The effect of attending full‐day kindergarten on English learner students

A significant and growing English learner (EL) population attends public schools in the United States. Evidence suggests they are at a disadvantage when entering school and their achievement lags behind non‐EL students. Some educators have promoted full‐day kindergarten programs as especially helpful for EL students. We take advantage of the large EL population and variation in full‐day kindergarten implementation in the Los Angeles Unified School District to examine the impact of full‐day kindergarten on academic achievement, retention, and English language fluency using difference‐in‐differences models. We do not find signficant effects of full‐day kindergarten on most academic outcomes and English fluency through second grade. However, we find that EL students attending full‐day kindergarten were 5 percentage points less likely to be retained before second grade and there are differential effects for several outcomes by student and school characteristics. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Politics and the life sciences: an unfinished revolution

Politics and the life sciences--also referred to as biopolitics--is a field of study that seeks to advance knowledge of politics and promote better policymaking through multidisciplinary analysis that draws on the life sciences. While the intellectual origins of the field may be traced at least into the 1960s, a broadly organized movement appeared only with the founding of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) in 1980 and the establishment of its journal, Politics and the Life Sciences ( PLS ), in 1982. This essay--contributed by a past journal editor and association executive director--concludes a celebration of the association's thirtieth anniversary. It reviews the founding of the field and the association, as well as the contributions of the founders. It also discusses the nature of the empirical work that will advance the field, makes recommendations regarding the identity and future of the association, and assesses the status of the revolution of which the association is a part. It argues that there is progress to celebrate, but that this revolution--the last of three great scientific revolutions--is still in its early stages. The revolution is well-started, but remains unfinished.     

Substitutability,securitisation and hydro-hegemony: ontological and strategic sequencing in shared river relations

When a river passes through multiple states, to what extent are those states able to co-operate over or come into conflict over that shared water source? To address this question, I build on previous literature that emphasised benefit sharing, securitisation narratives and basin-level hydro-hegemony to advance an ontologically and strategically sequential framework for understanding shared river relations. I apply that framework to explain the changes in the hydro-political relationship between Turkey and Syria with regard to the Euphrates River. From 1980 to 1998, the policy-makers in both states saw use of the Euphrates as helping the government achieve high priority political goals and perceived full usage of that water to be the only means of doing so. Therefore, they both securitised the issue of Euphrates water usage to a significant degree. This mutual securitisation drove the two states toward greater conflict. After 2000, each state found substitute means for those same goals and so reduced its securitisation of Euphrates water usage. This reduced securitisation facilitated greater co-operation between them.     

Multimethod Research

This article conceptualizes multimethod research as doing cross-case causal inference—statistical analyses, experiments, or Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)—together with within-case causal inference in the form of case studies. In addition, game theoretic multimethod work is explored as combining a game theoretic model with case studies. The role of case studies is to explore causal mechanisms which cannot be captured in the cross-case, for example, statistical analyses. The article then describes the logic of case selection for case studies in order to explore causal mechanisms. Various combinations of X and Y variables are analyzed, some of which are useful for causal mechanism analysis and others which are not. Finally, the Avoid Overdetermination Rule is presented, which deals with issues of confounders, control variables, and alternative explanations.     

Does Ethical Leadership Matter in Government? Effects on Organizational Commitment,Absenteeism, and Willingness to Report Ethical Problems

Recent ethical scandals involving managers in government organizations have highlighted the need for more research on ethical leadership in public sector organizations. To assess the consequences of ethical leadership, 161 managers in a large state government agency and 415 of their direct reports were surveyed, and personnel records were obtained to measure absenteeism. Results indicate that after controlling for the effects of employee characteristics, perceptions of procedural fairness, and supportive leader behavior, ethical leadership reduced absenteeism and had a positive influence on organizational commitment and willingness to report ethical problems. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are presented.     

Presidents and Patronage

To what extent do presidents select appointees based upon campaign experience and connections? The answer to this question has important implications for our understanding of presidential management and political leadership. This article presents a theory explaining where presidents place different types of appointees and why, focusing on differences in ideology, competence, and non‐policy patronage benefits among potential appointees. We develop a formal model and test its implications with new data on 1,307 persons appointed in the first six months of the Obama administration. The empirical results broadly support the theory, suggesting that President Obama was more likely to place appointees selected for non‐policy patronage reasons in agencies off his agenda, in agencies that shared his policy views, and where appointees are least able to affect agency performance. We conclude that patronage continues to play an important role in American politics, with important consequences for campaigns, presidential politics, and governance.