Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech: Fifty Years On

Fifty years ago, Enoch Powell made what still is one of the most notorious speeches in postwar British politics. Its tone was shocking for its use of inflammatory references to ethnic minority immigrants. Immigration continues to be divisive and references to it by politicians inevitably lead to comparisons with Powell. The aim of the collection is to examine Powell's speech from a number of perspectives, exploring how it was viewed both by contemporaries and in the light of subsequent developments. The objective of this article is to examine Powell's motivations, impact and legacy.     

Legal Cynicism,Antisocial Attitudes,and Recidivism: Implications for a Procedurally Just Community Corrections

The current approach to supervising offenders in the community has produced disappointing results in terms of reduced recidivism. In response to this, a number of scholars have turned their attention to the role that community corrections officers (CCOs) may play in ensuring successful community supervision. Early evaluations of CCO training have shown promising results, yet missing from this knowledge is a consideration for the legal cynicism that may be held by offenders. It may be unreasonable to expect CCOs to change the antisocial attitudes of offenders when those negative attitudes are directed toward them. The purpose of the current work, therefore, is to integrate ideas about legal cynicism into the knowledge about effective supervision to promote a more procedurally just community corrections. Our broader purpose is to encourage a more realistic understanding of the challenges of the officer-offender relationship in order to improve the efficacy of existing models of effective community supervision practice.     

Racial/Ethnic Disproportionality in Psychiatric Diagnoses and Treatment in a Sample of Serious Juvenile Offenders

Psychiatric disorder prevalence has been shown demonstrably higher among justice-involved adolescents than youth in the general population. Yet, among arrested juveniles, little is known regarding racial/ethnic differences in disorder prevalence, the role of trauma exposure in the diagnosis of behavioral disorders, or subsequent psychiatric treatment provided to adolescents with such diagnoses. The current study examines racial/ethnic disparity in psychiatric diagnoses and treatment of behavioral disorders associated with delinquency, controlling for traumatic experiences, behavioral indicators, and prior offending among serious juvenile offenders. Logistic regression is employed to explore the racial/ethnic disproportionality in behavioral disorder diagnoses and psychiatric treatment provision among 8763 males (57.7?% Black, 11.8?% Hispanic) and 1,347 females (53.7?% Black, 7.6?% Hispanic) admitted to long-term juvenile justice residential placements in Florida. The results indicate Black males are 40?% more likely, and Black females 54?% more likely to be diagnosed with conduct disorder than Whites, even upon considerations of trauma, behavioral indicators, and criminal offending. Black and Hispanic males are approximately 40?% less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than White males, with no racial/ethnic differences for females. Importantly, Black males are 32?% less likely to receive psychiatric treatment than White males, with no differences between White and Hispanic males, or any female subgroups. Traumatic exposures increased the odds of oppositional defiant disorder and ADHD, but not conduct disorder for males, though adverse childhood experiences were unrelated to behavioral disorder diagnoses among females.     

The Effects of Tulsa's Pre‐K Program on Middle School Student Performance

As states have upgraded their commitment to pre‐K education over the past two decades, questions have arisen. Critics argue that program effects are likely to fade out or disappear over time, while supporters contend that program effects are likely to persist under certain conditions. Using data from Tulsa Public Schools, three neighboring school districts, and the state of Oklahoma, and propensity score weighting, we estimate the effects of Tulsa's universal, school‐based pre‐K program on multiple measures of academic progress for middle school students. We find enduring effects on math achievement test scores, enrollment in honors courses, and grade retention for students as a whole, and similar effects for certain subgroups. We conclude that some positive effects of a high‐quality pre‐K program are discernible as late as middle school.     

The Elephant, Umbrella, and Quarrelling Cocks: Disaggregating Partisanship in Ghana's Fourth Republic

Within the literature on Ghanaian partisanship, a healthy debatehas arisen between those viewing Ghana’s two dominantparties as cleaved along socioeconomic lines and those suggestingthat this cleavage runs along ethnic lines. Using election results,constituency maps, census data, and a survey of voters’‘cognitive shortcuts’, this article weighs in withthe debate. The findings suggest that ethnicity matters in Ghanaianelections far more than socioeconomic variables. The findingsdo not, however, lead easily towards the gloomy predictionsthat often accompany ethnic politics. The relationship betweenethnicity and partisanship in Ghana is far more complex. Datapresented here suggest that Asante and Ewe voters are likelyto vote for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National DemocraticCongress (NDC), respectively, regardless of the candidates theyselect. Voters of other ethnic backgrounds, who make up thevast majority of Ghanaian voters, view the dominant partiesas representative of Asante and Ewe interests but do not themselvesvote as a block and base their evaluations of the ‘Asante’and ‘Ewe’ parties ultimately on things other thanethnicity. It is this latter group of voters that makes Ghanaianelections unpredictable and discourages politicians from turningnational votes into a zero-sum ethnic censes.     

