The Advantages of Pure Forms of Parliamentary Democracy over Mixed Forms

It is often said that parliament shouldrepresent the opinions found in thepopulation and that government should beheld accountable for its political program.It is shown that these two goals rely ontwo different basic models of democracywhich are not fully compatible with eachother: the model of a pure representativedemocracy and the model of a pure two partycompetition. Unaccountable governments,voter alienation, strategic voting, andgovernmental instability are shown to beconsequences of this institutional mix.These problems may be avoided with reformsin the direction of one or the other basicmodel.     

Voting competitions with interested politicians: Platforms do not converge to the preferences of the median voter

We examine equilibrium voting strategies for elections with interested politicians facing uncertainty about voter pReferences. If politicians' utilities are defined over the set of strategies that voters select (instead of being dependent only on the probability of winning an election), equilibrium strategies will diverge (instead of converging to the median voter's pReferences) as long as politicians have different pReferences. We present conditions (i) for political compromise, and (ii) for politicians with different utility functions to merge into parties with complete strategic agreement.     

Research and Welfare Reform

Social science research had an important but limited effect on welfare reform, meaning recent enactments that imposed work requirements on family welfare. Policymakers sometimes ignored findings, but the features of research also limited its influence. Most academics did not accept the conservative goals of reform, many of their predictions proved to be incorrect, and research also lacked sufficient policy content to interest government. These features reflect the recent development of the social sciences. For research to have more influence, it must become more catholic about goals and more realistic, and it must offer more governmental content. Especially, inquiry should rely less on the statistical analysis of databases and more on field observation of how poor communities live and programs operate.     

Perceptions of Sexual Harassment: The Effects of Gender,Legal Standard,and Ambivalent Sexism

This research tests the possibility that the reasonable woman as compared to the reasonable person test of hostile work environment sexual harassment interacts with hostile and benevolent sexist beliefs and under some conditions triggers protectionist attitudes toward women who complain of sexual harassment, We administered to a sample of undergraduates the ambivalent sexism inventory along with the fact patterns in two harassment cases and asked them to make legally relevant decisions under either the reasonable woman or person standard. We found that those high in hostile sexism, and women, found more evidence of harassment. However, those high in benevolent sexism did not exhibit the hostile sexism effects. Although men were less sensitive to the reasonable woman standard than women, under some conditions the reasonable woman standard enabled both genders to find greater evidence of harassment. The results are discussed from the perspectives of law and psychology.     

Another permanency perspective:Family Drug Court

Because a staggering percentage of criminal court caseloads are intrinsically related to drug or alcohol abuse, general jurisdiction courts with rehabilitative “Drug Court” programs have experienced notable success. A similarly large number of juvenile and family court cases also involve substance abuse. The establishment of a “Family Drug Court” is allowing parents involved in abuse and neglect litigation to benefit from the juvenile justice system's social service mode of rehabilitation.     

The effect of race and gender on bail outcomes: A test of an interactive model

This paper responds to suggestions that researchers interested in the relationship between defendant race, defendant gender, and criminal justice outcomes broaden their focus to include pretrial decision making. We used data on defendants charged with violent felonies in Detroit Recorder’s Court to analyze the effect of race and gender on the amount of bail imposed by the judge and on the defendant’s pretrial status. We found that judges take gender, but not race, into account in determining the amount of bail for certain types of cases; more specifically, Black females faced lower bail than Black males in less serious cases. In contrast, we found that both race and gender affected the likelihood of pretrial release. White defendants were more likely than black defendants to be released pending trial and females were more likely than males to be released prior to trial. In fact, white females, white males, and black females all were more likely than black males to be released. An earlier version of this mansucript was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Phoenix, AZ, October, 1993.