Calling Out the Persistence of Racism

In this issue New Political Science begins a new tradition, printing an extended review essay of the book that received the Michael Harrington Book Award at the most recent American Political Science Association Meeting. The Michael Harrington Award is given for an outstanding book that demonstrates how scholarships can be used in the struggle for a better world. In 2011, the award went to Michelle Alexander for her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Color-Blindness. Sanford Schram, a member of the award committee, has contributed the below review.     

Law Enforcement Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina

Major disasters represent infrequent events that often require response organizations to vicariously learn from the experiences of others in order to improve their operations. A primary mechanism for such knowledge diffusion is the different practitioner and empirical journals for the organizational fields that comprise disaster response. A review of the literature for the law enforcement field, however, reveals that little attention is given to how these organizations manage actual disasters. In particular, the presentation of organizational experiences, whether through case studies or other methodologies, is very limited in the practitioner and empirical literature of this field. This represents a considerable problem for improvements of disaster response operations given that law enforcement agencies represent a key component in such efforts. The research presented in this article is an effort to fill this knowledge gap and thereby facilitate organizational learning to improve future law enforcement disaster response activities. The authors traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina to examine the response efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies to the storm. The findings from this research are reported here in a lessons‐learned format to inform law enforcement disaster response policy.     

Favorites and underdogs: Strategic behavior in an experimental contest

Conflicts between favorites and underdogs are everyday phenomena. We examine their strategic behavior in an experimental contest, and find behavior partially consistent with predictions. Favorites given a first-mover advantage do overcommit effort relative to Nash. Underdogs often select the best response effort level given the favorite's move. Overall dissipation of the prize was significantly higher with the strategic commitment relative to Nash. qu]Life is not so mathematically idiotic that it allows only the big to eat the small, for it happens just as often that the bee kills the lion, or at least drives it mad.