Just punishments: Guideline sentences and normative consensus

The federal sentencing guidelines prescribe ranges of sentences to be given to persons convicted of felonies in the federal criminal courts. The U.S. Sentencing Commission wrote the guidelines attempting to make sentences conform to community views of appropriate punishments, along with several other criteria. Employing data from a 1994 national sample of adult Americans, designed as a factorial survey, the degree of correspondence is shown between guidelines sentences and those desired by the American public. Although at the individual level only a modest degree of concordance was found, the central tendencies of public opinion (median sentences) were found to correspond quite closely to the guidelines sentences. The major points of disagreement centered around drug trafficking crimes: the guidelines prescribed very long sentences for those crimes and distinguished sharply among trafficking in heroin, powder cocaine, and crack, whereas median sentences desired by the public were much lower and did not distinguish sharply among trafficking in those drugs. We interpret the findings as indicating that the guidelines sentences conform reasonably closely to American normative consensus concerning the sentencing of federal felons.The research reported in this article was commissioned by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily endorsed by the Commission. Full expositions of the findings from the national survey used are given by Rossi and Berk (1995, 1997).     

Style issues and vote choice

It has been an assumption common in voting research that candidates must offer and voters must perceive opposing stands on issues for those issues to have a rational influence on the vote. Though apparently reasonable, this assumption eliminates analysis of the rational impact of style in voter thinking. This article argues that style issues should not be so easily dismissed and were of some importance in the 1972 presidential election. First, the data indicate that voters considered style issues as important as position issues. Second, voters were able to detect differences between the candidates on certain style issues. Third, salient style issues and salient position issues are similar in their causal relationship to the vote. These findings lend support to the general conclusion that style issues are an important and rational element of voter deliberations and have several implications for the study of public opinion, the behavior of political leaders, and the adequacy of elections as mechanisms of governmental accountability.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in Phoenix, March 31-April 2, 1977. The data presented here were gathered under National Science Foundation Grant GS-35408, Robert D. McClure and Thomas E. Patterson, principle investigators. We would like to thank Professor Patterson and McClure for the use of their data and their helpful comments.     

Protecting health information privacy in research: what's an ethics committee like yours doing in a job like this?

The Commonwealth and State legislation designed to protect the privacy of personal health information has attracted the criticism that the constraints imposed on the use of the information in research obstructs that research. A central and common feature of the legislation is the reliance upon the review by human research ethics committees of research that proposes to use personal health information for research without prior consent from those whose information it is. The origins of this reliance are explored and explained and it is suggested that this has proved to be an inappropriate policy choice. The extension of the reliance is then described and the conceptual, procedural, workload and structural consequences of requiring these voluntary committees to conform to legislative standards of review of issues of the public interest are critically examined. In recent reviews of the Commonwealth legislation, there is recognition of the underlying uncertainty as to the appropriate balance between protection of personal privacy and the promotion of beneficial research. In the further exploration of these matters that those reviews recommended, a close and critical examination of the wisdom of continuing to rely on ethics committees is needed.     

The Emergence of Environmental Concerns: Hydroelectric Schemes in Scotland

Regulating the environmental impacts of hydroelectric schemesis of increasing importance in the light of the strong policydrive towards expanding the proportion of energy gained fromrenewable sources. Yet hydroelectric schemes are significantin another way. They provide an unusual example of a technologythat has changed little over the last 100 years and thus offersa real opportunity to judge the impact of a changing regulatoryclimate. In Scotland, three distinct phases can be detected.Earlier controls focussed on the protection of private interests,especially fishing rights, with authorisations secured throughPrivate Acts of Parliament. This was followed by a period wherepromotion of such schemes lay with public bodies; though undergeneral statutory duties, ultimately the balancing of environmentaland other interests lay with such bodies who acted with fewexternal controls. Privatisation of electricity generation in1989, coupled with the growing development of relevant EuropeanCommunity legislation, dramatically shifted the regulatory balances.Environmental Assessment requirements and now the obligationsof the Water Framework Directive have substantially alteredthe concept and scope of environmental concerns in this field.