SOUTH AFRICAN REALITIES AND REALPOLITIK

South Africa is a country of major and powerful tribes, of many sub-tribes, of one large non-tribe, and of two articulate communities (the Asians and mixed-race coloureds). Chief among the tribes in their history and their right to control tracts of South Africa are the white Afrikaner tribe led by Mr, Vorster himself and the black Zulus led by Chief Gatsha Buthelezi. Both dominate, but are feared and resented by, the rest of their respective racial communities. The two are, and have been for hundreds of years, each other's prime adversaries…. To advocate one man, one vote in a unitary state as the solution to such a patchwork of racial resentments and history frankly seems a nonsense….     

POST-PRISON SUCCESS PREDICTION A Preliminary Florida Study

This preliminary study attempts to prepare the foundations for obtaining a valid predictive measure for the chance of “success” for a prisoner leaving the Florida penal system. A random sample of 200 Florida prison system releases is analyzed from several vantage points Parolee versus expvee popubtion differences are studied and a variant of the California Base Expectancy Scale is constructed for Florida. To overcome the weakness of utilizing the same predictive model for a broad spectrum of prisoners, an attempt is made to describe homo geneous subpopulations. Through the use of cluster analysis, one such subpopulation is identified and predictive ability for this group is shown to be greatly increamd.     

LOCAL ENTERPRISE BOARDS: THE SHORT HISTORY OF A RADICAL INITIATIVE

Local enterprise boards were first developed as radical initiatives For economic intervention in the early 1980s. Despite the closeness of their dates of birth, however, and the apparent similarity of the organizational forms (and titles) which they adopted, the differences between the boards were as significant as their shared features. The ambitions of each of the five first-wave boards were quite distinct. Some were more radical than others: some were concerned to challenge the market, whilst others were more concerned to work with it. But the experience of market-based intervention through the last decade as well as the legislative and financial constraints imposed by central government have encouraged a degree of convergence, particularly as grander ambitions have been modified. Partnership with the private sector (including the financial sector) became increasingly important for all of them, to the extent that legislation to restrict the operation of local authority based companies of this sort seems misplaced, at least if it is intended to undermine local socialism. The enterprise boards now seem to offer a better model for the involvement of business in regional and local government, than they do as trojan horses for the local authority left.     

TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR ESTABLISHING POLICY SUCCESS

Claims that a particular policy has been a ‘success’ are commonplace in political life. However, a few of these claims are justified in any systematic way. This article seeks to remedy this omission by offering a heuristic which practitioners and academics can utilize to approach the question of whether a policy is, or was, successful. It builds initially on two sets of literature: Boyne's work on public sector improvement; and the work of Bovens et al. on success, failure and policy evaluation. We discuss the epistemological issues involved in whether it is possible to produce an objective measure of ‘success’. Subsequently, we present a framework for assessing success, focusing on three dimensions: process success; programmatic success; and political success. We then move on to raise a series of what we term complexity issues in relation to success for whom; variations across time, space and culture; and methodological issues.     

UNEMPLOYMENT,CRIME, AND IMPRISONMENT: A PANEL APPROACH*

Despite the widespreach acceptance of the notion that during periods of economic downturn, higher levels of unemployment lead to higher levels of crime and imprisonment, the research literature reveals very little consistent support for the existence of such a relationship. Studies that do suggest unemployment causes crime and imprisonment have used methodological techniques which, especially in over-time studies, could lead to the acceptance of spurious effects caused by trend and lag as evidence of a true relationship. Using data over a six-year period for the United States, a panel model is specified in which appropriate controls for intra-series trend and cross-series lagged effects are included. Although bivariate correlations are strongly suggestive of a relationship between unemployment and crime, results of the panel approach suggest that most of the apparent relationship is due to common trend effects. Little evidence is found for the existence of a relationship between crime/imprisonment and unemployment, regardless of the type of effect considered. In addition, results from stability tests indicate that the crime-unemployment relationship has been unstable. while the unemployment-imprisonment relationship has been relatively invariant.