The impact of rational participation models on voting attitudes

Rational models generally predict that only a few people should vote in most elections. A major reason why turnout is so high today is because of the numerous positive messages which citizens are routinely given about the value of their vote. A month after discussion of a model of rational participation, individuals were found to be more negative toward the institution of elections. A major reason for voting continued to be the feeling of duty to participate; subjects who felt no moral obligation would not go to the polls even if they were very interested in an election.     

On the reputation of state supreme courts

A state supreme court, in making and justifying choices, uses a variety of sources of information and authority—its own precedents, scholarly commentaries, articles in law reviews, encyclopedias, restatements, and so forth. Quite often a state supreme court appeals to the wisdom or rejects the lack of it in the decision of a sister court in order to arrive at or buttress reasoning in a particularly problematic case. These citations—construed as derogation or deference—yield very handy and nonreactive indicators of hierarchies of prestige between and among the highest appellate courts of the several states. In this paper, I develop a simple and general measure of judicial reputation, present evidence on the hierarchy of state supreme courts as of 1975, show how this ranking has changed in the last 50 years, and examine competing and sometimes complementary explanations of judicial prestige. Taken together, social diversity, judicial professionalism, political ideology, and the size of case load provide an impressive explanation of the reputation of state supreme courts.     

Spatial analysis of crime and region in the united states

The regionality of crime has been presented, debated, and questioned for over a centruy of this Nation’s history, usually involving a segmental approach to crime rates or treating the various crime rates separate from one another. This paper, using states as a real unit of analysis, develops two general crime dimensions using discriminant function analysis. These two dimensions, based upon complete estimation, demonstrate the discriminating power of crime profiles in assessing regionality. Also, region as an independent variable is shown to possess strong explanatory power regarding crime patterns. Although crime viewed at the state and regional level is highly generalized, it does draw attention to spatial and temporal consistencies in the general crime pattern. This level of analysis and this paper allows a greater understanding about the country and integrates available information on crime variations within our society. Finally, implications of this study for the current criminal justice system in the united States are discussed.     

A SURVEY OF UNIFIED FAMILY COURTS

The American Bar Association Coordinating Council on Unified Family Courts, with the assistance of Hofstra University's Center for Childre. Family and the Courts, recently conducted a survey of various courts and jurisdictions that either implemented or experimented with a unified family court structure. The purpose of the project was to get a sense of the state of unified family courts with the goal of building more support for the unified family court concept based on demonstrated effectiveness. The findings of the survey have been summarized in this article. The survey, survey data, and list of survey respondents can be found in the article's appendices.