“Success” in policy piloting: Process,programs, and politics

Research has demonstrated that pilots contain multiple shifting purposes, not all of which relate to simple policy testing or refinement. Judging the success of policy pilots is therefore complex, requiring more than a simple judgment against declared goals. Marsh and McConnell provide a framework against which policy success can be judged, distinguishing program success from process and political success. We adapt Boven's modification of this framework and apply it to policy pilots, arguing that pilot process, outcomes and longer-term effects can all be judged in both program and political terms. We test this new framework in a pilot program in the English National Health Service, the Vanguard program, showing how consideration of these different aspects of success sheds light on the program and its aftermath. We consider the implications of the framework for the comprehensive and multifaceted evaluation of policy pilots.     

Constituent Communication Through Telephone Town Halls: A Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress

Telephone town halls are an increasingly prevalent method for members of Congress (MCs) to communicate with constituents, even while garnering popular criticism for failing to facilitate engagement and accountability. Yet scholars have paid little attention to the events and their effects, and even less to how they might be improved. To remedy this problem, we report on a field experiment in which four MCs joined their constituents in telephone town halls. Overall, participation in an event improved constituents’ evaluations of the format in general, and of the MC in particular. Furthermore, we studied how these events might be improved by evaluating a reform—a single‐topic focus with predistributed briefing materials—designed to enhance deliberative interaction. This reform enhanced effects on opinions of the format without significantly altering effects on attitudes toward the MC. Our results suggest that telephone town halls hold promise for constituents, officeholders, and democratic practice.     

Enhancing Data-Driven Law Enforcement Efforts: Exploring how Risk Terrain Modeling and Conjunctive Analysis Fit in a Crime and Traffic Safety Framework

Law enforcement’s examination of vehicle crashes is often nested in the Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS) framework which highlights the importance of hot spot analysis. To assist law enforcement efforts, this study explores how two additional spatial techniques, namely risk terrain modeling (RTM) and conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC), could be incorporated within the DDACTS framework. RTM was utilized to identify how the built, physical environment contributed to the risk of traffic incidents. RTM identified 6 risk factors related to the occurrence of vehicle crashes, and high-risk places were compared to hot spots on predictive accuracy. CACC was used to explore configurations likely to result in traffic incidents for the priority places. Our findings support the Theory of Risky Places and fit within a vulnerability-exposure framework, providing law enforcement with guidance for identifying places where vehicle crashes are likely to occur in the future. In addition to providing insight for law enforcement, we discuss how law enforcement can develop working partnerships with stakeholders capable of preventing and/or reducing traffic incidents, which is in line with the general DDACTS framework.

     

The Effect of Paramilitary Protest Policing on Protestors' Trust in the Police: The Case of the “Occupy Israel” Movement

The use of paramilitary methods in civil policing tasks has become common in Western police agencies. Despite propositions that such methods should undermine the relationship between the police and the public, the effect of paramilitary policing on public trust in the police has not been empirically tested. In the present study, we examine this question in the context of protest policing, which has become a major concern for Western police agencies. Using a survey of 470 protesters who participated in “Occupy” protest events in Israel in 2012, we find that the perceived use of paramilitary methods has an independent and negative effect on trust, stronger than that of police effectiveness and the “neutrality” component of procedural justice. In‐depth interviews suggest that the significance of paramilitarism may be the result of a sense of alienation and criminalization it elicits among protesters who generally perceive themselves as law‐abiding citizens.     

Party Strategies,Constituency Links,and Legislative Speech

This article examines how parties organize legislative speech. Electoral incentives and legislative institutions affect speech participation. When electoral systems create personal vote‐seeking incentives, parties are less concerned with screening speeches and more supportive of members seeking to garner name recognition. But in many countries, legislative rules and norms constrain opportunities for individual position taking during the lawmaking debates. We argue that parties resolve this dilemma by organizing speech participation into nonlegislative speeches and lawmaking debates. In each instance, different types of legislators are more likely to speak. We examine the case of Chile and test the implications of our theory with data on congressional speeches.     

The relation between interviewers’ personal characteristics and investigative interview performance in a child sexual abuse context

Despite important progress in knowledge about interview ‘best practice’ with child victims, few studies had yet evaluated the impact of interviewers’ personal characteristics on adherence to these ‘best practice’. This study was designed to determine whether interviewers’ personal characteristics are associated with adherence to a structured interview protocol (National Institute of Child and Human Development), the use of open-ended questions and the amount of details provided in children’s responses during investigative interviews with alleged victims of child sexual abuse. 114 interviews were scored from 13 police investigators after they followed a one-week training program. Results showed that experience, emotional intelligence, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Neuroticism were related with adherence to the protocol and ratio of open-ended questions. Cognitive abilities were related to the amount of details obtained from the child. Generalized estimating equations were used to compare relative contribution of each variable. These findings raise questions about how investigative interviewers are selected and trained.     

Sustaining families, dissuading crime: The effectiveness of a family preservation program with male delinquents

Purpose

Family factors have long been considered an important contributor to the criminogenic process. Family Preservation (FP) programs attempt to improve family functioning and, thereby, dissuade future delinquency. Despite years of delivery, the limited research concerning the influence of FP programs on juvenile delinquency remains inconclusive.

Methods

This study examined the effectiveness of an FP program implemented in a metropolitan county of a large Southern state. Subjects were adjudicated male juveniles referred to the program by the courts. Recidivism outcomes for FP participants were compared against those of a simple random sample of non-participants.

Results

Findings suggest that FP does not impact recidivism among study participants. Issues with treatment fidelity may be responsible for the lack of results for this program.

Conclusion

These findings fail to lend support to the FP program. However, they do demonstrate the importance of treatment fidelity in juvenile justice programming.     

Idea generation: the performance of U.S. States 1997–2007

Regional prosperity increasingly depends on a region’s capacity to have command over the production of ideas. Measuring the production of ideas with patents, the objective of this paper is to analyze how the number of utility patents granted to inventors in U.S. States in different technologies changed between 1997 and 2007 and how States took advantage of the new opportunities and adapted to the changing technology landscape. The paper uses shift-share analysis, traditionally used in employment studies, for analyzing change in patents by technology categories developed by the NBER. The shift-share results show that only a few states were able to take advantage of the information technology driven increases in patents. California dominates in patent production and may be providing spillover benefits to neighboring states. The shift-share decompositions are used as variables in a fixed-effect panel-regression model of state economic growth. The regression results show that the shift-share decompositions provide statistically significant information in explaining growth after accounting for a State’s stock of patents, suggesting that States should concentrate on effective ways to boost their stock of knowledge in rapidly growing technologies to improve state economic growth.