Building capacity in indigenous governance: Comparing the Australian and American experiences

This paper compares key aspects of governance structures for Indigenous populations in the United States and Australia. The paper focuses on policy coordination and administration, in particular the nodes of decision-making in the two countries in relation to government contracting and accountability. The U.S. approach to funding Indigenous organizations stems from the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Act and its subsequent expansions. Through the development of contracting into permanent compacting via block grants, this approach builds established nodes of Indigenous government and facilitates whole-of-government coherence at the level of the American Indian tribe. The U.S. approach seems correlated with better performance and may lighten bureaucratic loads over the long term. The Australian model, on the other hand, seeks to create whole-of-government coherence through top-down financial accountability in a way that hampers the development of Indigenous political capacity. The paper traces the development of these practices through time and illustrates how they contribute to the fragmentation rather than growth of Indigenous political capacities. It suggests ways the Australian model could be improved even in the absence of fundamental reform by drawing on the contracting-to-compacting framework of longstanding U.S. practices.     

The emerging political economy of austerity in Britain

This paper uses data from the British Election Study's Continuous Monitoring Surveys to investigate reactions of the British public to the economic crisis and the austerity policies the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government has adopted to deal with it. Multivariate models informed by competing valence and positional theories of electoral choice are employed to study the impact of these reactions on support for the Conservative Party and Prime Minister David Cameron and evaluations of the Conservatives' ability to handle important issues. Analyses indicate that there is widespread and growing pessimism about the prospects of resolving the economic crisis in the near future. Since the crisis began in 2008, the dynamics of these bearish attitudes have been closely linked to rising unemployment rates. Differing positions regarding the Coalition's austerity policies exert sizable effects on party support, but these attitudes have not negated the force of valence politics considerations such as party leader images, partisan attachments and global assessments of party performance.     

Defining Defamation: Community in the Age of the Internet

The ability to instantly communicate with a global audience has created numerous legal uncertainties as jurists struggle to adapt age-old jurisprudence to modern-day technologies —and defamation jurisprudence is no exception. The definition of a plaintiff's community is critical to his or her ability to succeed in a defamation lawsuit, often determining whether the plaintiff is a public figure or whether the plaintiff's reputation has been injured in his or her community. This article examines federal and state defamation jurisprudence to compare the factors courts have used to define community in both traditional print and broadcast cases with the factors used in more recent Internet defamation cases. It then suggests three possible rubrics courts could employ to more uniformly define community in Internet defamation cases.     

Tolerance and Intolerance, 1976–1998

Early students of political tolerance projected a rapid rise in levels of tolerance, but subsequent research has failed to offer conclusive evidence regarding whether tolerance has, in fact, increased. The General Social Survey (GSS) included the same 15 dichotomous tolerance items in the period 1976–1998, seemingly permitting assessment of trends in tolerance through examination of a standard 0–15 scale. Unfortunately, the validity of these data is uncertain because we cannot rule out the possibility that changes in affect toward the five GSS target groups, not true changes in tolerance, drive movement in the longitudinal series. To address this problem, we reexamine the GSS data from the perspective of past discussions of the meaning of tolerance and intolerance. We argue that that the GSS scale captures two aspects of tolerance: whether respondents are tolerant or intolerant; and, among the intolerant, the breadth and depth of their intolerance. We further argue that the first of these dimensions can be measured validly using the GSS data. Our analyses reveal that, at most, tolerance has increased only marginally in the period 1976–1998.     

Effectiveness of citizen police academies in changing the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of citizen participants

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the citzen police academies (CPA) in two cities were effective in changing participants’ attitudes, beliefs, and behavior toward police. Pre-and post-test questionnaires were used to obtain participants’ ratings of their attitudes and beliefs concerning police officers and their willingness to cooperate with police. Participants were also asked to indicate what cooperative behaviors they had actually engaged in before and/or during the CPA. At the end of the CPA, participants in both cities rated themselves as having more positive attitudes toward police, and more willingness to engage in behaviors that would help police. There was also an increase in actual performance of some cooperative behaviors during the CPA. These changes did not seem to be overly dependent on the jurisdiction (large versus small city), the demographics of the CPA participants, or the specific characteristics of the CPA curriculum.     

Yes we can! Valence politics and electoral choice in America, 2008

The claim that the 2008 presidential election was a transformative one is fast becoming part of the conventional wisdom of American politics. Despite the election’s undoubted significance, this paper argues that factors affecting voting decisions were strikingly similar to those operating in many previous presidential elections. Using data from the CCAP six-wave national election survey, we demonstrate that a valence politics model provides a powerful, parsimonious explanation of the ballot decisions Americans made in 2008. As is typical in presidential elections, candidate images had major effects on electoral choice. Controlling for several other relevant factors, racial attitudes were strongly associated with how voters reacted to the candidates. Other models of electoral choice, such as a Downsian issue-proximity model, are also relevant, but their explanatory power is considerably less than that provided by the valence politics model.     

Is there a “common law” of responsibility?

Contrary to common expectations and a good deal of legal folk wisdom, several surveys have failed to find group differences in the way people attribute responsibility and assign punishments. These nonfinding, suggest that there is a considerable degree of consensus about how to judge wrongdoing. The nature of this consensus is examined using survey data collected in two Japanese and one American cities. We examine the extent of group differences in the evaluation of inputs (here a set of hypothetical vignettes), decision rules, and punishments. The paper concludes with a discussion of the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues raised by these and similar findings of small group differences. Collectively, these three issues define, an agenda for future research on the nature and extent of a common law of responsibility.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 1986 meeting of the Law and Society Association. The research was supported by seed funds from the Social Science Research Council and from the University of Michigan and by N.S.F. grant No. SOC 77-242918. Japanese data were gathered and analyzed with support from the Nihon Gakujutsu Shinkokai and Mombusho to the Japanese investigators: Yoko Hosoi, Zensuke Ishimura, Nozomu Matsubara, Haruo Nishimura, Nobuho Tomita, and Kazuhiko Tokoro. They have recently published a book on the project. (Ishimura et al., 1986).