Involuntary outpatient treatment as “desintitutionalized coercion”: The net-widening concerns

In American jurisprudence, two justifications have traditionally been put forth to support the government's social control of persons with mental illness: police power and parens patriae. As public mental hospitals became less available as loci in which to exercise these functions, governments sought alternative means to achieve the same ends. One prominent but quite controversial means is involuntary outpatient treatment (IOT). While the concerns about IOT have been myriad, one often alluded to but never documented is that of “net-widening.” That is, once IOT became available, it would be applied to an ever greater number of individuals, progressively expanding the margins of the designated population to whom it is applied, despite the formal standard for its application remaining constant. We tested the net-widening belief in a naturalistic experiment in Massachusetts. We found that net-widening did not occur, despite an environment strongly conducive to that expansion. At this time, whatever the arguments against IOT might be, net-widening should not be one of them.     

The relative success of private funders and government funders in funding important science

Regression analysis is used to test the effects of funding source (and of various control variables) on the importance of the article, as measured by the number of citations that the article receives. Funding source is measured by the number of private and the number of government grants mentioned in the acknowledgements section. The importance of an article is measured by an “early” count (of citations through October 1992), and a “late” count (of citations through July 2002). Using either measure of article importance, the evidence suggests that private funders are more successful than the government at identifying important research. Jel classification D 780 . H 110 . O 310     

Does sex education affect adolescent sexual behaviors and health?

This study examines whether offering sex education to young teenagers affects several measures of adolescent sexual behavior and health: virginity status, contraceptive use, frequency of intercourse, likelihood of pregnancy, and probability of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I find that while sex education is associated with adverse health outcomes, there is little evidence of a causal link after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity via fixed effects and instrumental variables. These findings suggest that those on each side of the ideological debate over sex education are, in a sense, both correct and mistaken. Opponents are correct in observing that sex education is associated with adverse health outcomes, but are generally incorrect in interpreting this relationship causally. Proponents are generally correct in claiming that sex education does not encourage risky sexual activity, but are incorrect in asserting that investments in typical school-based sex education programs produce measurable health benefits.     

The committee assignment process as an optimal contracting problem

This paper adapts a simple model from the optimal contracting literature to explain the relationship between political parties and non-incumbent candidates. The model predicts that legislators with a higher opportunity cost of government service will receive better committee assignments. Using data that spans 12 Congresses (97th to 108th), I find that when the opportunity cost of Senate service is measured by previous occupation, freshmen senators with a high opportunity cost for serving (those who were lawyers) were given good committee assignments, while freshmen senators with a low opportunity cost for serving (professors, and those with relatives already in politics) were given worse committee assignments.     

Does involuntary outpatient commitment lead to more intensive treatment?

Studies of involuntary outpatient commitment (OPC) among persons with severe mental illness have concluded that OPC is only effective in improving treatment outcomes when it is sustained for 6 months or longer and is combined with frequent outpatient services. This article explores factors that influence the delivery of outpatient services to subjects in a randomized trial of OPC and finds 2 general patterns. Outpatient visits were more frequent among all subjects with apparent clinical need, regardless of study assignment, and among subjects whose OPC was sustained beyond an initial court order. These results suggest that, in practice, sustained OPC represents a consensual agreement between clinicians and the court to more intensively address the complex needs of persons with severe and persistent mental illness.     

A New Dynamism in World Politics: Increasingly Skillful Individuals?

Our inquiry is the first phase of a project designed to explore systematically whether individuals are becoming more equipped to play a central role in world affairs. It hypothesizes that individuals have undergone a skill revolution, leading them to be more analytically competent, emotionally capable, and politically effective in assessing events, developing alternatives, and executing effective political action. The first phase is confined to the skills of elites: we tested the predicted generational changes by analyzing the skills of three types of individuals—elected officials in the U.S. Congress, witnesses at congressional hearings, and contributors to the daily press in three countries—in two widely separated epochs as they evaluated events across three issue areas—foreign affairs, international trade, and human rights. In doing so we randomly selected nearly one thousand paragraph-sized statements and coded them according to the methodology prescribed by the Integrative Complexity Coding Manual. All in all, our findings supported the hypothesis: the skill level of the sampled individuals was found to have increased over several generations by a statistically significant (P < .001) average greater than 10 percent. Each issue area also showed gains in the same direction between the two epochs and across all types of elites; and all of these results also met the 95 percent confidence level for statistical significance. Inasmuch as this finding does not negate the possibility of a long-term trend toward more capable publics, it points to the need for further research into the dynamics whereby world politics may become increasingly sensitive to demands at the micro level.