likely to know their incumbent's name as citizens who remain in a familiar incumbent's district and, consequently, significantly more likely to roll off, or abstain from voting in the House election after having cast a presidential vote. We also show that participation rates in the 2002–2006 House elections in Texas—each of which followed a redistricting—match these patterns, with roll-off increasing 3% to 8% in portions of the state that were redrawn, controlling for other factors. The findings demonstrate that scholars and policy makers ought to be concerned with the extent to which the redrawing of congressional lines affects citizens' exercise of political voice.     

Scaling Residential Retrofits in New York City: Financing,Standardization, and Streamlining

Energy efficiency is a multiple-win opportunity for reducing global warming pollution, providing energy and cost savings, improving local environmental quality, and increasing the resilience of our built environment. In 2030, 85 percent of New York City's building portfolio will be comprised of buildings that exist today. Scaling up building retrofits and creating the policy environment to grow the building retrofits industry in New York City is critical to achieving the city's economic, local and global environmental, public health, and resilience goals. This article proposes scaling up the city's innovative residential energy efficiency efforts through a home efficiency Web portal, accelerating and stitching innovative programs together as they grow, leveraging post-Sandy recovery funding for building performance improvements, and moving stepwise towards certain mandates for energy performance among the city's smaller private buildings.     

Performance Standards and Employee Effort: Evidence From Teacher Absences

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title‐1 schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference‐in‐difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the first year of NCLB on teacher effort in the subsequent year suggest that on average, teacher absences in North Carolina fell by about 10 percent. The probability of being frequently absent similarly decreased. These reductions in teacher absences were driven by within‐teacher increases in effort and by teachers in the bottom half of the effectiveness distribution. On average, only a modest amount of the achievement gains attributable to the increased accountability pressure are explained by the corresponding decline in teacher absences.