Examining Legislative Cue‐Taking in the US Senate

We examine congressional cue‐taking theory to determine its extent, conditionality, and various forms in the US Senate. Using a novel data‐collection technique (timed C‐SPAN footage), we focus on temporal dynamics via event history analysis. Examining the effects of senator characteristics across 16 votes from the 108th Congress, we find that committee leadership and seniority generally predict cue‐giving, while other types of characteristics predict cue‐giving on certain types of votes. Our results underscore the importance of considering the order and timing of voting when studying congressional behavior.     

A Pacific Sojourn: Anna Kavan and the New Zealand Connection, 1941–2

Abstract

This article examines Anna Kavan’s sojourn in New Zealand from February 1941 to November 1942 in the company of the pacifist playwright Ian Hamilton. Living in the most remote of the ex-British colonies reinforced Kavan’s ontological sense of homelessness and wish to disidentify from British society, yet the colony’s anglophone orientation offered familiarity within the strange and alien. The geography, landscapes and communities of its Pacific islands encouraged a reshaping of her imaginative engagement with otherness. Referring to Kavan’s recently published diary, ‘Five Months Further or What I Remember ab[ou]t New Zealand’, the essay argues that the New Zealand ‘experience’ encouraged her use of tropes of the Gothic and uncanny as she grappled with issues of distance, homelessness and disjunctive reality. The discussion focuses on the alternative/parallel world that New Zealand represents in stories published in I Am Lazarus (1945). It identifies experimental techniques associated with Gothic fiction by which Kavan registers the overlapping dualisms of war-torn London and idyllic rural New Zealand, and represents memory through framing devices and defamiliarizing rhetorical tropes as a distancing activity interrupting the present moment: dream sequences, irruptions into and splittings of reality, space and time reversals, doublings of self/other, disjunctive non sequiturs and ghostly mirror imaging.     

Current Policy Context for Education Efforts to Help Young Parents Meet Their Multiple Challenges

Recent increases in the adolsecent birth rate can be in part attributable to a variety of factors including limited sex education in schools, the decline in family planning services, and rising dropout rates. This paper explores the importance of education for adolescent parents, particularly the inclusion of pregnancy prevention programs and services for young parents as part of the educational mainstream.     

The local state in Canada: theoretical perspectives

Studies of government at the local level tend to be focused on the municipalities. To understand the full range of institutions at this level, a broader conception of the “local state” is required. The latter refers to the state in so far as it is present in and concerned with the local community, and thus it encompasses local agencies of the central state as well as local governments. To conceive of the local state in this way allows for a critical assessment of competing theories of local government in Canada. The latter describe local institutions variously as the third order of government, agencies for special purposes, the local public economy, or local apparatuses of the state. All but the first draw attention to non-municipal agencies at the local level, but none give an adequate account of the structure and functions of the local state as a whole. What is required is a theory that takes the pressure for local self-government seriously, and is sensitive to both geographical variation and historical change.     

Repeat victimization among adolescents and young adults

Prior research has shown that victimization incidents are disproportionately concentrated among relatively few victims and that prior victimization is a consistent predictor of future risk. This paper expands existing knowledge on victimization by describing temporal patterns of risk and by developing and testing alternative explanatory models of the link between past and future risk. Analyses based on panel data from the National Youth Survey support both state dependence and heterogeneity interpretations of the correlation in risk over time. In other words, prior victimization predicts future risk in part because it alters something about the individual, and because it indicates an unmeasured propensity for victimization that persists over time. The theoretical implications of these findings, including the feasibility of a victim labeling perspective, are discussed.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Phoenix, 1993.An exception to this lack of attention is the vast literature in the area of domestic abuse.     

State support under the new federalism

The new federalism will reduce total intergovernmental revenues to local governments. The reduction will be due to both the transfer to the states of much of the federal aid which previously flowed directly to local governments and reductions in total federal aid levels. Pass-through requirements on the shifted aid will not affect this general result but may soften the impact in many states. Because of differences in the extent to which state governments substitute federal pass-through aid for state aid from own-source revenues and in the degree to which different sources of revenues are treated differently by the states, local revenue reductions will vary greatly from state to state. The losses for local governments will range from 100% of the shifted aid in some states to as little as 15–20% in others.