Glass Walls in State Bureaucracies: Examining the Difference Departmental Function Can Make

Occupational segregation in government employment is an important issue in public administration. Occupation determines pay and benefits, and when women have greater access to quality jobs—especially in the public sector—this promotes their economic, social, and political advancement. This research addresses two questions: (1) What changes have occurred to alter “glass walls” across departmental functions? (2) What impact does departmental function have on the salary of women? The findings reveal that although occupational segregation has decreased over the past two decades in Michigan’s bureaucracy, it is still prevalent. Gender‐based occupational segregation is linked to departmental function. Redistributive departments have much lower levels of occupational segregation than other functional categories. Mean salary is also linked to departmental mission, with distributive departments having both the highest mean salary and the highest level of occupational segregation. Salary differentials across departmental functions are becoming smaller over time. Overall, women appear to be most successful, both financially and career‐wise, in historically male‐dominated fields.     

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Law and Human Behavior -     

Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses

Collection and especially analysis of open‐ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments in machine learning based analysis of textual data. A crucial contribution of the method is that it incorporates information about the document, such as the author's gender, political affiliation, and treatment assignment (if an experimental study). This article focuses on how the STM is helpful for survey researchers and experimentalists. The STM makes analyzing open‐ended responses easier, more revealing, and capable of being used to estimate treatment effects. We illustrate these innovations with analysis of text from surveys and experiments.     

Exaggerating good governance: Regime type and score inflation among executive survey informants

Researchers and policymakers often rely on executive surveys to understand and promote good governance. In doing so, they assume that the evaluations provided by these well‐informed respondents are not systematically influenced by regime type. However, regime‐embedded executives often have a personal stake in the survey outcomes, incentivizing them to exaggerate good governance. This paper compares World Economic Forum Executive Opinion Survey responses to corollary measures of key governance concepts in democracies, anocracies, and autocracies. It finds evidence of significant score inflation among executives in closed regimes. The individual‐level mechanisms are explored in one autocracy by comparing responses from regime‐embedded informants based at firms headquartered within the country with those managing businesses headquartered abroad. These micro‐level data likewise reveal evidence of widespread inflation, particularly on items related to governance. Finally, a closer look at Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index demonstrates the broader impact Executive Opinion Survey inflation for measuring governance within closed regimes.     

Preliminary Study on the Effect of Heated Surfaces Upon Bloodstain Pattern Analysis

Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA) involves the interpretation of distinct blood patterns found at crime scenes following a violent act. In this paper, we explored for the first time the effects of surface temperatures upon blood impacting a horizontal surface (steel) with its implications in BPA explored. Specific surface temperatures were explored over the range 24–250°C which relate to the four major boiling regimes of liquid media; natural convection, nucleate boiling, transition boiling, and film boiling, where a series of blood drops tests were performed at varying impact velocities. Blood was found to separate into its components at temperatures of 50°C+, displayed as temperature induced blood rings, where a single secondary and a series of further inner rings are exhibited. This consequently led to the development of a new constant expressing the decrease in spread factor (D_s/D_o) at the secondary ring.     

An Analysis of Policy‐Based Congressional Responses to the U.S. Supreme Court's Constitutional Decisions

While Congress can attempt to overrule constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court by initiating the constitutional amendment process, an amendment is rarely a practicable option. Instead, Congress regularly tries to modify the impact of constitutional decisions with ordinary legislation. I analyze policy‐based responses to the Supreme Court's constitutional decisions that were initiated in Congress between 1995 and 2010. For each responsive proposal, I consider the relationship between the proposed legislation and the Court's legal holding and the relationship between the proposal and the public policy associated with the Court's decision. I find that Congress enjoys considerable success in reversing the policy impacts of the Court's decisions but is limited in its ability to overcome the Court's legal rules.