China's Not-So-Wild West

In the last year living in Beijing, I've been to the Forbidden City and Summer Palace four times. I've traversed the Great Wall three times. And I've lost track of how many times I've walked from one end of the Tiananmen Square to another. Even when traveling on business or personal trips to Shanghai, I've found myself in the same places numerous times, the Expo site (three times) and the Shanghai World Financial Center (twice) to name a few.     

Destination Shanghai

Although a young city at 700 years old-in its fancy compared with Chinese civilization as a wholeShanghai has become one of the most recognized and dynamic cities in China.     

Driving on the Wild Side

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about China since moving here,it’s this:The rules of the road are far different than those Stateside.Actually,perhaps the word"rules"is a bit of an overstatement; "suggestions of the road"may be more fitting.     

Efficient,Fair, and Incomprehensible: How the State “Sells” Its Judiciary

Socio‐legal scholars often approach dispute resolution from the perspective of the disputants, emphasizing how the resources on each side shape the course of conflict. We suggest a different, “supply‐side,” perspective. Focusing on the state's efforts to establish centralized courts in place of local justice systems, we consider the strategies that a supplier of dispute resolving services uses to attract disputes for resolution. We argue that state actors often attempt to “sell” centralized courts to potential litigants by insisting that the state's services are more efficient and fair than local courts operating outside direct state control. Moreover, we argue that state actors also invest significant energy in claiming that the local courts are incomprehensible. Thus, in its efforts to introduce and advance centralized courts, the state argues not only that it offers the best version of what the citizenry wants, but also that it is impossible to conceive that people would want something other than what the state offers. We illustrate our argument and explain its significance by examining judicial reform in New York, where there has been a decades‐long effort to displace local justice systems.     

Attitudes Toward the Police: A Comparison of Canadian and American Adolescents

The present inquiry is an attempt to determine the attitudes which adolescents in Canada and the United States have toward the police and the determinants of these attitudes. In addition to providing a diverse sample of youths from two countries, each with unique policing structures and policies, the study represents the first attempt to assess the attitudes twoard the police held by a sample of Canadian adolescents. The sample for the inquiry consists of 869 youths from a rural Rocky Mountain State and three West Coast cities in the United States and 1200 youths from a major metropolitan area on the West Coast of Canada.

To assess the attitudes which adolescents hold toward the police in their respective countries and areas, a 16–item Likert scale was employed along with a series of questions eliciting a variety of social-biographical, experiential (type and extent of contacts with police) information as well as the prestige rating of the police. Analysis of the data indicates that the majority of adolescents in both countries have positive attitudes toward the police, regardless of the type of police force (Canadian RCMP, Canadian Municipal, U.S. Sheriff, U.S. Municipal) they are policed by. In addition, none of the social-biographical variables in either sample contributed significantly to the attitudes which were held toward the police, nor were certain juveniles more likely to have more negative experiences with the police. Rather, the primary determinant of juvenile attitudes toward the police in both countries seems to be the type of contact which the adolescent had with the police. The findings have significant implications for the police literature and police operational policy which are discussed.     

Comparing NOMINATE and IDEAL: Points of Difference and Monte Carlo Tests

Empirical models of spatial voting allow us to infer legislators' locations in an abstract policy or ideological space using their roll‐call votes. Over the past 25 years, these models have provided new insights about the U.S. Congress, and legislative behavior more generally. There are now a number of alternative models, estimators, and software packages that researchers can use to recover latent issue or ideological spaces from voting data. These different tools usually produce substantively similar estimates, but important differences also arise. We investigated the sources of observed differences between two leading methods, NOMINATE and IDEAL. Using data from the 1994 to 1997 Supreme Court and the 109th Senate, we determined that while some observed differences in the estimates produced by each model stem from fundamental differences in the models' underlying behavioral assumptions, others arise from arbitrary differences in implementation. Our Monte Carlo experiments revealed that neither model has a clear advantage over the other in the recovery of legislator locations or roll‐call midpoints in either large or small legislatures.