Can Callous-Unemotional Traits and Aggression Identify Children at High-Risk of Anti-Social Behavior in a Low Socioeconomic Group?

Frick et al. (2005) proposed that Callous-Unemotional (CU) traits may be an important personality dimension associated with youth offending. The goal of the present study was to examine whether CU traits were associated with risk factors for offending in a low SES sample of children aged 10 years to 11 years in New Zealand. Two subgroups were identified: one high (High-CU/Agg group) and one low (Low-CU/Agg group) on CU traits and aggression. Results showed that scores for the High-CU/Agg group were significantly worse compared to the Low-CU/Agg group on a range of measures including stress management, caregiver criminal convictions, and dysfunctional parenting. However, analyses revealed that the measure of aggression accounted for more unique variance compared to CU traits. Further research is needed with youths from low SES communities to develop a more robust profile of potential youth offenders.     

Budgeters' Views of State Performance-Budgeting Systems: Distinctions across Branches

Given that a majority of states have had some sort of performance‐budgeting initiative on the books for several years, how has implementation of such reform progressed? To answer this question, we surveyed legislative and executive budgeters from the 50 states, asking them for their impressions of performance‐budgeting implementation in their state. Specifically, we asked these budget officers about the reasons for introducing performance budgeting in their state; the types of activities required of their system; responsible oversight bodies; extent of application across state agencies and departments; and perceived levels of effectiveness and problems experienced with implementation of the budget reform. Our findings indicate that implementation of performance‐based budgeting systems is proceeding slowly. While there are some benefits to highlight, results show that implementing performance budgeting is not without problems—perhaps the greatest being differing perceptions of use and success among budget players, particularly across branches of government.     

Propping up dictators? Economic cooperation from China and its impact on authoritarian persistence in party and non‐party regimes

This article investigates how China's economic cooperation affects authoritarian persistence elsewhere. For the period 1998–2008, the article assesses quantitatively whether the effects of economic cooperation from China vary, conditioned by the regime type of the recipient. The analysis finds that China's economic cooperation is associated with regime durability in party‐based regimes. In non‐party regimes, in contrast, it is associated with regime collapse.     

How Policy Rules Shape the Structure and Performance of Collaborative Governance Arrangements

Local food system governance increasingly occurs in collaborative venues at the local, state, and regional levels. Prominent examples of such are food policy councils (FPCs). FPCs take a systemic approach to improve local food systems by including diverse stakeholders to advise on policy development. The authors study public FPCs to understand how policies structure the stakeholder composition and goals of FPCs and how FPCs’ stakeholder composition facilitates and/or impedes performance. Data come from a content analysis of policies that mandate the structure and functions of public FPCs and interviews with FPC representatives. Findings indicate that FPCs connected to a broader array of food policy actors in their communities produce more diverse policy outputs, but this outcome is tempered by whether council members represent personal or organizational interests.     

Morality Influences How People Apply the Ignorance of the Law Defense

In four empirical studies, we showed that laypeople apply the ignorance of the law defense differently depending on the perceived morality of the defendant's course of conduct at the time of the illegal act. Moral and neutral defendants who pled ignorance of the law were afforded leniency, whereas immoral defendants were sentenced as though they were not ignorant, even when defendants in all three conditions violated identical laws. These findings suggest that laypeople adopt a just deserts approach to criminal law, which influences their responsiveness to a criminal defendant's claim to be ignorant of the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal law and argue that legal doctrine should reflect laypeople's moral intuitions.