Not a G2 But a Trio

The new world order has three major players:Europe,China and the United States on the occasion of the London I summit on April     

ASSESSING POLICY DIVERGENCE: HOW TO INVESTIGATE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN A LAW AND A CORRESPONDING REGULATION

Policy designs are selected to achieve specific policy outcomes. The policy process, however, contains multiple junctures when a policy's design may diverge from its original intents. Despite this fact, few theoretically valid and methodologically reliable approaches exist to assess policy divergence as it occurs during the policy process. This article presents a method for assessing policy divergence during implementation with a comparative analysis of a legislative law and corresponding regulation. The case analysed is US organic food policy in the 1990 Organic Foods Production Act and 2002 National Organic Program regulation. The article draws theoretical leverage from Mazmanian and Sabatier's implementation framework and methodological leverage from the institutional analysis and development framework. The analysis indicates that the designs of both policies are fairly robust with relatively minor divergence. The conclusion discusses the gains and challenges in developing a comparative approach to studying policy designs and assessing policy divergence.     

STABLE PREDICTORS OF RECIDIVISM:

Seventy-one studies are reviewed which present data on the relationship between biographical predictors and recidivism in 177 independent samples of offenders. A summary table lists the number of samples in which a particular predictor was found to be related to recidivism and the number of samples in which that predictor was found to be unrelated to recidivisim. Detailed summaries of the relation between “type of instant offense” and recidivism and “age at first arrest” and recidivism are also included.     

BRIDGING CRIMINAL CAREERS,THEORY, AND POLICY THROUGH LATENT VARIABLE MODELS OF INDIVIDUAL OFFENDING*

Our goal is to build bridges between theoretical criminology, the study of criminal careers, and policy-relevant research. Insights from the criminal career and propensity positions lead us to seek (1) a comprehensive means of incorporating theoretical variables in research on criminal careers, (2) statistical models that yield meaningful projections relevant to public policy issues, and (3) methods for comparing findings for different measures of offending. We present a conceptual framework accomplishing this by applying the general linear model to the study of crime and criminal careers. This framework differentiates the elements of (1) a curvilinear function linking the scale of the linear model and the scale of the measure of offending, (2) a probabilistic relationship between a latent tendency to offend and the measure of offending, (3) a probability distribution of individual differences on the latent dimension, and (4) relationships among repeated observations for the same individual. We describe numerous versions of the general linear model that do not require special statistical expertise and are appropriate for the full range of measures of offending. We conclude by addressing strategies for comparing results across measures.