Access and allocation in climate change adaptation

As climate change impacts become increasingly apparent, adaptation becomes increasingly urgent. Accordingly, adaptation to climate change has shifted towards the centre of attention in both policy and research. In this article, we review the last 10 years of adaptation research (2008–2018), with a focus on work within the Earth System Governance network. We use the lens of access and allocation to structure our review and examine how adaptation affects, and is affected by, access to basic needs, basic rights, and decision-making on the one hand, as well as allocation of responsibilities, resources, and risks on the other. We find that questions of justice, equity, and fairness are fundamental to all dimensions of adaptation. The access perspective, for example, suggests that we need to assess vulnerability, understood broadly, while the allocation perspective focuses on questions of responsibility for being vulnerable, e.g. when people live, or move to, hazard-prone areas exposed to climate risk. This also relates to questions of who is responsible for selecting, implementing, and funding adaptation measures. Overall, we find that the framework of “access and allocation” and its subcategories offer a detailed approach to adaptation and adaptation research, but that it is not intuitive. The notion of “climate justice” seems to resonate more with both academic and policy debates.

     

An exploratory study assessing compliance among municipal controllers and the possible explanations for their degree of compliance

Municipal controllers are sometimes confronted with requests from managers that contradict with the legal provisions. This raises the question how municipal controllers deal with these requests and whether this would impact their compliance. This article is a result of an exploratory study assessing compliance among municipal controllers and the possible explanations for their degree of compliance. The study has focused on one specific provision concerning accrual accounting, one of the elements of new public management (NPM), which is prescribed for Dutch municipalities. The study is based on a survey in 22 municipalities. The results show that the majority of municipal controllers who participate in this study deviate from this legal provision. There might be a relation between the orientation of the controllers and the degree of compliance. The position of the controller within the municipality can be a significant factor explaining this orientation. However, the size of the sample is too limited to generalize. The conclusions of this study undermine the idea that municipal controllers should act as business partners to the management. Finally, the study reveals a paradox: while one of the main elements of NPM is to shift more responsibilities to decentralized managers, this shift can lead to an increased principal‐agent problem, leading to a lesser degree of compliance.     

Behavioral Stability as an Emergent Process: Toward a Coherence Theory of Concentrated Personal Disadvantage

The best predictor of future misbehavior is a history of aberrant and wayward conduct. Even so, few theories attempt to account for time-stable maladaptive pathways. To this end, we advance a theory of stability, what we term Coherence Theory. Coherence Theory conceptualizes stability as an emergent property that occurs when antisocial dispositions, social consequences, and misconduct coalesce within an individual. In this sense, misconduct is viewed as only one component of a larger, overarching and multi-faceted emergent construct we label as “concentrated personal disadvantage.” When these three components coalesce within an individual, temporal stability in maladaptive pathways should be expected. Using nationally representative, longitudinal data from the National Survey of Children, we test specific hypotheses derived from our theory. This study makes use of the first and second waves of survey data (N wave 1 = 2,301; N wave 2 = 1,423). The sample overall was 51% male and 52% white. Our analyses provide tentative support for the proposed theory. Concentrated personal disadvantage was found to emerge when the identified constellation of variables coalesced in individuals, and was found to be relatively stable over a 5 year period for males and females. Coherence Theory challenges traditional theories on the stability of antisocial pathways, offers specific conditions under which high levels of stability are likely, and explains why disruption off of antisocial pathways is so difficult.     

Does the Federal Government Learn from the States? Medicaid and the Limits of Expertise in the Intergovernmental Lobby

State programmatic expertise is an important asset to federalsystems, but this expertise is not always informative to federaldecision-makers. I argue the degree to which state expertiseis informative to federal decision-makers depends on how wellthe policy interests of state and federal levels are aligned.I illustrate variation in these conditions using case studiesof congressional politics over the Medicaid program. I thenapply a statistical test, which demonstrates that states’programmatic expertise regarding Medicaid is less persuasiveto congressional committee members compared to other witnesseswho are equally knowledgeable. The results suggest a "failureof federalism," where the public good potential of state programmaticexpertise often is not realized in the federal system.     

Organisational culture and strategic change in Australian local governments

This study examines the impact of organisational culture on strategic change in local governments in Australia. The findings indicate that strategic change is affected by two organisational culture factors, innovation and attention to detail. This study contributes to the management accounting contingency literature and the public management literature by providing an insight into the role of organisational culture as a contingency factor influencing strategic change. Such findings may be used by local government managers to enact change effectively.