Decision games applied to police decision making -an exploratory study of information usage-

An analysis of police decision making is presented using the decision board technique developed by Leslie Wilkins. This method assumes that decision making can be measured by observing a subject's response to stimuli presented in the form of pieces of information. A board was created and employed with fifty municipal police officers. Findings suggest that police demonstrate individualized preferences for varying amounts and kinds of information. The nature of the offense was considered most frequently. The attitude of the offender was also an important determinant of the decision outcome; and the offender's attitude then influenced the amount and type of information subsequently used.     

Implementation evaluation: A future direction in project evaluation

The problem of implementation failure is an important component in the evaluation of criminal justice projects. In general, the issue of project implementation has been neglected by organizational researchers and evaluation specialists as well as by policymakers and program developers. In direct contrast to the existing pattern, we stress the importance of organizational factors and the relationships between individuals and organizations for the successful implementation and institutionalization of criminal justice projects.     

Priming time for Blair? Media priming, Iraq, and leadership evaluations in Britain

Priming is often mentioned in studies of media effects in Britain, yet empirical tests of its extent and nature are lacking; most evidence of priming effects is from the United States. Moreover, research on British elections concludes that the media have little impact on the public’s perceptions of issues, including in the 2005 election. In this paper we argue that priming by the British media has been misconceived and thus not studied adequately. We demonstrate that the issue of the war in Iraq was primed by media coverage in 2005, both as a consequence of the volume of coverage of the issue and its tone. The influence of Iraq was not just long-term, via its impact on confidence in the Labour government or Tony Blair’s reputation, but was also affected by media coverage during the campaign. We also demonstrate that the media’s coverage of Iraq in 2005 influenced voters’ evaluations of Blair by polarizing consumers of the same news. Finally, we find slightly more of an impact of the tone of coverage of Iraq in 2005 but it is moderated by the editorial stance of the newspaper—the editorial stance of British newspapers still seems to matter, suggesting that the dealignment of the British press has not eliminated the influence of reading a newspaper that endorses a party, no matter how qualified that endorsement may be.     

Incidence of Fetal Drug Exposure in Alabama: 2004–2011

Postmortem toxicological results for neonates and stillborn fetuses were examined to determine the incidence of drug exposure in utero and the relationship to fetal mortality. From 15,600 fatalities with toxicological analyses, 39 subjects were identified; 22 had positive findings (56%). Among the general population, 10,500 had positive findings (67%). Among the subject population, 22 drugs/metabolites were identified; cocaine/benzoylecgonine was most frequent (9 of 22 cases, 41%) then methamphetamine/amphetamine (7 of 22 cases, 32%). Respective incidences among the general positive population were 12% and 6%. Fetal/neonatal concentrations overlap the general population and exceed the mother. Remaining substances, detected largely in fatalities unrelated to drug exposure, were of little toxicological significance. The variety, with exceptions, reflects the general population. That the incidence of cocaine and methamphetamine among fetuses/neonates is three‐ and fivefold greater than the general population is evidence that maternal abuse of these drugs poses greater risk to fetal viability than all other substances identified.     

An Antipodean History of Interpretation

In this paper, we explore the connections between intepretivism's core and its peripheries in both geographical and epistemological terms, by tracing the relationship between interpretivism and Australian political scholarship. In this task, we draw on some of the most celebrated and influential work on Australian politics—by political scientists but before them historians and anthropologists—to show how the approach typically undertaken by these researchers echoes key tenets of interpretivism, especially through an interest in subjective beliefs and experiences, a desire to uncover and bring to life richly contextualised detail, and a commitment to the abductive linking of theory and practice. As such, we suggest that the spread of this counter identity to interpretive researchers in Australia risks manufacturing a sense of methodological antipathy, marginalising the work of interpretivists from mainstream political scholarship.     

Party competition in emerging democracies: representation and effectiveness in post-communism and beyond

Competition among political parties is subject to two demands: representation and effectiveness. This poses a dilemma for democratization, as the political opening creates pressures for the representation of long-suppressed voices, but the strain of socio-economic transformation engenders pressures for greater effectiveness in building market economies and democratic polities. How do new democracies cope with this dilemma? This article extends the author's previously published work on party-system institutionalization by focusing explicitly on this problem, including on how electoral reforms affect the distinct pulls of representation and effectiveness. Based on data from eastern European and former Soviet states compared to western European and Latin American experiences during their initial periods of democratization, the evidence shows that the institutionalization of representation and effectiveness in post-communism is more hazardous. Politics in the post-communist region is characterized by numerous contending parties, weak political actors and floating constituencies. Volatility is not only higher in comparison to other regions but continues unabated during successive elections. These conditions contribute to the ‘ineffective representation’ evident in the relatively large share of wasted votes at each election, with significant sectors of the electorate left out from legislative representation. Electoral reforms reflect the twin pressures: changes in formula in the direction of proportional representation favour broader representation, but higher thresholds seeking greater effectiveness make more difficult entry into parliament. The resulting mechanical and strategic effects confirm the expected direction of the reforms, although the contrary pulls towards representation and effectiveness render difficult the stabilization of party competition.     

Professionalism and public administration: A bibliography

Abstract

This paper tests public budgeting to ascertain if it has both a long‐run equilibrium and short‐run incremental process. In the model, the decision‐maker strives to achieve budgetary balance over the long‐run but is constrained in the short‐run and follows incremental decision‐making. The interaction between expenditures and revenues, along with several control variables, is tested for each of the Canadian provinces using data between 1961 and 2000. The results show that in the long‐run, expenditures force the budget toward balance in all the provinces with the exception of British Columbia. In that province, there was a fiscal synchronization of revenues and expenditures working in combination. In the short‐run, incrementalism occurs in nine of the ten provinces.     

The hydra of development studies

Development Studies has been mired in allegations of theoretical impasse since the mid-1980's. This article investigates the modalities and vagaries of the dialectic between social science's theoretical image of the Third World, which could be summarized as the oppositional Modernization and Dependency “paradigms” prior to the alleged impasse, and the actual substantive Third World development trajectories that have emerged. Now a new convergence, negative and perhaps enduring, has supplanted the optimism of the original Modernization postulate and may provide a seedbed for a resurrection of the pessimistic Dependency underdevelopment thesis. For the first time there has been a coming together in the study of the Third World on the one hand, manifested as majority theme Development Studies, and on the other hand, actual objective development in the vast majority of countries under study. But this intersection only arises insofar as both appear to be in equivalent difficulty. In the Third World there has been increasing divergence in trajectories of development, with polarization of income both within the South, and in an even more pronounced manner vis-à-vis the First World. If the 1980's have become known as the “Lost Decade' in developmental terms for Africa and Latin America, the 1990's ended with the emergence of a new development blockage among the NIEs and near NIEs of the Asian region. The crisis in Development Studies becomes all the more obvious considering the emergence of the Neo-classical format as part of the 1980's development counterrevolution. Now the neo-classically inspired minimalist state — which was a product of its predecessor, downsized in order to serve the market and contribute to Pareto optimality — a historical reversal of its colonial and earlier post-colonial form — must confront renewed demands to solve the internal problems that accelerated Globalization has generated in the context of a crisis of overproduction.     

Four Years After the Collapse of the USSR

A prominent French political scientist and specialist on Russia introduces this special issue of Post-Soviet Affairs, The essay notes recent literature on Russia's regions and challenges analysts to rethink prevailing conceptions of center-periphery relations, centralization versus decentralization of political power, and authoritarian versus democratic politics. Focis is on regional elites' attitudes toward political inclusion and on the mutual dependence of elites.