Someone has to do it: towards a practical defence of politicians

In response to rising popular disenchantment with elected officials, numerous scholars have sought to defend politics and restate why it matters. For the most part, however, these theoretical arguments overlook the views and reflections of politicians themselves. As a step towards filling this gap, the author surveys politician-centred studies from around the world and the reflections of academics who have become politicians. By paying careful attention to what ‘insiders’ say about life in politics, the author constructs a practical rather than theoretical defence of the vocation and the people who undertake it. The author argues that politicians' views remind one that human endeavour is central to the purpose and function of politics and associated political institutions. To link the practical views and experiences of politicians with the emerging literature on demonisation, the author revisits the work of Arendt and Weber. The author concludes that while one may not always like who politicians are or the ways they operate, revaluing endeavour allows one to give credit where credit is due; politicians may regularly disappoint people but representative democracy does not work without them.     

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

Scholars debate the relative strength of economic and ‘socio-psychological’ sources of anti-immigrant sentiment. However, the literature often fails to distinguish legal from illegal immigration and therefore overlooks a major instance in which this debate is moot. To address this issue, we develop a theory that recognizes two different modes of evaluating immigrants: “attribute-based” judgment, in which respondents weigh immigrants’ desirability based on individual characteristics—human capital, race, language ability, and so on—and “categorical” judgment, which disregards these altogether. Categorical judgments arise when a policy issue triggers blanket considerations of justice or principle that obviate considerations about putative beneficiaries’ individual merits, instead evoking overriding beliefs about the desirability of the policy as a whole or casting the entire category as uniformly deserving or undeserving. We use experimental evidence from two national surveys to show that the principal distinction between attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration is not in the relative weight of immigrants’ attributes but the much greater prevalence of categorical assessments of illegal immigration policy, much of it rooted in rigid moralistic convictions about the importance of strict adherence to rules and laws.     

Organizational change in law enforcement

A major problem in identifying and understanding change in law enforcement organizations is in specifying the object of intended change and the process by which change is to be implemented. The study focuses on organizational-structural change in police organizations and examines factors which have influenced the implementation of saturation patrol units, covert surveillance units, and regionalized detective bureaus. The results indicate that factors such as domain consensus, dependence and influence relationships, and perceptions of threat affect both the acceptance and use of these organizational changes.     

Toward a physician payment policy: Evidence from the Economic Stabilization Program

Concern over the rising cost of medical care has focused policy attention on methods of paying physicians. Unfortunately, limits placed on fees paid by public medical care financing programs, Medicare and Medicaid, adversely affect those programs' primary objective: making office-based physicians' services available to the poor and the elderly at affordable prices. This suggests that a second policy instrument, controls on physicians' private charges, may be needed. The Economic Stabilization Program (ESP) provides the only recent U.S. experience with a system which constrained both physicians' private charges and public payments. Using Medicare and Medicaid claims data for a large sample of California physicians, we simulate what physicians' private charges and supplies of services to Medicare assignment and Medicaid patients would have been in the absence of ESP. The simulations suggest that without ESP, private charges would have been higher and the quantities of services provided to poor and elderly patients lower than were actually observed. We believe, therefore, that the ESP experience supports the argument that controls over both public and private fees are needed in order to simultaneously contain costs of and maintain access to physicians' services by Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.The research for this paper was supported by Contract No. 600-76-0054 from the Social Security Administration, USDHEW. We wish to thank our colleagues Judith Feder, John Holahan, William Scanlon, and Judith Wagner for their helpful comments. James Bluck provided excellent research assistance. The findings and opinions expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of either The Urban Institute or The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.     

Preadolescent antecedents of depressive symptomatology at age 18: A prospective study

The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to summarize the theoretical frame-work, methodological orientation, and gender-differentiated findings of our ongoing study of the personality context, prospective and concurrent, for depressive symptoms at age 18; and (2) to report new longitudinal relations between preadolescent play constructions (at age 11) and depressive tendencies reported seven years later. Eighty-seven 18-year-olds completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). Seven years earlier, at age 11, the subjects were observed in a play construction situation. Six psychologically coherent, reliable play composite variables were generated from the codings of videotapes and related longitudinally, in a hierarchical polynomial regression design, to the later CES-D scores. Among preadolescent girls, concern with morality and loss foretold, linearly, depressive experiences. The quadratic regression function explained additional variance: relative to girls receiving intermediate CES-D scores, girls earning loworhigh scores were seen as more overcontrolling of impulse, more angry, and more concerned with loss. Among preadolescent boys, only curvilinear relations were obtained. Relative to boys receiving intermediate CES-D scores, boys earning loworhigh CES-D scores were seen during preadolescence as more undercontrolling of impulse, more angry, and more concerned with loss as theme. The implications of these findings are discussed.This study was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH 16080 to Jack Block.Received Ph.D from University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Major research interests include socio-emotional development in adolescence, developmental psychopathology, and cross cultural perspectives on development.Received Ph.D from Stanford University in 1950. Major research interests include logitudinal analyses of personality and cognitive development, personality theory, and personality assessment.