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.     

Brain Politics: Aspects of Administration in the Comparative Issue Definition of Autism-Related Policy

The construction of public problems has a lasting influence on implementation in a given policy subsystem. National and sociopolitical contexts influence issue definition differently across nations. However, the degree to which nation-specific issue definition takes place has been insufficiently explored. In recent years, the growing incidence of autism has led to a quest for causal factors. One hypothesis posits that the use of mercury in vaccines may be a culprit. This paper examines the definition of the mercury and autism issue in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Insights into the comparative elements of issue definition are suggested by the case. These insights are of particular importance to administrators, as agencies are deeply involved as objects and actors in the process of issue definition and are often responsible for implementing new and redefined policies.     

On the value of formal assessment of uncertainty in regulatory analysis

The US Office of Management and Budget introduced in 2003 a new requirement for the treatment of uncertainty in Regulatory Impact Analyses (RIAs) of proposed regulations, requiring agencies to carry out a formal quantitative uncertainty assessment regarding a regulation’s benefits and costs if either is expected to reach $1 billion annually. Despite previous use in other contexts, such formal assessments of uncertainty have rarely been employed in RIAs or other regulatory analyses. We describe how formal quantitative assessments of uncertainty – in particular, Monte Carlo analyses – can be conducted, we examine the challenges and limitations of such analyses in the context of RIAs, and we assess how the resulting information can affect the evaluation of regulations. For illustrative purposes, we compare Monte Carlo analysis with methods typically used in RIAs to evaluate uncertainty in the context of economic analyses carried out for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Nonroad Diesel Rule, which became effective in 2004.     

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.     

Feminism and the Flat Law Theory

This article examines two modalities of law, depicted spatially as the vertical and the horizontal. The intellectual background for seeing law in vertical and horizontal dimensions is to be found in much socio-legal scholarship. These approaches have challenged the modernist, legal positivist and essentially vertical view of law as a system of imperatives emanating from a hierarchically superior source such as a sovereign. In keeping with the socio-legal critical tradition, but approaching it from the perspective of legal philosophy, my aim is to address three matters. First, why is vertical law problematic for feminists? Second, what are the theoretical characteristics of law in its horizontal register? Third, how is an appreciation of this ‘flat’ law useful for feminist legal theory and practice? In particular, I consider the ways in which feminist legal theory operating in the horizontal dimension can transgress, without transcending, the vertically determined perimeters of the nation state.