Impact of a Secondary School Depression Prevention Curriculum on Adolescent Social-Emotional Skills: Evaluation of the Resilient Families Program

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - School-based mental health intervention programs have demonstrated efficacy for the prevention and reduction of depressive symptoms, though the effect tends to be...     

Accountability in Public Management Networks: An Analysis of Cost Monitoring in Chicago Municipal Networks

Public management networks (PMNs) continue to proliferate as governance becomes more complex, and so does the need to hold them accountable. Agency and collaboration theories provide a solid foundation, but additional constructs are necessary to adapt to this dynamic era. Building from Bovens et al. (2008), the authors offer an ecological framework of third-party accountability that incorporates a number of prominent accountability theories under the same construct. Employing a mixed-methods research design that examines eight local PMNs in the Chicago region, the study finds that an exemplar accountability mechanism—additional cost monitoring—occurs more often in situations predicted by the framework. Additionally, qualitative interviews of network participants suggest that cost structures can differ by network type, which is verified quantitatively.     

So Close,but so Far? The Davies Commission and the Contested Politics of UK Airport Expansion

Aviation expansion and the construction of a third runway at Heathrow airport is firmly back on the political agenda. Yet, the stark fact remains that a growing list of British governments has been unable to engineer a partial or temporary policy settlement in aviation. In exploring the challenges of reaching such a settlement, this article characterises the shifting and contested political and policy contexts of UK aviation. It begins by exploring the ‘wicked issue’ of aviation expansion before foregrounding how the politics of air travel is riven by competing policy frames, fragmented governance and the absence of gatekeepers. It argues that the Davies Commission and its efforts to remove aviation from the domain of partisan politics provided little more than a temporary respite for government. It thus concludes by questioning whether the May government's expansion proposals will succeed this time around, outlining how the contributions in this collection address the themes and issues of this overriding policy puzzle.     

Intra-Campaign Changes in Voting Preferences: The Impact of Media and Party Communication

An increasing number of citizens change and adapt their party preferences during the electoral campaign. We analyze which short-term factors explain intra-campaign changes in voting preferences, focusing on the visibility and tone of news media reporting and party canvassing. Our analyses rely on an integrative data approach, linking data from media content analysis to public opinion data. This enables us to investigate the relative impact of news media reporting as well as party communication. Inherently, we overcome previously identified methodological problems in the study of communication effects on voting behavior. Our findings reveal that campaigns matter: Especially interpersonal party canvassing increases voters’ likelihood to change their voting preferences in favor of the respective party, whereas media effects are limited to quality news outlets and depend on individual voters’ party ambivalence.     

Beyond the media's explanation: Examining the determinants of attitudes toward torture

The question of what constitutes torture has perhaps never held as prominent a place in US political discourse as it has since the attacks on 9/11. This has fueled a national conversation that causes us to consider to what extent do our actions as a nation reflect our values as a nation? In a post 9/11 world in which the country will confront terrorism at home and abroad and our values will be tested we should strive for a better understanding of citizens' attitudes towards the practices that are (and have been) used to counter terrorism. To the extent that democratic theory is correct in necessitating public policy and public opinions to be reasonably congruent, understanding the distribution and formation of citizen attitudes towards torture is an important endeavor.     

Intervention and Statebuilding Beyond the Human: From the ‘Black Box’ to the ‘Great Outdoors’

This article analyses intervention and statebuilding as shifting towards a posthuman discursive regime. It seeks to explore how the shift to ‘bottom-up’ or post-liberal approaches has evolved into a focus upon epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It attempts to describe a process of reflection upon intervention as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations – in order to take problems seriously – begins to further undermine confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the bottom-up approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of intervention, seems to further intensify it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis seems to be found in the rejection of the aspiration to know from a position of a ‘problem-solving’ external authority and instead to learn from the opportunities opened up through the practices of intervention. However, what is learnt does not seem to be able to fit into traditional modes and categories of expertise.     

“The Higher You Fly,the Further You Fall”: White-Collar Criminals, “Special Sensitivity” and the Impact of Conviction in the United Kingdom

The resilience of some high-profile white-collar criminals in the media gaze after prison may lead some to conclude, particularly as some research also supports this notion, that this group of offenders generally manages well after conviction. Research in this area is, however, small and largely American. The authors seek to add to this small body of research by offering findings on the impact of conviction on 17 UK convicted white-collar criminals after completion of their sentence. It provides a unique insight into the consequences of conviction, showing that although there were some offenders who did experience limited impact and coped well, there was also a significant group who suffered a decline in status, financial losses, negative media coverage, and relationship and mental health problems, to name some. The authors argue more research is needed on this group and their needs as they are often neglected by the criminal justice system.     

Extreme idealism and equilibrium in the Hotelling–Downs model of political competition

In the classic Hotelling–Downs model of political competition, no pure strategy equilibrium with three or more strategic candidates exists when the distribution of voters’ preferred policies is unimodal. I study the effect of introducing two idealist candidates to the model who are non-strategic (i.e., fixed to their policy platforms), while allowing for an unlimited number of strategic candidates. Doing so, I show that equilibrium is restored for a non-degenerate set of unimodal distributions. In addition, the equilibria have the following features: (1) the left-most and right-most candidates (i.e., extremists) are idealists; (2) strategic candidates never share their policy platforms, which instead are spread out across the policy space; and (3) if more than one strategic candidate enters, the distribution of voter preferences must be asymmetric. I also show that equilibria can accommodate idealist fringes of candidates toward the extremes of the political spectrum.     

Complex Contracting: Management Challenges and Solutions

Governments at all levels buy mission‐critical goods and services whose attributes and performance requirements are hard to define and produce. Many governments—and the public managers who lead them—lack experience and knowledge about how to contract for complex products. The contract management counsel provided to public managers is thin. Missing is a conceptual managerial framework to guide purchasing the complex products that are often so critical to public organizations' core missions. Drawing on perspectives from across the social sciences, the framework presented in this article provides guidance on how managers can harness the upsides of complex contracting while avoiding its pitfalls. The framework helps identify conditions that increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for the purchasing government and the vendor—the win‐win. To illustrate the framework, the article provides examples of successful and failed acquisitions for complex products such as transportation projects, social service systems, and information technology systems.