Appearance Without Counsel: Self-Representation in the Criminal Courts of the United States and Canada

Previous attempts to ground structural effects have averaged the responses of individuals in survey research and consequently equate properties of the respondent with attributes of the system itself. This technique (Blau, 1960; 1974) generates philosophical controversy which can only be avoided by measuring properties of criminal justice agencies having no counterpart at the individual level (offenders, police, correctional workers) of analysis. Sampling designs must subsume both organizations and individuals to formulate generalizations about interorganizational processes. Applying conventional multivariate statistical models, we are able to examine one type of characteristic while simultaneously adjusting for the effects of the other.     

Iraq Casualties and the 2006 Senate Elections

Prior scholarship on the effects of war casualties on U.S. elections has focused on large‐scale conflicts. For this article, we examined whether or not the much‐smaller casualty totals incurred in Iraq had a similar influence on the 2006 Senate contests. We found that the change in vote share from 2000 to 2006 for Republican Senate candidates at both the state and county level was significantly and negatively related to local casualty tallies and rates. These results provide compelling evidence for the existence of a democratic brake on military adventurism, even in small‐scale wars, but one that is strongest in communities that have disproportionately shouldered a war's costs.     

Orchestrating Party Talk: A Party‐Based View of One‐Minute Speeches in the House of Representatives

Previous studies of House members' speech‐giving behavior treat the behavior as a product of members' individual goals. By uncovering leadership memoranda soliciting member participation in one‐minute speech giving, I find, first, that parties significantly structure one‐minute speech giving, with party‐orchestrated message campaigns accounting for about one‐third of the speeches given. Second, I find that a party‐based explanation illuminates individual members' speech‐giving behavior. Ideological proximity to the party leadership and party organizational factors strongly influence a member's willingness to be “on message.” These findings have important implications for studies of both party message politics and members' speech‐giving behavior.     

Testing Spatial Models of Elections: The Influence of Voters and Elites on Candidate Issue Positions

This research tests spatial models of electoral competition using survey data on state legislative candidates' policy positions and ideology in eight U.S. states. Our data support several hypotheses: 1) candidates' issue positions do not converge; 2) party elites have more extreme positions than do candidates; 3) candidate issue positioning is a function of party‐elite issue positions and union involvement in the campaign, as well as constituency characteristics; and 4) when candidates rely heavily on elite resources during their campaign, elites become more important in shaping candidate issue positions.     

The Fly Ball Effect: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding the Impacts of Short‐Term Seed Grants

The federal government has long used grants‐in‐aid to encourage state and local governments to carry out federal policies. Little research has been done that examines how short‐term seed grants affect program continuation. We propose the “fly ball effect” as a theoretical framework for understanding how seed money should impact program maintenance. Our theory suggests that short‐term seed grants by themselves should result in considerable funding uncertainty and program eliminations or stagnation once the initial grant money expires. We use data from drug court start‐ups in four states to provide empirical support for our theory. We argue that understanding the logic of the fly ball effect can help granting governments to improve the effectiveness of their grant funding systems, at least as measured by strong program continuation and expansion.     

An Automated System for Argument Invention in Law Using Argumentation and Heuristic Search Procedures*

Abstract. A heuristic search procedure for inventing legal arguments is built on two tools already widely in use in argumentation. Argumentation schemes are forms of argument representing premise‐conclusion and inference structures of common types of arguments. Schemes especially useful in law represent defeasible arguments, like argument from expert opinion. Argument diagramming is a visualization tool used to display a chain of connected arguments linked together. One such tool, Araucaria, available free at http://araucaria.computing.dundee.ac.uk/ , helps a user display an argument on the computer screen as an inverted tree structure with an ultimate conclusion as the root of the tree. These argumentation tools are applicable to analyzing a mass of evidence in a case at trial, in a manner already known in law using heuristic methods ( Schum 1994 ) and Wigmore diagrams ( Wigmore 1931 ). In this paper it is shown how they can be automated and applied to the task of inventing legal arguments. One important application is to proof construction in trial preparation ( Palmer 2003 ).     

Business Management Reform in the Department of Defense in Anticipation of Declining Budgets

Business management reform efforts have been part of the U.S. Defense Department agenda for decades. Current reform efforts have explicitly established the goal of generating, harvesting, and reinvesting savings from business management reform to buy more capital items; that is, they have focused on a measurable reallocation from operating and support costs to investment within a given budget top line. Recent increases in the defense top line, largely related to the war on terrorism, are not likely to persist; in addition, an examination of the factors affecting the top line suggests that a decline in the near term is likely. An examination of current and past defense management reforms suggests that efficiency‐seeking business management reforms are not likely to generate sufficient resources to cover a budget decline. Instead, management reform should be sustained for reasons of stewardship and accountability.