Cultural Difference

President Trump’s criticisms of minorities, immigrants, and poor countries, while controversial, point to the need to discuss cultural differences more candidly. Much of the upset over diversity in America and the world results from the fact that everyone is not the same. The United States is the world’s most individualist country, where most people approach life as a quest to achieve their personal goals. But most minority Americans and recent immigrants tend to adjust to the world as it is rather than seeking change. That is a major reason why integration of these groups has proven difficult. Poor countries abroad are often ill-governed because local culture accepts misrule more passively than in the West. The entire American tradition, including political theory and theology, takes an individualist culture as normal and thus fails to address our current challenges. We need a new tradition in which cultural difference is the subject rather than denied.     

Electoral competition and democratic decline in Nicaragua: uncovering an electorally viable platform for the right

Between the 1980s and 2006 Nicaragua was a competitive democracy where parties of the left and right won national presidential elections and relinquished power when their terms ended. More recently the quality of Nicaragua’s democracy has deteriorated. This change is due partly to autocratic behaviour by the elected leftist president, Daniel Ortega. But democratic decline is also the result of factional divisions and vague, outmoded policy commitments on the right that have crippled its electoral competitiveness, enabling Ortega’s behaviour. Utilizing an experimental research design, this article identifies two modernized policy platforms that could significantly broaden rightist electoral support in presidential campaigns, aiding democratic resurgence in Nicaragua. At a point when opposition parties are struggling to retain strength and coherence in many other democracies, the study presents a research strategy that could help clarify the ways such parties might reinvigorate their electoral competitiveness.     

The Time to Give: PAC Motivations and Electoral Timing

There has been much discussion about how members of Congressdesire money early in the campaign season. However, theoreticalmodels of how contributions are allocated during the electoralcycle have been lacking. Our analysis attempts to remedy thisgap by providing and testing a model which specifies how theprocess of bargaining between members of Congress and organizedinterests produces the pattern of donations observed over thecourse of the electoral cycle. Most notably, our results suggestthat strategic incumbents can receive money early in the campaignif they desire but that they are generally unwilling to paythe price of lower aggregate fundraising and greater provisionof access. These findings buttress earlier empirical findingsthat question the instrumental value of early money. In addition,our results highlight that contribution choices are fundamentallyinfluenced by short-term factors, especially electoral conditions,that do not lend themselves to the routinized behavior necessaryfor contributors to invest in incumbents for long-run payoffs.     

Testing hot-spots police patrols against no-treatment controls: Temporal and spatial deterrence effects in the London Underground experiment

Our understanding of causality and effect size in randomized field experiments is challenged by variations in levels of baseline treatment dosage in control groups across experiments testing similar treatments. The clearest design is to compare treated cases with no-treatment controls in a sample that lacks any prior treatment at baseline. We applied that strategy in a randomized test of hot-spots police patrols on the previously never-patrolled, track-level platforms of the London Underground (LU). In a pretest–posttest, control-group design, we randomly assigned 57 of the LU's 115 highest crime platforms to receive foot patrol by officers in 15-minute doses, 4 times per day, during 8-hour shifts on 4 days a week for 6 months. The effect of 23,272 police arrivals at the treatment hot spots over 26 weeks was to reduce public calls for service by 21 percent on treated platforms relative to controls, primarily when police were absent (97 percent of the measured effect). This effect was six times larger than the mean standardized effect size found in the leading systematic review. This finding provides a benchmark against the baseline counterfactual of no patrol in hot spots, with strong evidence of residual deterrence and no evidence of local displacement.     

Does restricting choice in referenda enable governments to spend more?

If school boards represent the preferences of the median voter, referendums to approve school expenditures should not constrain school expenditures. If school boards would choose expenditures larger than the median voter’s preference, referendums that restrict voters to approving or disapproving a school board’s recommended expenditure level will result in expenditures larger than the median voter would prefer. However, Florida used a unique referendum system which guaranteed the median voter’s most preferred outcome. Using Florida education expenditures as a benchmark, the evidence suggests that spending was slightly higher in restricted choice referendum states than in Florida.     

Sex offender notification and fear of victimization

Research on sex offender notification statutes was limited, and what did exist suggested notification resulted in increasing fear of victimization (Phillips, D. M. (1998). Zevitz, R. G. & Farkas, M. A. (2000c). Nonetheless, existing research failed to provide a direct measure of fear of victimization, or a comparison group to determine whether community members receiving notification were more fearful of victimization than community members, residing in the same neighborhood, who had not received notification. Additionally, existing research did not differentiate between fear of victimization for self (personal fear) and fear of victimization for others (altruistic fear). Warr (Warr, M. (2000) argued that the “strongest indictment” of the fear-crime literature was the failure to consider altruistic fear. By comparing emotional responses to specific types of victimization between groups of notified and not-notified community members, at the multivariate level, notification was significantly related to personal fear, but not altruistic fear. At the bivariate level, however, notification was related to one type of altruistic fear—sexual victimization.