Legislators and Administrators: Complex Relationships Complicated by Term Limits

State legislators' relationships with administrators have received scant attention in the literature despite the importance of these relationships for delivery of public services. We explored whether or not the legislator‐administrator relationship in one professional state legislature resembles Congress's oversight of federal agencies. We also assessed whether or not term limits changed this relationship. Our findings indicate that monitoring state agencies was a low priority for this legislature, and it dropped even lower after term limits were implemented. More specifically, we found some institutional roles to be associated with legislators placing a higher priority on monitoring, especially before term limits, whereas some individual motives were associated with a lower priority, especially after term limits. Legislators exhibited more confusion about the process of monitoring after term limits.     

DOES IMPRISONMENT ALTER THE LIFE COURSE? EVIDENCE ON CRIME AND EMPLOYMENT FROM A NATURAL EXPERIMENT

Ex‐prisoners consistently manifest high rates of criminal recidivism and unemployment. Existing explanations for these poor outcomes emphasize the stigmatizing effects of imprisonment on prisoners seeking postrelease employment as well as the deleterious effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ attitudes and capabilities. However, these explanations must be distinguished from selection effects in the criminal sentencing process, which also could explain some or all of these poor outcomes. To distinguish between criminogenic and selection explanations for ex‐prisoners’ postrelease experience, I analyze data from a natural experiment in which criminal cases were assigned randomly to judges with sizable sentencing disparities. Using these exogenous sentencing disparities, I produce unbiased estimates of the causal effects of imprisonment on the life course. The results of this analysis suggest that selection effects could be sufficiently large to account for prisoners’ poor postrelease outcomes because judges with large sentencing disparities in their use of imprisonment had similarly high caseload unemployment and criminal recidivism rates.     

The Juvenile Delinquency Problem in Japan: Application of a Role Relationship Model

The purpose of this paper is to seek a better understanding of the social conditions within Japan which may be related to the increasing rates of juvenile delinquency. This trend is in sharp contrast to their overall crime patterns. In fact, as reported by Ames (1981:1), Japan has the lowest crime rate in the industrialized world, and its crime totals have declined since 1955. Within this article, we discuss youth crime trends, explain the applicability of a role relationship model, discuss the breakdown in informal social control/social relationship areas, and suggest implications for Western societies.     

Liberal Nationalism,Imagined Immigration and the Progressive Dilemma

The article critically evaluates liberal nationalist perspectives on immigration by drawing on findings from a qualitative research project undertaken in 2014 among White British interviewees in England. From one perspective the study's participants' attitudes seem to support arguments made by David Goodhart and other liberal nationalists regarding immigration, social trust and integration. However, further analysis suggests that these attitudes are to a very significant extent drawn first from partially imagined ideas surrounding immigration and second from potentially unreliable sources. These findings thus provoke the question of whether social trust and notions of a national community are actually being disrupted by immigration, or whether they are being disrupted by prejudiced nationalist and xenophobic perceptions about immigration and immigrants. The article will conclude by arguing for more nuanced research into attitudes towards immigration and in favour of a sceptical approach to nationalist frameworks for interpreting society and politics in Britain today.     

Party Differentiation in Congress

Abstract At times, the American political parties are so close in terms of policy positions that critics denounce the lack of a “dime's worth of difference” between them. At other times, the gap between them on a left‐right dimension is huge. How can we explain this variation? We argue that parties can behave rationally as collective units, and that shifts in divergence and convergence can be explained as rational responses to changes within governmental institutions and to shifts in conditions outside. We analyze this argument using adjusted ADA scores (Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder 1999) to compare voting score differences between the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress from 1952 to 1996. We pose specific hypotheses for potentially important factors shaping party behavior and test them with a multivariate model. Our results support the argument that the variation in the behavioral gap between the two parties in Congress can be explained as rational party responses to internal and external stimuli.