Did the Tax Reform Act of 1986 Improve Compliance? Three Studies of Pre- and Post-TRA Compliance Attitudes*

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 rewrote the federal income tax code, bringing it closer to policy professionals' vision of what constitutes an equitable and efficient income tax. Research on tax compliance suggests the law might have affected taxpayer compliance in three ways: by reducing opportunities to overstate deductions, by changing perceptions of fairness, and by altering tax liabilities. Changes in taxpayer perceptions, attitudes, and noncompliance intentions were examined in three bodies of survey data, each containing pre-and post-reform data from independent samples of the same population. The results show an improved normative climate for taxpayer compliance and point to both the feasibility and the importance of examining the effects of substantive tax policies on taxpayer perceptions, attitudes, and behavioral intentions.     

Nationalism, Regionalism, and State Institutions: An Assessment of Opinions in Spain

Acknowledging Spain's diversity, this article assesses the impactof nationalism, regionalism, and other factors on public opinionabout the country's young democratic institutions. Utilizingsurvey data, the analysis focuses on national and regional variationsin public preferences for central state institutions and federalistor other designs for state-regional relations. It concludesthat a strong base of support exists for the current democraticsystem and the institutions through which it is implemented.Nevertheless, some doubts remain about the basic state structureof central-regional relations.     

Gender comparisons in the relationship between parental and sibling violence and nonfamily violence

This paper addresses two neglected areas in the research on the relationship between family violence and violence outside the home: violence other than parent-child abuse and the effect of gender. Specifically, we consider both parental and sibling violence as independent variables, nonfamily violence as the dependent variable, and gender as the specification variable. The data were collected from a sample of 306 students in Introductory Sociology and Social Problems classes. The finding of particular importance is that the interaction between the gender of both the aggressor and the victim has a significant effect on the relationship between violence within the home and nonfamily violence.     

WOMEN,RACE, AND CRIME *

This paper explores the capacity of alternative theoretical perspectives to explain the self-reported criminality of black and white young adult females. When criminal involvement is regressed on the theory operation-alizations separately by race, a key difference emerges: For white women, significant effects are clustered in the social-psychological theory groups (bonding, attitudes, and maturation), but for the black women the social-psychological variables have only scattered and inconsistent eflects. Instead, for black women structural indicators emerge as the important predictors of criminal involvement.