Parental Socialization and Rational Party Identification

This article constructs a rational choice model of the intergenerational transmission of party identification. At a given time, identification with a party is the estimate of average future benefits from candidates of that party. Experienced voters constantly update this expectation using political events since the last realignment to predict the future in accordance with Bayes Rule. New voters, however, have no experience of their own. In Bayesian terms, they need prior beliefs. It turns out that under certain specified conditions, these young voters should rationally choose to employ parental experience to help orient themselves to politics. The resulting model predicts several well–known features of political socialization, including the strong correlation between parents' and children's partisanship, the greater partisan independence of young voters, and the tendency of partisan alignments to decay.     

Church attendance,meaningfulness of religion,and depressive symptomatology among adolescents

Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 451 adolescents at a public high school in Texas during the spring semester 1989. The instrument used contained the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and items to determine participants' gender, frequency of church attendance, and meaningfulness of one's religion. Based on social support research and the writings of Carl Jung and Viktor Frankl, it was predicted that those who attended church frequently and those who viewed their religions as providing meaning for their lives would have lower BDI scores than their classmates. The findings supported these predictions. Implications and a discussion of the results are included.Received Ed.D. in educational psychology from University of Illinois. Main research interests are substance abuse in adolescents, drug use prevention strategies, and suicidal ideation in adolescents.Received Ph.D. in general psychology from Boston University. Main research interest is psychology in interdisciplinary perspective, with a specialization in the psychology of religion.Pursuing a M.Ed, in school psychology at Southwest Texas State University. Main research interests are psychological testing and assessment.     

A Classification Tree Approach to the Development of Actuarial Violence Risk Assessment Tools

Since the 1970s, a wide body of research has suggested that the accuracy of clinical risk assessments of violence might be increased if clinicians used actuarial tools. Despite considerable progress in recent years in the development of such tools for violence risk assessment, they remain primarily research instruments, largely ignored in daily clinical practice. We argue that because most existing actuarial tools are based on a main effects regression approach, they do not adequately reflect the contingent nature of the clinical assessment processes. To enhance the use of actuarial violence risk assessment tools, we propose a classification tree rather than a main effects regression approach. In addition, we suggest that by employing two decision thresholds for identifying high- and low-risk cases--instead of the standard single threshold--the use of actuarial tools to make dichotomous risk classification decisions may be further enhanced. These claims are supported with empirical data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study.     

Modeling Duration Dependence

As applications of duration analysis have burgeoned in politicalscience, scholars have become increasingly aware of the potentialsubstantive importance of duration dependence: the extent towhich the conditional hazards of the events of interest arerising or falling over time. Here I discuss the issue of durationdependence, focusing on the distinction between "spurious" dependencedue to unobserved heterogeneity and "true" duration dependencedue to state dependence in the process of interest. I presenta simple extension of a commonly used parametric duration model—theWeibull model—which allows researchers to assess the influenceof causal variables on the nature and extent of duration dependencein their data. I then illustrate the application of this "generalizedWeibull" model using data on the duration of international alliances.     

The Spirit of Capitalism? Religious Doctrine,Values, and Economic Attitude Constructs

This article examines the relationship between conservative Protestant doctrine and economic policy attitudes. Building upon Weber's (1930) classic (and controversial) thesis that Calvinist thought inspired the capitalist spirit, we posit that the individualistic theology of fundamentalists, evangelicals, and charismatics often engenders political preferences for individualistic economic policies. We test this hypothesis by (1) performing a series of cross-sectional ordered probit analyses to understand the independent degree of association between doctrinal belief and economic attitudes toward taxing, spending, and the role of government, (2) creating and testing a structural equation model to assess various hypothesized paths of influence, and finally, (3) using 1994–96 NES panel data to assess the degree to which changes in an individual's doctrinal beliefs produce changes in his or her economic attitudes. Results lend substantial support to the efficacy of Weber's thesis, and point to religious belief as one exogenous agent of core political values.