Horsing around: Using equine facilitated learning to support the development of social-emotional competence of students at risk of school failure

The social-emotional issues some students experience can place them at risk of school failure. Traditional methods of support can be ineffective or not sustainable and new alternative approaches need to be attempted to support social-emotional competency, school engagement, and success for students at risk. This article discusses preliminary outcomes of an equine facilitated learning (EFL) program specifically designed to focus on using horses to improve the resilience and social-emotional competency in students perceived as “at risk” of school failure. This qualitative exploratory study used interviews and observations over a six month period to listen to the voices of the students themselves about their experiences of EFL. Initial findings from the pilot study suggest that EFL programs can be a novel and motivating way to promote resilience training and social-emotional development of students at risk of failure and, in turn, improve their level of engagement and connection with school environments.     

The distribution of conflict and attention across energy infrastructure

Across the world, public administration and policy decisions are related to diverse levels of conflict and attention. However, the degree and variance of conflict and attention remain largely unspecified. This article examines how types of energy infrastructure and characteristics of project location are associated with the distribution of conflict and attention around the energy infrastructure siting process. Our empirical focus is on gas pipelines, electricity transmission lines, solar power projects, and wind power projects across the United States in 2018. Primarily relying on regression analysis and interviews, this article finds differences in the distribution of conflict and attention intensity within and between these energy infrastructure types, with gas pipelines and wind power projects presenting relatively higher conflict and attention intensities. However, conflict and attention are skewed to low intensities across infrastructure types. Characteristics of project locations that are positively associated with high conflict and attention intensity include the proportion of Democratic voters and the level of urbanization in the places where projects are sited. In contrast, the proportion of Black or Hispanic residents is negatively associated with high conflict and attention intensity.     

Mental Health Review Tribunals

This paper is concerned with the operation of the Mental Health Review Tribunal system and summarizes the findings of an empirical investigation of tribunal decision making. The tribunals constitute an independent body which reviews the necessity for the continued compulsory detention of patients in psychiatric hospitals. The research focuses on the interpretation and application of mental health legislation by individual tribunal members and the manner in which these individual approaches are qualified in the group context. The study comprises three stages: a self-report questionnaire, a national statistical analysis of decisions, and a simulation study of decision making using a videotape of a hypothetical case. The research establishes considerable inconsistency in tribunal decision making at both an individual and group level and attributes some of this inconsistency to individually based factors isolated by the research. The findings further indicate that these factors remain influential within the group decision-making context.     

Housing vouchers for the poor

Can the nation's social programs survive the push toward leaner appropriations, a greater use of the market, and a narrower definition of the needy? A program to provide housing assistance for the poor is proposed that fills all these requirements. Housing vouchers are found to be cheaper than other housing programs and more satisfactory for participants. Moreover, the political climate augers well for the new approach.     

Life-style constraints on formal political participation—Why so few women local councillors in Britain?

Much of the literature on both formal political participation and political recruitment is static in concept. It fails to take into account that opportunities for participation may alter during one individual's lifetime. In particular, the lives of women change, often abruptly, on marriage and at childbirth. Time constraints increase and decrease as family demands heighten or lessen. The small survey of women political activists reported here suggests that flexibility of time constraints, taken together with family attitudes, are important factors in women's recruitment. Some women's expectations of local government and perceptions of its power also militate against their recruitment. Although the survey is small and limited to Labour Party activists, its findings are likely to be applicable to women in other industrialized countries.     

Is approval voting an ‘unmitigated evil’?: A response to Brams,Fishburn, and Merrill

Brams, Fishburn, and Merrill (1988) contend that the indeterminacy of approval voting (AV), introduced in our paper (1988), is not a vice, but a surpassing virtue of AV. They do not compare the negative versus the positive features of AV, so their assertion remains a conjecture. Our response emphasizes the need to determine the costs of AV and to evaluate them against any merits. Moreover, by correcting and answering BFM's comments, the argument against AV becomes much stronger. This is because we show that AV's region of indeterminacy is quite large; it includes most profiles. Some of the consequences of this instability are that the AV outcome can negate the voter's true wishes, that the AV outcome can be volatile even to minor fluctuations of voter's decisions, and that AV is one of the most susceptible systems to manipulation by small groups of voters (for example, small, maverick groups could determine the AV outcome). Under specific circumstances, AV may be appropriate. To identify these situations we propose the more accurate name of the "Unsophisticated Voter System."