An Evaluation of Alternative Tax and Expenditure Limitation Policies on Kansas Local Governments

Cross-sectional time series data in a partial adjustment model are used to examine county government fiscal behavior under a "hard" tax and expenditure limitation policy, an aggregate property tax levy limit, versus a "soft" limit under Truth in Taxation in Kansas. Results indicate that under the aggregate levy limit, per capita property taxes, own-source revenues and own-source expenditures were significantly higher than under the Truth in Taxation policy where local officials face many fewer restrictions on their ability to raise the levy.     

Service by Decrees or Degrees?

Please fasten your seatbelt,sir. Would you like tea or coffee? Tell me your seat number and I'll see if I can find a China Daily or Morning Post newspaper for you. On the airlines     

Magic Fountain

<正>We’ve all heard the tales surrounding past legends of people motivated by special quests.King Arthur sought the holy grail,Christopher Columbus sought a magic way to India for riches,and Ponce de Leon searched for the fountain of youth.Fables,     

The Burial of Chitimukulu Mubanga

This account of the burial of the 9th Paramount of the Bembawas written by a government clerk at Kasama in N. Rhodesia.It is extracted, by permission, from the Government newspaperMutende.     

CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM IN THE UNITED STATES*

Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether variables derived from prominent criminological theories are helpful in distinguishing between nonviolent and violent extremists. The results show that variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and criminal record all have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common indicators of social control (e.g., education and marital status) and social learning perspectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models. We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as life‐course criminology treats more common forms of crime.     

Molding ‘Creative’ Thinkers

<正>Recently, I gave a class of postgraduate writing students the assignment to write an original essay on this topic: Moon Cake Mystery, Methods, and Magic. The guide     

CAN RATIONAL CHOICE BE CONSIDERED A GENERAL THEORY OF CRIME? EVIDENCE FROM INDIVIDUAL‐LEVEL PANEL DATA

In the last few decades, rational choice theory has emerged as a bedrock theory in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and political science. Although rational choice theory has been available to criminologists for many years now, the field has not embraced it as other disciplines have. Moreover, rational choice scholars have fueled this skepticism of the theory's generality by modeling offender decision making that is one‐sided—large on the costs of crime (sanction threats), short on the benefits of crime. In this article, we directly assess the generality of rational choice theory by examining a fully specified model in a population that is often presumed to be less rational—adolescents from lower socioeconomic families who commit both instrumental (property) and expressive crimes (violence/drugs). By using a panel of N = 1,354 individuals, we find that offending behavior is consistent with rational responses to changes in the perceived costs and benefits of crime even after eliminating fixed unobserved heterogeneity and other time‐varying confounders, and these results are robust across different subgroups. The findings support our argument that rational choice theory is a general theory of crime.