LONG‐TERM TRENDS IN CRIMES OF VIOLENCE (COMMENT ON COONEY, 2003)*

Empirical and theoretical issues posed by Mark Cooney's (2003) analysis of long‐term trends in crimes of violence are discussed.     

National Government Policy Options for Contributing to Regional Economic Stability: The US Department of Energy's Major Nuclear Weapons Sites

We have conducted economic simulation, historical, and survey research that considers the national government's obligation to the regions that surround the places where it developed and tested nuclear weapons. The research shows that the strongest case for an obligation is at four site regions: Hanford (Washington), Idaho, Oak Ridge (Tennessee), and Savannah River (Georgia, South Carolina). These four are dependent on the Department of Energy (DOE), have relatively low incomes, are expected to grow less economically than their counterparts and the nation as a whole, and suffer from environmental stigma. We reviewed and simulated the impacts of a variety of tools, including severance packages, onsite projects, and offsite economic investments. In essence, investments in severance packages, education, and recreation are more effective per dollar invested than high technology, but all investments are less effective in these dependent regions than in larger metropolitan areas because of the economic leakage out of these dependent regions. The national government needs to begin a process of working with these regions to help them deal with the shock of shrinking their dependency on the DOE.     

GOVERNING MENTAL HEALTH CARE: HOW POWER IS EXERTED IN AND THROUGH A QUALITY IMPROVEMENT COLLABORATIVE

We investigated the role of power in public governance using a Foucauldian conceptualization of power, i.e., power is produced by a range of techniques as diverse as language and measuring. We draw on an evaluation study of a quality improvement collaborative, in which different mental health care organizations were encouraged to improve their care in a structured way. We analyzed how the different actors involved in the collaborative were governed and came to govern themselves differently. Measurement instruments were an example of a dominant mechanism by which actors at different levels of the collaborative were governed: by accounting for improvements, introducing or strengthening a certain way of thinking about health care clients, and changing how clients thought about and acted upon themselves. We argue that the focus on consequences of governing techniques is fruitful for studying governmentality and leads to new research questions in the context of public policy analyses.