Stammwähler und die opportunistische Wahl parteipolitischer Programme

This article explains political radicalism by the number of voters who are biased towards a party. With little voters biased in favor of a party, this party has to rely more heavily on its programmatic distance to other parties. Because large parties – i.e.: parties with a high number of biased voters – gain votes when they move to the center of the political spectrum, parties with a lower number of voters that are biased in their favor are forced to the edges of the policy space. We draw on a computational model of political competition between four parties in a two‐dimensional policy space to investigate this relationship. We use panel corrected OLS estimates to analyze the data generated by the computer simulation. Our results substantiate the hypothesis of a negative relationship between the number of biased voters and the inclination of a party to adopt a more extreme policy stance.     

Excuses,Excuses: Self-Handicapping in an Australian Adolescent Sample

The purpose of the present study was to examine gender differences in the self-handicapping tendencies of a sample of 337 Australian school attending adolescents, who were aged between 15 and 19 years. Self-handicapping, as measured by the shortened Self-Handicapping Scale, was examined in relation to self-esteem, performance attributions, coping strategies, and the potential behavioral self-handicaps of reduced study hours and inefficient study habits. Girls scored significantly higher on the Self-Handicapping Scale and endorsed using emotional and illness related excuses significantly more often than boys. High self-handicapping scores independently predicted lower study hours for boys, and were associated with less efficient study for girls. Coping and attributional predictors of self-handicapping were found to be rumination, luck attribution, and poor active coping strategies for boys, and ability attributions, behavioral disengagement, instrumental support, and poor active coping strategies for girls.     

Who's the Boss? Patterns of Perceived Control in Adolescents' Friendships

This study examined the nature and correlates of different patterns of perceived control in adolescents' relationships with their best friends. Participants included firstborn adolescents (M = 14.94 years), their younger siblings (M = 12.44 years) and both their mothers and fathers in 163 families as well as a best friend of each adolescent (M = 15 years). Data were collected from family members during home visits regarding adolescents' family relationships, friendships, and psychosocial adjustment; time use data were gathered during a series of 7 nightly phone interviews. Information was obtained from best friends during a brief phone interview. We developed a typology of 3 different patterns of perceived friendship control based on the combination of adolescents' and their best friends' ratings of relational control. Patterns of control in adolescents' friendships were associated with the distribution of control in both parents' marriages and adolescents' sibling relationships. Further analyses, designed to test developmental predictions, revealed connections between friendship control and other qualities of adolescents' friendships (i.e., intimacy, conflict, perspective-taking).     

Institutional Change in Swiss Cantons: A Contribution to Describing and Explaining Institutional Reforms

Most accounts of Swiss federal institutions are unable to explain institutional change. In this contribution the authors trace change in Cantonal reforms and then use multivariate explanation models to account for institutional reforms such as New Public Management reforms. The multivariate analyses used rely on an “event count model” to explain the frequency of institutional reforms and a “binary response model” to explain why Cantons adopt New Public Management reforms. This research demonstrates that policy research as well as innovation and diffusion theories can contribute to explaining institutional reform.     

Corruption, Reform, and Virtue Ethics

Books reviewed in this article:
Gerald E. Caiden, O.P. Dwivedi, and Joseph Jabbra (eds.), Where Corruption Lies
Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform
Peter Kobrak, Cozy Politics: Political Parties, Campaign Finance, and Compromised Governance
Raymond J. Devettere, Introduction to Virtue Ethics: Insights of the Ancient Greeks     

Who's Responsible for the Economy? The Formation and Consequences of Responsibility Attributions

The concept of responsibility lies at the heart of theories of democratic accountability. This article represents the first attempt to explicitly model attributions of presidential versus congressional responsibility for the economy. The article investigates the extent to which contextual and individual-level factors influence citizens' attributions of responsibility for the economy and how, in turn, such judgments shape their political evaluations. Employing a multinomial probit model of attributional choice, I find that responsibility judgments are shaped to varying degrees by economic ideology, perceptions of institutional context, and partisanship, although the effects of partisanship are not uniform across political parties. The results demonstrate that responsibility attributions are politically consequential and moderate the effects of economic perceptions on presidential and congressional approval. Finally, the results suggest that the effects of responsibility attributions in the sanctioning process are not invariant across the target of institutional evaluation .     

Does merit pay reward good teachers? Evidence from a randomized experiment

A common criticism of merit‐pay plans is that they fail to systematically target rewards to the most effective teachers. This study presents new evidence on this issue by evaluating data from Tennessee's Career Ladder Evaluation System and the Project STAR class‐size experiment. Because the students and teachers participating in the experiment were randomly assigned, inferences about the relative quality of teachers certified by the career ladder should be unbiased. The results indicate that Tennessee's career ladder had mixed success in rewarding teachers who increased student achievement. Assignment to career‐ladder teachers increased mathematics scores by roughly 3 percentile points but generally had smaller and statistically insignificant effects on reading scores. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.