Federalism, Political Structure, and Public Policy in the United States and Canada

Two of the three large countries on the North American continent—the United States and Canada—share a number of similarities that often make it difficult for the untrained observer to differentiate between the two nations. On the surface, the two are structured similarly as federal systems that, by definition, exhibit shared power between the national government and provincial or state political entities.Although there are other important social and economic characteristics of the two countries that help explain differences in policy processes and outcomes, it is the contention of this article that one gets the clearest sense of what Elazar has called thinking federal by utilizing an analytical approach that joins questions related to federalism with some conceptual frameworks of the public policy field. Two frameworks undergird the argument in this article—the Lowi typology of different types of policies and Deil Wright's typology of different models that describe the American inter-governmental system.In both countries, policies must be sensitive to the greater interdependencies between units of government as well as to linkages between policy areas. The mechanisms or instrumentalities for dealing with policy issues are intrinsically complex. It is also clear that the intergovernmental networks that exist in both the U.S. and Canada are composed of an array of actors. The differing political structures of the systems do impact the types of intergovernmental policies that have emerged in the two countries. The executive dominance so imbedded in Canadian governments has contributed to their ability to adopt and implement certain controversial redistributive policies, such as a national health insurance program. By contrast, the fragmentation of the U.S. system makes redistributive policies more difficult.     

Beyond PTSD: mental health consequences of violence against women: a response to Briere and Jordan

This article proposes that we move beyond posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in our conceptualization of traumatic stress responses of victimized women exposed to serial forms of unrelenting violence, such as intimate partner violence and stalking. It is argued that the traditional PTSD framework is ill fitting in the context of some forms of violence against women (VAW), and these limits have consequences for developing appropriate interventions for some victimized women. The article further suggests going beyond PTSD by developing a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which PTSD and other mental health symptoms contribute to the vast array of deleterious personal, societal, and economic costs of VAW.     

Competence to Stand Trial: A Neuropsychological Inquiry

Law and Human Behavior - How might the deconstruction of the legal theory of competence be related to modern neuropsychological models of cognition? To address this question, we examined...     

The Resurrection of Group Selection as a Theory of Human Cooperation

Two books edited by members of the MacArthur Norms and Preferences Network (an interdisciplinary group, mainly anthropologists and economists) are reviewed here. These books in large part reflect a renewed interest in group selection that has occurred among these researchers: they promote the theory that human cooperative behavior evolved via selective processes which favored biological and/or cultural group-level adaptations as opposed to individual-level adaptations. In support of this theory, an impressive collection of cross-cultural data are presented which suggest that participants in experimental economic games often do not behave as self-interested income maximizers; this lack of self-interest is regarded as evidence of group selection. In this review, problems with these data and with the theory are discussed. On the data side, it is argued that even if a behavior seems individually-maladaptive in a game context, there is no reason to believe that it would have been that way in ancestral contexts, since the environments of experimental games do not at all resemble those in which ancestral humans would have interacted cooperatively. And on the theory side, it is argued that it is premature to invoke group selection in order to explain human cooperation, because more parsimonious individual-level theories have not yet been exhausted. In summary, these books represent ambitious interdisciplinary contributions on an important topic, and they include unique and useful data; however, they do not make a convincing case that the evolution of human cooperation required group selection.     

Convergence repertoires: anti-capitalist protest at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics

This article introduces the term ‘convergence’ in order to explain a distinctive repertoire of protest events in which the following are present: (1) activists with an ideologically anti-capitalist orientation; (2) engage in property destruction; (3) travel from outside of the site of the protest event; and (4) solicit a determinable police response. Convergences have emerged as a subset of the alter-globalization movement since the ‘Battle in Seattle’ in 1999. Convergences have since emerged in resistance to meetings of global financial institutions, political primaries, and recently, the Olympic Games. We examine the logic that activists use to weave resistance to these disparate targets together. In this article, we arrive at this finding inductively, paying particular attention to convergence events at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. Narratives around convergence repertoires allow activists to link seemingly disparate actors with similar and predictable performances.