Identity Style,Parental Authority,and Identity Commitment

The role that parental authority patterns and social-cognitive identity styles may play in establishing identity commitments was investigated. The results indicated that family authority and identity style variables combined accounted for 50% of the variation in strength of identity commitment. As hypothesized, the relationship between parental authority and identity commitment was mediated by identity style. The findings are consistent with the view that family authority patterns may contribute to the way in which late adolescents negotiate the task of constructing a sense of identity. Alternative explanations of the findings are considered.     

Corruption, Reform, and Virtue Ethics

Books reviewed in this article:
Gerald E. Caiden, O.P. Dwivedi, and Joseph Jabbra (eds.), Where Corruption Lies
Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform
Peter Kobrak, Cozy Politics: Political Parties, Campaign Finance, and Compromised Governance
Raymond J. Devettere, Introduction to Virtue Ethics: Insights of the Ancient Greeks     

State Reform in Turkey: Reasons, Needs and Strategies

The state structure in Turkey including all its branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) at both the national and local levels has been shown to be ineffective, even irrelevant, to the ingrained demographic, social, economic and political exigencies of the country. One of the main reasons behind this is the collapse of public finance. Conventional rhetoric limiting solutions to administrative reform fails to provide a sufficiently broad enough context within which public sector reform in Turkey can be discussed. Turkey's determination to become a full member of the EU also necessitates a comprehensive and radical overhaul of the Turkish public sector with respect to efficiency and productivity. Five main strategies are proposed to assist Turkey in overcoming its state governance predicament: initiating and carrying out a state-wide reform by employing modern principles of public management; understanding and solving the problem of internal and external debts; enhancing the conditions of governance; reintroduc-ing and strengthening the principle of meritocracy in public sector and cooperating more with the EU.     

Testing Explanations of Strategic Voting in Legislatures: A Reexamination of the Compromise of 1790

A difficult yet prevalent problem in legislative politics is how to assess explanations when observable actions may not represent true (and unobserved) legislator preferences. We present a method for analyzing the validity of theoretical/historical accounts that unifies theory, history, and measurement. We argue that approaches to testing accounts of legislative behavior which are theoretically and historically agnostic are not always best and present an approach which: (1) forms an explicit explanation of behavior (here a simple dynamic voting game) that yields estimable parameter constraints, and (2) tests these constraints using a customized empirical model that is as consistent as possible with the explanation. We demonstrate the method using legislative voting data from the first Congress (1789–1791). Using the idea of sophisticated equivalents from voting theory we subject the traditional account of the “Compromise of 1790” to a statistical test and find that there is reason to doubt the claim that legislators of the time believed the specified log roll was taking place. The results suggest that the capital location and assumption issues were resolved independently.     

Federal policy mandating safer cigarettes: a hypothetical simulation of the anticipated population health gains or losses.

If manufacturing a safer cigarette is technically possible--an open question--then mandating that tobacco manufacturers improve the safety of cigarettes would likely have both positive and negative implications for the nation's health. On the one hand, removing toxins may reduce the incidence of smoking-related diseases and premature mortality in smokers. On the other hand, smokers might be less inclined to quit, those who have quit might resume the habit, and youth who have never smoked will have one less reason to avoid tobacco use. To assess the expected population health impacts of a legislative or regulatory mandate, we created the Tobacco Policy Model, a system dynamics computer simulation model. The model relies on secondary data and simulates the U.S. population over time spans as long as 50 years. Our simulation results reveal that even if requiring cigarettes to be safer makes smoking more attractive and increases tobacco use, a net gain in population health is still possible.     

Leviathan and Fiscal Illusion in Local Government Overlapping Jurisdictions

This paper integrates twomodels of local government behavior,leviathan and fiscal illusion, into theframework of overlapping jurisdictions.Estimation of the leviathan and fiscalillusion variables without accounting forvertical effects between overlappingjurisdictions results in overestimation ofthe horizontal effects. Using a medianvoter model and municipal and county datawe find support for the leviathan modelusing traditional tests. These effects arelargely offset, however, when the test isset within the context of the verticalrelationship. We find that municipal percapita expenditures and county per capitaexpenditures are symmetricallycomplementary.