Integrating Voting Theory and Roll Call Analysis: A Framework

Scholars of legislative studies typically use ideal point estimatesfrom scaling procedures to test theories of legislative politics.We contend that theory and methods may be better integratedby directly incorporating maintained and to be tested hypothesesin the statistical model used to estimate legislator preferences.In this view of theory and estimation, formal modeling (1) providesauxiliary assumptions that serve as constraints in the estimationprocess, and (2) generates testable predictions. The estimationand hypothesis testing procedure uses roll call data to evaluatethe validity of theoretically derived to be tested hypothesesin a world where maintained hypotheses are presumed true. Wearticulate the approach using the language of statistical inference(both frequentist and Bayesian). The approach is demonstratedin analyses of the well-studied Powell amendment to the federalaid-to-education bill in the 84th House and the Compromise of1790 in the 1st House.     

Questioning Appeals to Community within Crime Prevention and Control

This article casts a critical eye over some of the (often ignored) assumptions which underlie recent appeals to community in crime prevention and control. The article considers the philosophical origins, ambiguities and tensions within such appeals. In so doing, it draws explicitly upon the growth of community safety and to a lesser extent restorative justice in Britain and considers some of the implications to which this shift may give rise. In particular, it focuses upon the manner in which appeals to community converge and collide with changing social relations which may undermine their progressive potential. Specific attention is given to the implications of: increasing social and spatial dislocation; the commodification of security; and policy debates about a growing underclass. It is argued that there is much confusion as to how, and to what extent, communities can contribute to the construction of social order. Within the dynamics of community safety and crime control practices there are dangers that security differentials may become increasingly significant characteristics of wealth and status with implications for social exclusion. This questions the extent to which crime is an appropriate vehicle around which to (re)construct open and tolerant communities.     

Assessing policy capacity in Canada's public services: Perspectives of deputy and assistant deputy ministers

Abstract: The state of policy capacity within Canada's various levels of government has for some time been the subject of discussion both within the public services themselves and among the academic research community. Drawing on the results of a 2006 survey of deputy and assistant deputy ministers working in Canada's federal, ten provincial and three territorial governments, this article presents assessments made by the most senior leadership. The survey results show that ninety per cent of deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers agree that policy capacity has changed but that the change is not uni‐directional. Both improvements and decline in policy capacity were observed, although assessments of decline were somewhat more pronounced. Moreover, improvements in policy capacity were found to be associated with a reduced focus on direct service delivery, a greater concern with long‐term planning, and the presence of a political leadership interested in innovation. Conversely, declining policy capacity was found to be linked to centralization of power, the loss of institutional memory, and “churning” within the ranks of the executive leadership. Additionally, level of government was also observed to be linked with change in policy capacity, with provincial deputies reflecting more negatively on policy capacity decline in their government than deputies at other levels.     

The “Science of Science Policy”: reflections on the important questions and the challenges they present

Developing the “Science of Science Policy” will require data collection and analysis related to the processes of innovation and technological change, and the effects of government policy on those processes. There has been much work on these topics in the last three decades, but there remain difficult problems of finding proxies for subtle concepts, endogeneity, distinguishing private and social returns, untangling cumulative effects, measuring the impact of government programs in a true “but for” sense, and sorting out national and global effects. I offer observations on how to think about these issues. This paper was presented as the Keynote Address at the NSF Workshop on Advancing Measures of Innovation: Knowledge Flows, Business Metrics, and Measurement Strategies, Arlington, VA, June 2006.     

The importance of “spillovers” in the policy mission of the advanced technology program

Government policies like the Advanced Technology Program (“ATP”) are intended, at least in part, to remedy the “market failure” inherent in the fact that a significant portion of the social benefits of new knowledge and technology are not captured by a firm that invests in R&D. ATP’s project selection, and its evaluation of the impact of its program, can be made more effective by explicitly incorporating the analysis of such “spillovers.” For project selection, this means identifying technological, organizational and economic factors that tend to oint to a large “spillover gap,” or deviation between the social and private rates of return to a proposed project. For program evaluation and assessment, it means adapting existing study methods that measure social returns to innovation in ways that explicitly capture spillover effects. This paper is based on a study that I performed for the ATP, Economic Analysis of Research Spillovers: Implications for the Advanced Technology Program, NIST GCR 97-708. I have benefited from comments and useful discussions with Zvi Griliches, Jeanne Powell, Rosalie Ruegg, and Richard Spivack. Some of the ideas in this paper grew out of previous joint research with James Adams. The views expressed herein are my own, however, and should not be attributed to any of these individuals or to the ATP.