Can Transparency Foster More Understanding and Compliant Citizens?

Voluntary policy compliance is an important yet rarely studied topic in public administration. To address the paucity of research, this article proposes and empirically tests a conceptual framework that ties policy transparency and policy understanding to voluntary policy compliance intentions. The reasoning is that the extent to which citizens understand a policy contributes to their intentions to comply with that policy. Further, the authors argue that policy transparency indirectly influences voluntary policy compliance intentions through a positive effect on citizens’ levels of policy understanding. To enhance the validity of the findings, the authors assess these relationships across two policy domains. The findings reflect an indirect positive effect of transparency on voluntary compliance occurring through policy understanding. However, this emerged only for one policy domain. These results suggest that the effects of policy transparency on policy understanding and voluntary policy compliance intentions may depend on the policy domain.     

The Pivotal Role of Adolescent Autonomy in Secondary School Classrooms

Student engagement is an important contributor to school success, yet high school students routinely describe themselves as disengaged. Identifying factors that alter (increase) engagement is a key aspect of improving support for student achievement. This study investigated students’ perceptions of autonomy, teacher connection, and academic competence as predictors of changes in student engagement within the classroom from the start to the end of a course. Participants were 578 (58% female) diverse (67.8% White, 25.2% African American, 5.1% Hispanic, 1.2% Asian American) high school students from 34 classrooms who provided questionnaire data both at the start and the end of a single course. Novel results from a cross-lagged model demonstrated that students who perceived their classrooms as allowing and encouraging their own autonomy in the first few weeks increased their engagement throughout the course, rather than the typical decline in engagement that was demonstrated by students in other classrooms. This finding is unique in that it extended to both students’ perceptions of engagement and observations of student engagement, suggesting a fairly robust pattern. The pertinence of this finding to adolescent developmental needs and its relationship to educational practice is discussed.     

Swampwalls: dark matter and the lumpen army of art

Dominant notions of contemporary art are being overturned not by some radical avant-garde theory or movement, but instead by an “uprising” from within the confines of the “art factory,” as well as by newly embodied instances of informal everyday creativity that high culture has long overlooked. Theorists Negt and Kluge might have described this insurrection as the partial unblocking of a counter-public or proletarian sphere: a realm of fragmented identities and working class fantasy generated in response to the alienating conditions of capitalism. A more specific cultural interpretation suggests this mutiny from within and assault from below is the irrepressible brightening of “creative dark matter:” that marginalized and systematically underdeveloped aggregate of creative productivity, which nonetheless reproduces the material and symbolic economy of high culture. The results are explosive, or at least potentially so as this long, pent-up shadow archive spills out into the once forbidden dwelling place of mainstream law and order and high cultural privilege. Meanwhile, a new wave of socially engaged art is thriving on the margins of the art world. Like an enormous production warehouse this “post-public” creativity is developing sustainable farming, reenacting historical labor demonstrations, providing public services lost to decades of deregulatory economic policy, and initiating local bartering systems and environmental cleanups. Its vitality is something Joseph Beuys could have only dream about. And not surprisingly even this “autonomous” and “Interventionist” art is selectively becoming part of the mainstream culture industry through what Gilles Deleuze describes as an “apparatus of capture.” Nevertheless, one result of this new confrontation reveals this vibrant imaginary “from below” is pushing artistic production, pushing also discourse, pedagogy and cultural institutions into radically re-thinking definitions and possibilities not only involving the possibilities of contemporary avant-garde art practices, but also about the very nature of creativity, democracy, and political agency more broadly.     

Processes Linking Parents’ and Adolescents’ Religiousness and Adolescent Substance Use: Monitoring and Self-Control

Empirical evidence suggests that religiousness is related negatively to adolescent substance use; yet, we know little about how such protective effects might occur. The current study examined whether parents’ and adolescents’ religiousness are associated positively with parental, religious, and self-monitoring, which in turn are related to higher self-control, thereby related to lower adolescent substance use. Participants were 220 adolescents (45 % female) who were interviewed at ages 10–16 and again 2.4 years later. Structural equation modeling analyses suggested that higher adolescents’ religiousness at Time 1 was related to lower substance use at Time 2 indirectly through religious monitoring, self-monitoring, and self-control. Higher parents’ religiousness at Time 1 was associated with higher parental monitoring at Time 2, which in turn was related to lower adolescent substance use at Time 2 directly and indirectly through higher adolescent self-control. The results illustrate that adolescents with high awareness of being monitored by God are likely to show high self-control abilities and, consequently, low substance use. The findings further suggest that adolescents’ religiousness as well as their religious environments (e.g., familial context) can facilitate desirable developmental outcomes.     

Googling the requester: Identity‐questing and discrimination in public service provision

Innovating upon previous field experiments and theories of identity‐based discrimination, we test whether public officials are using searches (“identity‐questing”) to profile citizens and acting on latent biases. Pairs of “institutional” and “noninstitutional” requesters send lower and moderate burden freedom of information (FOI) requests—providing no identity cues apart from undistinctive names, e‐mails, and ID numbers—to nearly 700 of Brazil's largest municipalities. Results show institutional requesters receive one‐fifth more responses than noninstitutional comparators. For moderate versus lower burden requests, noninstitutional requesters are 11% less likely to receive a compliant response than their institutional comparators. The only plausible explanation for these results is identity‐questing, a phenomenon that has far‐reaching policy implications. Most of the world's FOI laws, for example, contain vague ID obligations, which translate incoherently from laws to regulation and practice. Results enjoin public service providers to protect the identities of citizens by default or upon request.