Chinese Political Studies: Overview of the State of the Field

The range of questions of interest to scholars of Chinese politics has changed slowly over recent decades, but the depth of empirical probes to answer them has quickly improved. One reason is the rise of China-born and Chinese-American researchers. Another is greater access to local information in China after the start of reforms there. Future developments in this field are likely to enrich current American political science, which will require fresh methods for adequate study of the planet's most populous polity.     

Sex offender notification and fear of victimization

Research on sex offender notification statutes was limited, and what did exist suggested notification resulted in increasing fear of victimization (Phillips, D. M. (1998). Zevitz, R. G. & Farkas, M. A. (2000c). Nonetheless, existing research failed to provide a direct measure of fear of victimization, or a comparison group to determine whether community members receiving notification were more fearful of victimization than community members, residing in the same neighborhood, who had not received notification. Additionally, existing research did not differentiate between fear of victimization for self (personal fear) and fear of victimization for others (altruistic fear). Warr (Warr, M. (2000) argued that the “strongest indictment” of the fear-crime literature was the failure to consider altruistic fear. By comparing emotional responses to specific types of victimization between groups of notified and not-notified community members, at the multivariate level, notification was significantly related to personal fear, but not altruistic fear. At the bivariate level, however, notification was related to one type of altruistic fear—sexual victimization.     

Fair Housing After “Big Government”: How Tax Credits Are Reshaping the Legal Fight Against Racial Segregation

ABSTRACT

In June 2015, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 split decision, that facially neutral state policies and practices that unintentionally segregated minorities could violate the Fair Housing Act. This article draws on the Texas fair housing litigation to engage broader debates on fair housing as a legal framework, and its potential for disrupting or transforming patterns of structural inequality. Specifically, it examines how shifts in the ways that society designs and implements housing policies may encourage courts, advocates, and legal actors to think about fair housing issues in new ways. Moving beyond the emphasis on disparate impact, my findings elaborate on two mostly overlooked ways that LIHTC reshapes the legal battleground in the fight for fair housing, by opening contentious debate on (a) the state level of government, and (b) passive government administration of policies. I interpret these effects as unintended consequences of the gradual shift toward market-driven policies that allow officials to govern at a distance.     

Welfare as Wrecking Ball: Constructing Public Responsibility in Legal Encounters Over Public Housing Demolition

Scholarship on welfare privatization illustrates how the process often curtails and undermines public responsibility for the poor. In this article, I examine how recipients, policy makers, and judges participate in the legal process as a means of challenging and defending privatization. I look at cases of litigation initiated by public housing tenants between 1985 and 2012 to fight the demolition of their homes to explore the changing meaning of public responsibility within a shrinking public sector. My findings show that as legislative and administrative reforms steered courts toward a more flexible understanding of public responsibility, courts gave increasing attention to the economic hardships experienced by the state itself, while downplaying the plight of low‐income tenants.     

Co-witness Information Can Have Immediate Effects on Eyewitness Memory Reports

When questioning a reluctant witness, investigators sometimes encourage the witness by providing information about what other witnesses have said. Three experiments were conducted to test the combined effects of such co-witness information and suggestive questioning on the accuracy of eyewitness memory reports. Experiment 1 was analogous to the experience of a witness who receives information from an interviewer or questioner about what other witnesses have already said, whereas Experiments 2 and 3 simulated the situation in which a witness receives information directly from a co-witness. In all three experiments, when participants received incorrect information about a co-witness's response, they were significantly more likely to give that incorrect response than if they received no co-witness information. This effect persevered in a delayed memory test 48 h after the initial questioning session in Experiment 3. Accuracy rates were lowest of all when incorrect co-witness information was paired with questioning that suggested an incorrect response. These results have implications not only for the immediate effects on the accuracy of witnesses' memory reports, but also for the impact that even one such inaccurate report can have on the manner in which a case is investigated by the police or other authorities.     

UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES OF A.I.D. PROJECTS: LESSONS FROM IMPACT ASSESSMENT FOR PROJECT PLANNING

We examine lJ.S. Agency for International Development project designs as described in pre-project design documents arid compare them using document review protocols to project outcomes as described in project impact evaluation reports for 40 projects. From this we draw three major conclusions concerning project designs: (1)most are unrealistic – estimated outputs greatly exceed actual outputs at the same time that considerable cost overruns occur, (2) they do not adequately assess the feasibility of the implementation, maintenance, and use of the project and its outputs, and (3) they do not adequately assess potential negative impacts. In light of these shortcomings we offer several recommendations for consideration and testing.