Identity and dating commitment among women and men in college

Lower division and upper division college women's and men's commitment in a dating relationship was examined in connection with their (a) gender role attitudes, (b) educational aspirations, (c) certainty about their future vocation, and (d) the importance they attach to work vs. marriage as a source of life satisfaction. Dating commitment was also examined for women in relation to their dedication to work for pay after marriage, and for men in terms of their ideas about their future wife working. The more certain upper division college women's vocational identity, the more committed they were to their dating partner, but the more they planned to work after marriage the less involved they were in a relationship. Additionally, upper division women who placed more importance on a job than marriage and who had a clearer vocational identity were less involved in a relationship. The clearer upper division men's vocational identity, the more committed they were in a relationship. Lower division men who placed more importance on work compared to marriage were less involved in a dating relationship. The results are discussed in light of Erikson's stages of identity development and more recent research that suggests women's identity development follows a different course from men's.Received Ph.D. in child development and family relationships at the University of Texas at Austin. Current research interests include the influence of parent-child interaction on children's mastery and achievement motivation, peer and intimate relationships, and identity development.Received Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany. Research focuses on the development of relationships from courtship into marriage and first-time parenthood.Received Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Program of research concerns the developmental origins, correlates, and consequences of identity formation in adolescence. Recent research addresses the dynamics of relationships in adoptive families and the consequences of openness in adoption on family members.Received B.A. in child development and family relationships program at the University of Texas at Austin.     

Books in review

He has also served as research director of the Guggenheim Foundation from 1972–1984. Among his books are Men in Groups; The Imperial Animal(with Robin Fox); The Manufacture of Evil;and The Pursuit of Pleasure.     

The influence of state-level economic conditions on the 1992 U.S. presidential election

Evidence is found that state-level economic conditions played a significant role in the defeat of George Bush in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. Evidence is also found which indicates that the entrance of Ross Perot into the race as an independent candidate was not instrumental in the Bush loss.     

A comparative modeling of tax reform before and after the legislative process

This research modeled the extent to which the normative goals of equity and efficiency are embodied in three seminal tax reform proposals (Bradley-Gephardt, Kemp-Kasten, and the Treasury Department proposals) relative to the extant regime. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) is also modeled in the same manner. The objective of this study is to compare the equity and efficiency of the initial proposals with that of the final tax reform law. This before and after analysis is designed to ascertain the degree to which the legislative process undermined the normative goals of the tax reform movement. The National Tax Model was applied to model each regime and to measure the distributional and redistributional effects on tax burdens and wage efficiency costs associated with each system across ten income classes. The reform models, including TRA86, are shown as superior to the pre-reform system with respect to the normative criteria. The legislative process did not substantially compromise the goals as reflected in the seminal reform proposals in the development of a more politically acceptable tax reform law. This exercise demonstrates that it is possible for sound legislation to survive a political process that frequently permits the sacrificing of normative goals in favor of special interests.Financial support provided by the Arthur Young Foundation Tax Research Grant Program and The Ralph E. Kent Fund. The helpful suggestions of Jim Curtis were sincerely appreciated.     

PREDICTING STATE ABORTION LEGISLATION FROM U.S. SENATE VOTES: THE EFFECTS OF APPARENT IDEOLOGICAL SHIRKING

The recent Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services giving more discretion to states to regulate abortion has led to speculation concerning which states might move to limit abortions. Medoff (1989) attempts to predict how state legislatures might vote on state-level abortion legislation by examining the 1983 Senate vote on the Hatch/Eagleton Amendment. We expand upon Medoff's analysis by incor- porating recent developments in agency theory as it applies to the political agents (i.e., Senators) in the empirical model. The results demonstrate that accounting for Senatorial "shirking" and state ideology substantially im- proves the predictive ability of the model for the Senate abortion vote. The predicted votes of the state's Senators, after eliminating the effects of apparent Senatorial shirking, are used to infer the likelihood of state-level legislation substantially restricting abortion. We compare these results to a base model that ignores the issue of shirking and find increased predict- ability and several differing results.     

Cycle avoiding trajectories,strategic agendas,and the duality of memory and foresight: An informal exposition

This paper considers the notion of cycle avoiding trajectories in majority voting tournaments and shows that they underlie and guide several apparently disparate voting processes. The set of alternatives that are maximal with respect to such trajectories constitutes a new solution set of considerable significance. It may be dubbed the Banks set, in recognition of the important paper by Banks (1985) that first made use of this set. The purpose of this paper is to informally demonstrate that the Banks set is a solution set of broad relevance for understanding group decision making in both cooperative and non-cooperative settings and under both sincere and sophisticated voting. In addition, we show how sincere and sophisticated voting processes can be viewed as mirror images of one another — embodying respectively, “dmemory” and “foresight.” We also show how to develop the idea of a “sophisticated agenda,” one in which the choice of what alternatives to propose is itself a matter of strategic calculation.