Reviews and notes

A response to block and Hirschhorn ? This piece grew out of discussions between the author and several (but not all) members of the editorial collective.

The Capitalist State: Its ‘Relative Autonomy’ Reexamined ? Presented at the 1981 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 8–11, 1981.

Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross, New York: M. Evans and Co., Inc., 1980, $15.95. ISBN 0–87131–317–0.

Wealth and Power in America by Gabriel Kolko, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1962, 178 pp.; American Class Society in Numbers edited by Bob Howard and John Logue, Kent, OH: Kent Popular Press, 1978, 98 pp.; Class in the United States: Workers Against Capitalists by Charles Loren, Davis, CA: Cardinal Publishers, 296 pp., 1977.

Feminism and Materialism. Women and Modes of Production, edited by Annette Kohn and AnnMarie Wolpe (London, Boston and Henley: Rout‐ledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), viii, 328 pp., paperback $9.00.

An Interview with Jacques Attali ? Jacques Attali was chief economic adviser to Mitterand before the Socialist Party victory in France.      

Winning the Battle of Ideas: Propaganda,Ideology, and Terror

Propaganda is at the heart of the struggle between Al Qaeda's strain of militant Islamism and the governments of the United States and United Kingdom. In an ideological struggle, propaganda is critical in shaping outcomes. Both Al Qaeda and the U.S. and U.K. governments recognize this, and have devised propaganda strategies to construct and disseminate messages for key audiences. This article considers the key elements in the Al Qaeda propaganda narrative, and the means through which it is disseminated. On the other side, it assesses the U.S. and U.K. governments’ response, focusing particularly on the British effort to define and propagate a narrative centered on British values.     

The Age Structure-Crime Rate Relationship: Solving a Long-Standing Puzzle

Objectives

Develop the concept of differential institutional engagement and test its ability to explain discrepant findings regarding the relationship between the age structure and homicide rates across ecological studies of crime. We hypothesize that differential degrees of institutional engagement—youths with ties to mainstream social institutions such as school, work or the military on one end of the spectrum and youths without such bonds on the other end—account for the direction of the relationship between homicide rates and age structure (high crime prone ages, such as 15–29).

Methods

Cross sectional, Ordinary Least Squares regression analyses using robust standard errors are conducted using large samples of cities characterized by varying degrees of youths’ differential institutional engagement for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000. The concept is operationalized with the percent of the population enrolled in college and the percent of 16–19 year olds who are simultaneously not enrolled in school, not in the labor market (not in the labor force or unemployed), and not in the military.

Results

Consistent and invariant results emerged. Positive effects of age structure on homicide rates are found in cities that have high percentages of disengaged youth and negative effects are found among cities characterized with high percentages of youth participating in mainstream social institutions.

Conclusions

This conceptualization of differential institutional engagement explains the discrepant findings in prior studies, and the findings demonstrate the influence of these contextual effects and the nature of the age structure-crime relationship.     

The Impact of Subnational Fiscal Policies on Economic Growth: A Dynamic Analysis Approach

Much previous research has analyzed the effect of state and local taxes and expenditures on economic growth, but usually in a static manner. In this paper, we use panel vector autoregression (PVAR) to examine the effects of taxes and expenditures on state income growth. This methodology allows us to treat all variables in the model as endogenously determined. Our approach allows us to address the endogeneity problem inherent in fiscal policy research as well as to obtain results for both the short term and intermediate term (up to six years). Consistent with prevailing wisdom, taxes are shown to have a negative effect on economic growth, but the effect only is present in the short run. Public capital spending has a positive effect on growth in both the short and intermediate terms. Operational expenditures exhibit positive effects on growth over the entire analysis period.     

制度变迁与基础教育公平

改革中的基础教育资源的不均衡配置使得弱势群体子女在获得基础教育方面处于劣势地位.为了维护基础教育的公正,地方政府应当关注住房制度改革与基础教育制度之间的交互作用,在城市规划、保障性住房建设过程中均衡基础教育资源配置,通过政策和市场手段维护基础教育的公平与效率.