Evaluating public policy: The administrative role

If public administrators are not heavily involved from the beginning in the development of public policy, policy implementation and program evaluation may not be possible. The tasks and people needed for organizing policy change are identified and the roles of the public administrator in these efforts are discussed. This article describes three legislative efforts in which public administrators were heavily involved at the beginning stages of policy development; administrators helped to create programs that were subsequently more amenable to evaluation.     

Does Media Violence Cause Violent Crime?

Over the past 60 years, hundreds of studies have shown that viewing violence in the media can influence aggressive behaviour. However, the vast majority of these studies are laboratory based, and tell us little about how media violence influences real criminal behaviour. This paper reviews research involving crime statistics, offender populations, and longitudinal studies to evaluate the claim that such a link exists. When integrated with other long-term studies on the development of crime, it is concluded that the link between media violence and crime is weak after other environmental factors are taken into account.     

The reformers’ dilemma: media,policy ownership,and reform

Current proposals for strengthening policy ownership in reforming economies are fundamentally flawed. Modeling the reform process as a prisoners’ dilemma demonstrates that political agents must overcome this conflict of interests before present proposals for bolstering ownership will work. A politically autonomous mass media is one important mechanism enabling political agents to do this. Reforming countries without free media face an uphill battle overcoming the problems associated with transition. We test our theory by investigating the relationship between media freedom, foreign aid, and economic development in 26 post-socialist transition countries. The results of this analysis support our theory.      

Quasimarket failure

The efficiency of ??quasimarkets????decentralized public goods provision subjected to Tiebout competition??is a staple of public choice conventional wisdom. Yet in the 1990s a countermovement called ??neoconsolidationism?? began to challenge this wisdom. The neoconsolidationists use the logic of government failure to argue that quasimarkets fail and that jurisdictional consolidation is a superior way to supply public goods and services in metropolitan areas. Public choice scholars have largely ignored the neoconsolidationists?? challenge. This paper brings that challenge to public choice scholars?? attention with the hope of encouraging responses. It also offers some thoughts about the directions such responses might take.     

The political economy of the Reconstruction Era’s race riots

This paper analyzes the political economy of the Reconstruction Era’s (1865–1877) race riots through the economic logic of rules. The central argument is that the race riots were not an inevitable outcome at the end of the Civil War, but instead occurred because of the absence of effective rules to raise the cost of engaging in violence. We offer a general framework of ‘rule stickiness’ to analyze the process of rule reform. This framework offers insight into the conditions influencing the enforcement costs of formal rules, as well as the likelihood of third-party enforcers effectively monitoring and punishing rule breakers. The Memphis race riot of 1866 is provided as a case study to illuminate the explanatory power of the theoretical framework.     

Constructing Subjects and Making Experts: Reading the Politics of the Psychotherapy Novel

This paper examines the ideological and political basis of the practice of psychotherapy in contemporary culture. Psychotherapy is argued to be both inherently political and intimately concerned with the construction of subjectivity. These arguments are examined through interrogating the representation of psychotherapy in the works of Lindner ( The Fifty-Minute Hour , Bantam, New York, 1955) and particularly in Yalom's fictional text Lying on the Couch (HarperPerennial, New York, 1996). The implications within psychotherapy for representing normality, negotiating power, and locating and constructing subjectivity are highlighted through the critical treatment of these texts.