Assessing the public's understanding of constitutional reform: Evidence from Argentina

Constitutional and institutional reform is occurring at an impressive rate throughout the world. To explain the dynamics of reform the scholarly literature has focused almost exclusively on political elites. Analyses of the role played by public opinion in the constitutional reform process have been largely missing. This study takes an initial first step toward understanding the role played by public opinion through an analysis of public understanding of selected constitutional reform issues in Argentina. The evidence indicates that the Argentine public has a fairly sophisticated understanding of the issues involved in constitutional reform. This finding suggests that current elite-based explanations of constitutional and institutional reforms are incomplete. The article also provides a point of departure for future studies of the complex elite-mass interaction that occurs during reform.     

JUVENILE OFFENDERS MEET THEIR VICTIMS

The process of allowing certain victims of crime to confront their juvenile offender in the presence of a trained mediator to both talkabout the event andnegotiate aplan for compensating the victim is developing in a growing number of communities throughout the United States. This article reports on the impact of the victim offender mediation program in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is based on interviews with 206 victims and juvenile offenders in Albuquerque, as well as interviews with court officials andprogram stas This program represenisa strong court and community partnership. victims and offenders whoparticipated in mediation indicated high levels of satisfaction with both the processand outcomes of mediation. Wctims who were involved in mediation, particularly, were considerably more likely to indicate satisfaction with the manner in which the juvenile justice system handled their case than were those victims who were referred to mediation but did nut participate or similar victims who were never even referred to the mediation program. Offenders who negotiated their restitution obligation with the victim were far more likely to actually complete restitution, when compared to offenders whose restitution was ordered by the court with no mediation program involvement.     

Do career criminals exist in rural America?

The criminal career paradigm had essentially ignored investigating offenders in rural areas. To fill this void, a retrospective, cross-sectional design sampled 331 former adult correctional clients from the case archives in a rural midwestern state. Self-report and official records indicated that rural criminal careers were characterized by relatively few arrests, short-lived criminal justice system involvements, and a paucity of violent crime. Although the sample demonstrated relatively benign criminality overall, the most chronic offenders, top 10 percent of the sample, were plagued by overlapping, contemporaneous problems such as alcoholism, substance abuse, mental health difficulties, early onset of antisocial behavior, low educational attainment, and revolving involvement in the criminal justice system. Like rural communities, which were characterized by exceedingly low crime rates, rural career offenders tended to be relatively harmless criminals especially compared to habitual offenders commonly found in the criminological literature.     

Understanding Mission Expansion in the Federal Home Loan Banks: A Return to Behavioral-Choice Theory

Congress established the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) in 1932 to pursue the public purpose of homeownership. Recently, three views of their mission have emerged; one is that their purpose is to help small banks to remain viable. Why did their mission expand in this direction? We argue that mission expansion is a process that is better understood in terms of behavioral choice than public choice. Change began when expert attention was directed to small banks in rural areas and officials innovated within the existing rules to address their needs. Recognizing the FHLBs' usefulness, community bankers sought a more fundamental change in their practice. Responding to the general interest in preserving small banks' viability, legislative entrepreneurs advanced permissive rule changes. These were implemented to different extents in individual FHLBs in response to local needs. The case illustrates the usefulness of the behavioral‐choice paradigm for understanding change in public agencies and suggests legitimacy for mission change and the value of maintaining publicly directed administrative capacity.     

The Organization of Space and the Character of the Urban Experience

The growth and spread of the city in the United States had revolutionaryconsequences for the everyday lives of Americans. Spatial arrangementschanged dramatically. In the process, not only was the organizationof the community altered in both scope and variety, but individualliberty was enhanced by increasing individual self-awarenessand choice. This article details the spatial changes to communityand domestic design that resulted from the American urban revolution.After these changes are outlined, a formal model of choice isdeveloped. The consequences for choice of various local densityand segregation patterns are discussed as well.     

Multiculturalism,Institutional Law,and Imaginary Justice

Following Le Pen's relative successin the French presidential vote and the BritishNational Party's historic return in our own2002 local elections, the article considers theprospects for the production of morecommunicative race relations in contemporaryBritain. To this end we reassess the media'streatment of the Stephen Lawrence case andexplore the political logic of the Macphersonreport, the policy document which followed theapparent miscarriage of justice that allowedLawrence's alleged killers to walk free. Interms of our analysis of the media we areconcerned to show how the real of Britain'sordinary racism was hidden behind an ideologyof multiculturalism that scapegoated singularindividuals to cover for the structuralinequalities of wider society. The article aimsto show how the media upheld the notion ofobjective justice that institutional law wasapparently unable to secure.But while the media supported the ideology ofthe law, its exposure of the failings ofinstitutional law also led to calls for legalreform to guarantee the realisation ofinstitutional justice. Although we accept thatthe attempt to achieve legal totality isimpossible, our argument is that the critiqueof legal objectivity, which takes in subjectiverights claims, may present the possibility forthe realisation of a novel, inclusive, model ofrace relations. That is to say that althoughthe media supports the ideology of the law, thefact that this support requires a critique ofpractical law forces the law to modernisearound the idealistic demands of its ownideological structure. Akin toDouzinas,¹ who has argued for theendless expansion of rights as post-modernutopianism, we believe that this process ofmodernisation, which is arranged to maintainthe status quo through minimal reform, is thecondition of possibility of a more inclusivesystem of race relations.     

Hayekian Political Economy and the Limits of Deliberative Democracy

Inspired by Habermasian critiques of liberalism, supporters of deliberative democracy seek an extension of social democratic institutions to further a reinvigorated communicative rationality against the 'atomism' of market processes. This paper offers a critique of deliberative democratic theory from a Hayekian perspective. For Hayek, the case against the social democratic state rests with the superior capacity of markets to extend communicative rationality beyond the realm of verbal discourse.