Courts and health policy: judicial policy making and publicly funded health care in Canada

The 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provided political actors with the opportunity to make rights-based challenges to public policy decisions. Two challenges launched by providers and consumers of health care illuminate the impact of judicial review on health care policy and the institutional capacity of courts to formulate policy in this field. The significant impact of rights-based claims on cross-jurisdictional policy differences in a federal regime is noted.     

Parental Socialization and Rational Party Identification

This article constructs a rational choice model of the intergenerational transmission of party identification. At a given time, identification with a party is the estimate of average future benefits from candidates of that party. Experienced voters constantly update this expectation using political events since the last realignment to predict the future in accordance with Bayes Rule. New voters, however, have no experience of their own. In Bayesian terms, they need prior beliefs. It turns out that under certain specified conditions, these young voters should rationally choose to employ parental experience to help orient themselves to politics. The resulting model predicts several well–known features of political socialization, including the strong correlation between parents' and children's partisanship, the greater partisan independence of young voters, and the tendency of partisan alignments to decay.     

Church attendance,meaningfulness of religion,and depressive symptomatology among adolescents

Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 451 adolescents at a public high school in Texas during the spring semester 1989. The instrument used contained the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and items to determine participants' gender, frequency of church attendance, and meaningfulness of one's religion. Based on social support research and the writings of Carl Jung and Viktor Frankl, it was predicted that those who attended church frequently and those who viewed their religions as providing meaning for their lives would have lower BDI scores than their classmates. The findings supported these predictions. Implications and a discussion of the results are included.Received Ed.D. in educational psychology from University of Illinois. Main research interests are substance abuse in adolescents, drug use prevention strategies, and suicidal ideation in adolescents.Received Ph.D. in general psychology from Boston University. Main research interest is psychology in interdisciplinary perspective, with a specialization in the psychology of religion.Pursuing a M.Ed, in school psychology at Southwest Texas State University. Main research interests are psychological testing and assessment.     

Ideology and Political Alienation

A substantial literature over the years has focused on the relationship between political alienation and ideology. Much of this research contends that conservatives are more alienated than liberals because philosophically they believe that the best government is that which governs least. A close reading of the literature, however, reveals little consistency in the empirical findings. Survey data from Norway, Sweden, and the United States are used to provide a more extensive and consistent test of the hypothesis. Ideology is defined as both left/right self-identification and policy preference on economic and "new political" issues. The evidence reveals that in Scandinavia higher levels of alienation are found among conservatives, whereas in the US the left has been consistently more alienated, except on "new politics" issues. The discrepancy between the citizen's preferred ideological orientation and that which the public perceives the government to take, is used to explain the different findings for the three countries and the shifts in the relationship between ideology and alienation across time.     

Modeling Duration Dependence

As applications of duration analysis have burgeoned in politicalscience, scholars have become increasingly aware of the potentialsubstantive importance of duration dependence: the extent towhich the conditional hazards of the events of interest arerising or falling over time. Here I discuss the issue of durationdependence, focusing on the distinction between "spurious" dependencedue to unobserved heterogeneity and "true" duration dependencedue to state dependence in the process of interest. I presenta simple extension of a commonly used parametric duration model—theWeibull model—which allows researchers to assess the influenceof causal variables on the nature and extent of duration dependencein their data. I then illustrate the application of this "generalizedWeibull" model using data on the duration of international alliances.