Drug culture expertise and substance use

This study concerns the relationship between knowledge of drug culture and substance use. Results from a sample of 2,635 middle and high school students indicate that (1) knowledge of drug culture is positively correlated with substance use; (2) drug knowledge is more reliable and coherent in older youth; (3) drug knowledge is unrelated to other kinds of knowledge acquired in school; (4) youth exposed to peers' substance use in school have more drug knowledge; and (5) the earlier young people begin using drugs and alcohol, the more they know about the drug culture. Results suggest that knowledge of the drug culture may be an unobtrusive indicator of substance use problems.This project was made possible by a grant from the Tulsa Psychiatric Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma.Received Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in personality psychology. Research interests include school dropouts, substance use, delinquency, identity, narcissism, and health. To whom correspondence should be addressed.Received Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in personality psychology. Research interests include school dropouts, substance use, delinquency, personal commitments, identity, narcissism, and health.Received Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in personality psychology. Research interests include moral development and personality.     

Do legislators' votes reflect constituency preference? A simple way to evaluate the Senate

U.S. senators frequently vote against the preference of their constituency, assuming that such a preference exists. Both of a state's senators represent the same constituency. Whenever they split their votes, one or the other is necessarily going against the constituency preference. For the sample of defense-related votes analyzed above, misrepresentation — either observable vote splitting or unobservable vote matches that go against the constituency preference — occurred at least 37 percent of the time, at least 46 percent on one vote. Although party differences accounted for more than two-thirds of the vote splitting, a substantial number of splits remained. Besides, a party difference for a state's senatorial pair is itself problematical.The method employed here can be applied easily to any data whatever on senatorial voting. Its application will show that, quite often, many senators depart from constituency preference. This finding refutes the hypothesis, popular in certain circles, that ours is a more or less perfect political market with little or no scope for ideologically driven voting by legislators.     

A precise method for evaluating election schemes

A previously published paper evaluated election schemes under a wide variety of election circumstances. This paper improves upon the previous work by refining the measures used to rate the election schemes and increasing the statistical significance of those ratings. With these modifications, we can now draw some new conclusions:

1. In general circumstances, the Borda System outperforms the Copeland System which outperforms Approval which outperforms Majority Rule.
2. The Maximin Rule — strongly supported by Rawls's — turns out to be a reasonable election rule if the number of election alternatives is large relative to the number of voters.
3. With two exceptions, all our election systems performed quite well given a society with highly correlated utilities.
4. Given a polarized society, a serial dictatorship was better than every other election system except Borda.

Perhaps even more importantly, we now have the possibility of conducting some cost/benefit analyses of different proposals for electoral changes.     

Interest in political campaigns: The influence of question order and electoral context

A split-ballot experiment shows that, when people are asked how interested they are in following political campaigns, their response depends not only on the order in which the question is asked, but also on the broader electoral context in which it is posed. When asked how interested they were in following the political campaigns immediatelyafter a question about whether or not they voted in the (1982) election, people were more likely to think they were interested in the campaign, especially if they claimed to have voted, than if they were asked about it immediatelybefore the question on whether or not they voted. This order effect, however, appears to depend onwhen the questions are asked. If asked within a few weeks after the election, there is little or no order effect. But later, as the memory of the campaign fades, the order of the questions makes a sizable difference in the results. This order effect also seems to be more pronounced among better-educated respondents, suggesting that they are more likely to feel pressured by a social norm to vote and to express an interest in political affairs, not only in real life, but in the survey interview as well. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications for the design of the interview schedule used in the American National Election Studies.The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES81-11404).     

Explaining political sophistication

Debates over the political sophistication of mass publics smolder on. The more fundamental question, however, is why people become as politically sophisticated or unsophisticated as they do. This paper develops a nonlinear simultaneous equation model to weigh explanations of three general sorts: the politicalinformation to which people are exposed, theirability to assimilate and organize such information, and theirmotivation to do so. The estimates suggest that interest and intelligence, representing motivation and ability, have major effects, but that education and media exposure, the big informational variables, do not. I consider the reasons and sketch some implications for the sophistication of mass publics, for the study of sophistication and other variables of extent, and for democratic theory.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 9–11, 1987. The data were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Douglas Arnold, John Bolland, Thad Brown, Carol Cassel, Philip Converse, George Kateb, Jan Kmenta, Kathleen Knight, James Kuklinski, Kenneth Langton, Melvin Manis, Diana Owen, Thomas Rochon, Marianne Stewart, Paul Sniderman, James Stimson, and Herbert Weisberg have provided feedback and encouragement. James Gibson relayed his results on the intelligence measures, even as they came off the printer. Mary Lee Luskin helped in many ways. If errors remain, they are mine.     

R&D spinoffs: Serendipity vs. a managed process

This paper describes some of the spinoff benefits that can result from R&D projects, and categorizes them in terms of the dimensions of market and technical newness. These dimensions are discussed with reference to two types of spinoffs: 1) alternative market applications, when the results of an R&D project are subsequently applied to a market or use that differs from the originally intended application, and 2) second-generation technologies, when the technology that was the subject of an R&D project is significantly altered or enhanced in unanticipated ways through subsequent R&D. Examples from the Department of Energy's Energy-Related Inventions Program are integrated into the results of literature review to illustrate key concepts, including core technologies, degrees of market and technology newness, technology robustness, and the nature of connections linking spinoffs to prior R&D investments. The paper concludes by discussing spinoffs as a managerial strategy.