Retrieving administrative data to assess long-term outcomes: a case study of the 23-year follow-up of the Milwaukee domestic violence experiment

Objectives

To describe how social scientists, criminal justice practitioners, and administrative agencies collected administrative data to follow-up a criminological experiment after two decades. To make recommendations that will guide similar long-term follow-ups.

Methods

A case study approach describes the processes of and sociological benefits to collecting administrative data to assess criminal justice and life-course outcomes.

Results

While maintaining experimental integrity, we developed, executed, and verified processes to retrieve arrest, mortality, and residential data for the experimental subjects, which enabled us to complete the longest ever follow-up of a criminal justice experiment.

Conclusions

When experiments have policy implications, administrative data may be preferable to survey data for assessing primary effects. Successful social science research can be conducted in conjunction with multiple administrative agencies.

     

False Profits: Why Product Counterfeiting is Increasing

Product counterfeiting has grown in scope, scale and complexity in the last two decades, and now affects many areas of manufacturing and retailing from clothes and CDs to items such as shampoo and vehicle components. Based on a wide range of interviews in the UK, this article argues that despite recent legislative change and increased criminal penalties for counterfeiters, enforcement is haphazard, resource problems often dictate that no criminal prosecution is undertaken, and actual penalties remain low. Moreover, questions of whether or not a particular item is counterfeit have become greatly complicated by the development of outsourcing and the rise of parallel trading. These points suggest that counterfeiting is likely to grow in the future.     

Program Budgeting and Accountability in Local Government

Much has been written about program budgeting and its relevance to improved efficiency and effectiveness. However, there is little discussion about the relationship between the use of program budgeting and accountability. While, organisations using program budgeting focus on the issues of performance, the accountability of management to an elected body, such as a local council has been given little attention. In this article three questions are posed: (1) Is the performance information available to enable councillors to form a judgment about management's performance?; (2) Is management involved in determining issues of policy, such as objectives, programs and performance measurement?; and (3) Are councillors confronted by a greater volume of budgetary documentation but with no increase in time to consider it? The results show that program budgeting does not always enhance accountability in local government.     

An Analysis of Introducing Program Budgeting in Local Government

Program budgeting has been in use for 30 years. It has had a checkered history, being considered alternately a great advancement or an unworkable system. Little has been written about the consequences for the organization that has adopted it. This study was undertaken concerning local government across the State of Victoria, Australia. A questionnaire was sent to all municipalities. There was a 60 percent response rate. Results show that information generated by planning programming budgeting (PPB) is used for decision making but in a limited way. The proposition that PPB will have an impact on the operations of councils is only partially supported.     

Electoral bias at the 2015 general election: reducing Labour’s electoral advantage

Electoral bias results in an asymmetrical seat distribution between parties with similar vote shares. Over recent British general elections Labour held an advantage because it efficiently converted votes into seats. Following the 2015 election result this advantage has reduced considerably, principally because Labour’s vote distribution saw it accumulate more ineffective votes, particularly where electoral support was not converted into seats. By contrast, the vote distribution of the Conservative party is now superior to that of Labour because it acquired fewer wasted votes although Labour retains a modest advantage overall because it benefits from inequalities in electorate size and differences in voter turnout. Features of the 2015 election, however, raise general methodological challenges for decomposing electoral bias. The analysis, therefore, considers the effect of substituting the Liberal Democrats as the third party with the United Kingdom Independence Party. It also examines the outcome in Scotland separately from that in England and Wales. Following this analysis it becomes clear that the method for decomposing electoral bias requires clearer guidelines for its application in specific settings.     

Peer effects in private and public schools across countries

Many argue that the composition of a school or classroom‐that is, the characteristics of the students themselves‐affect the educational attainment of an individual student. This influence of the students in a classroom is often referred to as a peer effect. There have been few systematic studies that empirically examine the peer effect in the educational process. In this research, we examine the peer effect with a unique data set that includes individual student achievement scores and comprehensive characteristics of the students' families, teachers, other school characteristics, and peers for five countries. The data allow an examination of peer effects in both private and public schools in all countries. Our analysis indicates that peer effects are a significant determinant of educational achievement; the effects of peers appear to be greater for low‐ability students than for high‐ability students. The finding is robust across countries but not robust across school type. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

A method for measuring and decomposing electoral bias for the three-party case, illustrated by the British case

The measurement of bias in election results, whereby one or more parties are advantaged in the translation of votes into seats at the expense of others, is attracting increasing attention. So far, almost all of the analytical work – aimed at both identifying the extent of bias in an election result and establishing its causes – has focused on either two-party systems or on the largest two parties in multi-party systems. Building on the firm foundations of one such approach, this paper introduces an original procedure for analysing bias in three-party systems using a readily-appreciated metric for both evaluating the degree of bias and decomposing it into the various causal factors. This is illustrated using the example of the 2005 British general election and a comparison of the results from two-party and three-party analyses of six recent elections there.     

Pictures at an exhibition revisited: reflections on a typology of images used in the construction of corporate social responsibility and sustainability in non‐financial corporate reporting

• Strategic corporate and public affairs communication about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged as a major component of corporate efforts to interact with their stakeholders and society at large. Non‐financial reporting, and CSR reporting in particular, is now seen as an essential corporate communication process by most members of a company's stakeholder community. This growth in CSR reporting has been driven by the need to increase corporate transparency and accountability concerning social and environmental issues. Arguably, the European Union is the most progressive region in adopting CSR reporting. Almost all of Europe's top 100 companies report on social and environmental performance, whilst figures for the USA and the rest of the world are much lower. The latest Accountability Rating concludes that ‘Europe leads, America lags’ after measuring companies' social and environmental impacts.
• The authors argue that visual communication is as important as words and numbers in creating meaning and assess UK and German Companies' non‐financial performance. Utilizing a range of research methods including content analysis and semiotic interpretation the authors propose a typology of images used in non‐financial reporting. This typology and associated conceptual development can used to more accurately define and interpret CSR and sustainability.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The evolving discipline of public affairs

• Approaching the tenth anniversary of this Journal of Public Affairs, as the editorial team we offer this extended literature review as our reflection on the evolution and development of public affairs, both as an academic discipline and a professional practice. It is a necessarily personal and subjective contribution, highlighting the issues and areas which we believe represent significant continuing debates. The article considers how public affairs is, and should be, defined; examines the range of activities which theorists and practitioners understand as falling within the scope of corporate public affairs; analyses the relationship between public affairs and corporate political activity as different though complementary fields; discusses the importance of the public issues life cycle and the issues management models; and calls upon the public affairs community to defend the position of public affairs as the fundamental bridge between the organisation, society and government, in the face of challenges from other organisational functions.

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.