An Ambition‐Theoretic Approach to Legislative Organizational Choice

Understanding legislative organization requires that we understand internal institutional choice; we must be able to describe and predict variation in internal structures across legislatures rather than simply explain a given structure. Currently, models that would enable us to do so are largely unavailable. This article offers a more general model, based on a variant of ambition theory, with the explicit purpose of examining variation in internal organization rather than a particular structure. Theoretical results indicate that legislators' strategic preferences over structures will fall into distinct and opposed types. This finding implies that legislatures themselves should fall into the same types and that structures, rules, and norms should appear in organized, relatively coherent bundles linked to varying legislator types.     

TESTING THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: A Reduced Form Approach

There are three principal alternative explanations for the dramatic rise in crime over the last 15 years: (I) the retirement of capital punishment; (2) socioeconomic trends; (3) random social shocks starring with the Kennedy assassination in 1963. This article reports a statistical test of the second of these explanations. On balance, the results are unfavorable to it. The statistical test involves the extrapolation of a predicted homicide rate obtained from a reduced form regression equation estimated over the capital punishment era into the postcapital punishment era. The predicted homicide rate (based on socioeconomic variables) continues the long-run secular decline pattern after 1962, while the actual homicide rote rises precipitously. The article concludes with a brief argument that the capital punishment moratorium seems somewhat more plausible than the social shock theory as an explanation for the crime increase.     

MARIJUANA DECRIMINALIZATION RESEARCH

It can be argued that any objective reexamination of the marijuana laws and reformulation of public policy should necessarily be undertaken within some type of cost/ benefit perspective. As such, a paradigm might be structured which could examine the costs and benefits of the criminalization of marijuana vs. the benefits and costs of its decriminalization. On the one hand, there are the psychosocial costs of marijuana use which include any effects which might flow from the use of the drug. What the benefits of marijuana use might be, beyond the euphoric states and feelings of well being it offers, are yet to be fully determined. Yet by contrast. there are the human, social, and economic costs which flow from the criminalization of marijuana use. It is argued in this commentary that this paradigm can be used as a guide for decriminalization research. A variety of data sets and historical issues are briefly examined which fall within the parameters of this paradigm, and a series of research protocols which flow from the paradigm are addressed.     

MAINTAINING RESEARCH ACCESS IN POLICE ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract This paper explores certain of the general problems associated with maintaining research access in police organizations. Among the problems researchers are likely to encounter are difficulties in communicating and winning the acceptance of street-level patrol officers, problems in developing a mutually acceptable field role, and threats of premature termination. The solutions suggested include specific and repeated efforts to inform patrol-level officers of the research, emphasis of the occupational features of the traditional participant-as-observer role, and making specific plans to deal with attempts at premature termination.     

THE "COOLING OUT" OF LAW STUDENTS: Facilitating Market Cooptation of Future Lawyers

This article is concerned with the ways the law school experience eases entry into a stratified market thereby further compromising adversariness in the American legal process. It identifies some dimensions of legal education, broadly construed, which tend to acclimatize some students to existing realities of the job market. Interpreting interview data gathered from first-year students at the University of Wisconsin—Madison Law School, it suggests that socialization to a professional identity can resemble "cooling out" in the ways it reconciles some to accept any employment in lieu of seeking employment more in tune with their personal goals. Such acclimatization thwarts adversariness because, in accepting the dictates of a stratified market, these lawyers are channeled to serve some interests and people to the disadvantage of others.     

THE MANAGEMENT OF VIOLENCE BY POLICE PATROL OFFICERS*

This study examines the dynamics of potentially violent encounters between police and public. It is based on systematic observation of about 350 eight-hour tours of duty by patrol officers in three precincts of New York City during the summer of 1986. It compares the tactics and resulting outcomes found in encounters handled, respectively, by patrol officers believed by their peers to be especially skilled at minimizing violence and a cross section of all other patrol officers. Its major conclusions are (1) violence, even verbal aggression, is relatively rare in police work: (2) most conflict is dampened by the arrival of the police, leaving little scope for the use of defusing tactics: and (3) the behavior of officers judged by colleagues to be skilled in minimizing violence is measurably different from the behavior of “average” patrol officers, and in ways that suggest that colleagues may be good judges of on-street performance.