Detectives Stories and City Life

Detective stories take place mainly in two settings, constantly changing, many faceted big cities filled with strangers, and stable, fairly homogeneous, innocent small towns whose members know one another. The differences in each clarify the qualities of the other. In solving the mystery of the small town, the detective provides moral instruction and restores the town’s innocence. In solving the mystery in the big city the detective reveals the city as part of the mystery and provides the reader with temporary orientation to the city. Mysteries have grown with the growth of the cities and now appear in every country of the world. Harold J. Bershady is an emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, edited with Renée Fox and Victor Lidz, is After Parson: A Theory of Action for the 21st Century, published by Russell Sage Press, 2005.     

Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? The Impact of Information on Mass Attitudes toward Congress

Two features of citizen response to Congress can be taken as grounds for concern. First, Americans know relatively little about Congress, and especially about congressional procedures and policy output. Second, Congress typically emerges as the least respected political institution. Although these matters are troubling when viewed individually, more disturbing is the dilemma posed when knowledge and attitudes toward Congress are viewed in tandem. It appears that citizens who know Congress the best like Congress the least. Consequently, a sophisticated polity and a well-respected legislature seem fundamentally incompatible. This article seeks to resolve this dilemma, contending that there is nothing about knowledge per se that leads citizens to view Congress unfavorably. Rather, differences in knowledge levels alter the considerations citizens bring to bear when evaluating Congress, with the best-informed individuals constructing judgments on the basis of the most relevant Congress-specific criteria while less knowledgeable citizens employ readily available but more peripheral criteria.     

Quality Is Job One: Professional and Volunteer Voter Mobilization Calls

Campaigns rely upon both paid and volunteer phone calls to mobilize voters. Past field experiments show calls from volunteers to increase turnout and paid calls to be wholly ineffective. This article argues that the quality of phone calls rather than the presence or absence of a payroll explains this regularity. Three aspects of quality are considered: monitoring pace and interactivity, timing, and message. A fully randomized field experiment with over 100,000 subjects comparing professional and volunteer phone banks simultaneously was conducted during the 2002 congressional elections to test this hypothesis. The experiment discovers precisely the opposite relationship of prior research: effective professional phone banks and inefficient volunteer phone calls. The experiment also finds substantial temporal decay. The specific messages appear less important than tone or timing. The implications for the role of campaign consultants, replacing social capital, voter psychology, and the capacities of civic organizations are discussed.     

Social Capital and Public Policy – The Current Challenge Facing the Victorian Government

Social capital, since Putnam's 1993 work, has captured the imagination of policy‐makers the world over, and Australia is no exception. In 2005 the Department of Victorian Communities launched its Actions for Community Strengthening policy statement, which draws heavily on social capital theory. This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of the government's policy and critiques its failure to deal adequately with the causal relationship between social capital and its supposed community benefits. The article then seeks to isolate the missing factors through a look at recent research on volunteerism and argues that the institution of collaborative/interactive governance needs to be underpinned by sound socio‐economic reform.     

Holzer,Harry J., and Neumark,David (2006). Affirmative action: What do we know? The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 26(2), 463‐490.

The original article to which this Erratum refers was published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 25(2), 463–490.     

An Examination of Three Models of the Relationships between Parental Attachments and Adolescents’ Social Functioning and Depressive Symptoms

Three models of attachment relationships—the hierarchy model, the integrative model and the independent model—were compared in order to elucidate which best described the relationship between attachments to fathers versus mothers and its developmental consequences among 1,289 eighth grade students in Taiwan. These consequences included adolescents’ social support from family and friends, social expectations in peer interaction, self-worth, and depressive symptoms. The models can be summarized as follows: the hierarchy model assumes that paternal attachment is influenced by the level of maternal attachment; the integrative model assumes that the combined effects of secure attachments to mother and to father best predict the child’s development; and the independent model suggests that maternal and paternal attachments have differential influences on the child’s developmental outcomes. Our results indicate that the independent model best describes adolescents’ attachment relationships with parents and their subsequent developmental consequences. Moreover, gender differences were found in adolescent’s report of attachment to mother and father in relation with the outcome variables. Yih-Lan Liu is an associate professor at National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, R.O.C. She received her Ph.D degree 1996 from University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A. Her major research interests include parent-child interaction, attachment relationships, ego development and adolescent development and psychosocial adjustment.