INITIATING A COMPARABLE WORTH WAGE POLICY IN MINNESOTA: NOTES FROM THE FIELD

As of January 1986, Minnesota has progressed farther than any other state in implementing acomparable worth (pay equity) wage policy, with two laws requiring pay equity, one covering state employees and a second covering employees of all types of jurisdictions. This article presents a discussion of Minnesota's importance as a case study, a definition of comparable worth, the history and politics o f pay equity policy in Minnesota, and an analysis of Minnesota's role in a national campaign to change wage policy. The article shows that implementation has been more straight-forward in state government than for the 1,583 local jurisdictions, many of which had less-developed personnel systems than did the state. The passage of the local pay equity law ushered in a new stage in this policy, where the issue Is no longer controlled by a small number of legislators, bureaucrats, and lobbyists.     

THE USE OF MANDATORY SENTENCING LEGISLATION AS SYMBOLIC STATEMENTS

Mandatory sentencing legislation often results in laws which use provisions and set penalties in order to make strong symbolic and political statements. Thus, in addition to protecting society, they are powerful vehicles for expressing moral outrage. This is especially evident in mandatory sentencing for drug and alcohol offenses. The present research examines the consequences of that practice on one state's criminal justice system. Interviews with key actors along with examinations of official documents, newspaper publicity and media campaigns illustrate the political decisions and symbolic statements which pervade driving-while-intoxicated (DWI) legislation. The process is studied from before the lawls enactment through its subsequent outcome.     

Administration, Governance, and Policy Tools in Welfare Policy Implementation

Landmark welfare reform legislation passed in 1996 has been operating by legislative extensions since its expiration in September 2002. At this writing, reauthorization has been derailed by controversy over various legislative proposals. In this article, we contribute to the welfare policy debate by studying the importance of specific policy tools and the role of public administration in the dramatic fall in welfare caseloads from 1996 to 2000. Using administrative and survey data on welfare programs in 44 states, we test our theory that caseload reduction is a function of administrative commitments, policy design, and administrative actions linked to five sets of governance variables: environmental factors, client characteristics, treatments, administrative structures, and managerial roles and actions. We find strong evidence that administrative action to move clients into work, coupled with administrative commitments, can provide important links between policy goals and policy outcomes.     

CLIENT AND COUNSELLOR PERCEPTIONS OF THE PROCESS AND OUTCOMES OF FAMILY COURT COUNSELLING IN CASES INVOLVING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

The Family Court of Australia provides conciliation counselling to couples who are involved in disputes regarding their children following separation. In cases where domestic violence is involved, the appropriateness of providing counselling has been seriously questioned. This study is an extension of earlier work completed by the authors that specifically examined client satisfaction with counselling in cases involving domestic violence. This article examines client and counsellor perceptions of the counselling process and its outcomes.     

Accounting for culture in a globalized bioethics.

How might a global bioethics account for profound cultural difference in a world marked by porous borders? The authors endorse a critical, self-reflexive bioethics, suggesting that bioethics needs to change its fundamental orientation if it is going to remain relevant and intellectually vibrant throughout the twenty-first century. Bioethics must attend to issue of social justice and public health, while seriously considering the implications of social context for medical morality. Negotiating moral consensus across cultural boundaries will be difficult, but is is more likely to succeed if we critically engage with the cultural assumptions underlying bioethics itself.     

The Treaty of Amsterdam: Challenges of Flexibility and Legitimacy

The paper reviews key aspects of the new constitutional framework for the European Union, once the Treaty of Amsterdam has been ratified, in the light of the core challenges of managing flexible integration in an enlarged Union and securing adequate legitimacy for the integration project. Reviewing briefly the general debates on flexibility, and its relationship to different constitutional and political futures for the Union which are suggested by those involved in the debates, the paper examines the principal provisions governing what is termed 'closer cooperation' within the new Union treaties. The emphasis is placed on the framework provisions of the TEU, and those in the First Pillar. It is noticeable that the Treaty takes a 'non-ideological' approach to flexibility, eschewing direct support for those who interpret flexibility as meaning more or less integration in the future. It provides a framework for future cooperation which is likely to be too restrictive to be workable, except in very limited circumstances. However, particular instances of flexibility are provided in the Treaty, in the form of the opt-outs from the new free movement title and the communitarisation of Schengen for the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark, and some might even describe these as 'pick-and-choose'. The paper concludes by reviewing the flexibility debate against the background of the ongoing legitimacy challenge for the Union, arguing that, as currently conceived, flexibility is more to do with balancing political interests than with securing or enhancing legitimacy.     

Attitudinal characteristics of males who have engaged in spouse abuse

Several of the attitudinal characteristics which are frequently attributed to abusive males were investigated in this study. Samples of male military personnel who had engaged in at least one serious episode of interspousal violence in the previous 6 months were administered measures of the following variables: (1) Attitudes toward self — The Coopersmith Self-The Coopersmith Self-esteem Inventory; (2) Attitudes toward others — The Generalized Expectations of Others Questionnaire, a short form of The Attitudes Toward Women Scale and The Mehrabian and Epstein Empathy Scale; and (3) Dogmatism —The Rokeach D Scale and the Revised Authoritarianism Index, When compared to matched control groups of nonabusive males, statistically significant differences were found only for The Self-esteem Inventory and one item of the Generalized Expectations of Others Questionnaire. It is concluded that many of the attitudinal characteristics of abusive males reported in the clinical literature may not be a significant component in the etiology of spouse abuse.     

Measuring primary turnout in aggregate analysis

Research exploring participation in primaries by way of aggregate data faces the problem of finding an appropriate denominator on which to calculate turnout. Decisions need to be made on whether, and how, to divide either registered voters or the voting age population into partisan subsets. In order to cope with this problem, numerous methods have been devised to measure turnout. This paper explores the merits and compatibility of four of these measures, determining that the measure based on the normal vote has theoretical and empirical advantages over the others.