Innovation traditions,energy conditions,and state energy policy adoption

From 1974 to 1980, many conservation and renewable energy policies were adopted at the state level in the United States. Some states were particularly active in enacting such policies while others were totally inactive. The variation in state policy activity is only modestly related to the states' past policy innovation traditions and conservation/renewable energy opportunities. Differences in energy vulnerability, and the relative hardship imposed by the energy crisis, have apparently had even less impact on the adoption pattern. These weak or insignificant relationships are typical of other efforts to explain state energy policy variations and are attributed to six qualitative factors: Federal preemption and inconsistency, ambivalent public opinion, conflicting values, lack of information on state energy conditions, and ignorance of the impacts of renewable energy and conservation policies. The findings identify several actions to increase sensitivity toward state energy conditions in policymaking.     

Mutual engagement: Criminology and the sociology of law

How are conceptions of crime as abnormal sustained in the face ofpersistent sociological evidence that crime is normal? While ostensiblyexpressing different images of crime, together the accounts of crime asepisodic ruptures of the social fabric and as a normal feature of healthysocieties sustain the possibility of the sociality necessary for collective life.This paper explores the contradictory relationships between law and crimeas a normal feature of social life and crime as a rupture in the social web.Decades of research in crime, law and deviance have documented howcrime is a constituent and normal feature of any legal system: theorized asan aspect of law; professionally managed through law andinterpreted on the basis of the normal and conventionalcharacter of events and relationships; organized as a reflection andreproduction the encompassing social structure; experienced as familiar,ordinary and frequent. Crime is a normal and expected feature of any legalsystem whose anticipation is a resource for the production of law. Yet inpopular culture, rather than professional sociology, crime is experienced asbizarre, abnormal, a distinct rupture of what is conventionally portrayedas a seamless web of normative conformity. Conceptions of law'sabnormality helps to maintain normal appearances, to sustain the illusionof society, to individualize the event as one person's pathology, to containits threat, and to turn it into an economically and professionally managedproject. The contradictory cultural representations and experiences helpsustain a hegemonic reality in which crime is both a usual feature ofordinary social life to be understood and managed like any other mundanematter, and an episodic event that need not challenge confidence in whatis in effect a reified conception of society.     

Unintended consequences: Regulating the quality of subsidized day care

Advocates for the poor frequently support uniform, high federal standards for subsidized social services. While such standards may improve the quality of services for those who qualify, they can also have unintended but important side effects. Stringent regulations may actually curtail the supply of services, promote segregation, and expand the role of large subsidized for-profit firms. All these possibilities are illustrated by the history of federal regulation in subsidizing child day care. The federal government's retreat from regulation in 1980 and 1981 may have had results that—even if unintended—were in many ways salutary.     

Women in labour: The flapper vote and party system transformation in Britain

The impact of the enfranchisement of women under 30 upon the British party system is analyzed, especially the extent to which the Labour party at a crucial period in its rise to major party status was able to mobilize an uncommitted major segment of the electorate. The analysis seeks to supply an explanation missing from Butler and Stokes' finding of a sizable gender difference in class crossover voting among the interwar cohort. Both substantive and symbolic mobilization efforts are analyzed. Analysis of constituency electoral results for elections from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s finds that the political crisis of 1931 undermined Labour's efforts to mobilize the female vote and appears in particular to have driven substantial numbers of working class women to vote for other parties, thereby weakening their support for Labour well into the postwar period. Labour's failure to mobilize young women meant that it was able to obtain major party status only when World War II experiences caused a substantial number of middle class men to swing to the party