Global change in microcosm: The case of U.S. water institutions

Water is a resource that already has been affected by some aspects of global change and whose availability in time and place may be substantially further altered by global warming. As human demands and impacts on water resources have increased, institutions governing water use have evolved in response to pressures exerted by competing resource users. The record of such institutional evolution and its implications for the impacts of environmental change on human welfare can provide a glimpse of issues that are likely to arise as other natural resources are increasingly subject to the effects of global environmental transformations. Efforts to manage multiple interdependent water uses present informative analogies to the general problem of managing the many interrelated aspects of global change.     

Education and identity: Thoughts on the social origins of anorexia

Anorexia nervosa is often said to be a condition which afflicts mainly middle-class girls. This paper suggests that it is not social class but a high level of educational attainment which is associated with the onset of anorexia.The effect of education is analysed in terms of it's influence on the identity -formation of the young woman. Anorexia can be seen as an attempt to rescue a spoilt identity.     

Why does the Senate “win” in conference committee?: A stability explanation

This paper develops a bicameral stability model wherein the conference committee serves as a vehicle for mutually advantageous bicameral exchange. The goal is to maintain a single party's bicameral majority. Majority party leaders use the conference committee to attenuate the outlying positions of House standing committees that threaten the bicameral majority. Conference outcomes favor the Senate because it is more vulnerable to party turnover. Statistical results on data from the U.S. Congress, 1949 through 1991, demonstrate that when one party holds a bicameral majority, a relative increase in conference bills preserves at the margin, Senate majority-party seats at the expense of House majority-party seats.     

Children's criteria for procedural justice: Developing a Young People's Procedural Justice Scale

A Procedural Justice Scale for Young People was developed to examine the criteria that Grades 7 and 9 students thought were important in judging the fairness of the procedures used to judge a case of a hypothetical young thief. A 10-item scale was developed using unidimensional scaling and factor-analytic techniques. The study supports the earlier work on adults by Thibault and Walker (1978) and Tyler (1988) showing that for children too procedural justice concerns make a contribution to satisfaction with the outcomes and procedures of a case.     

Risk-based crime statistics: A forecasting comparison for burglary and auto theft

A major criticism of official statistics on crime is that they use inappropriate bases for computing rates. Here we investigate whether computing crime rates that contain in their denominators the number of exposures to risk of a specific event (e.g., residential burglary and auto theft) provides more accurate forecasts than employing the traditional FBI denominators as a base (e.g., the number of auto thefts and burglaries per 100, 000 persons living in the United States). Single equation, macrodynamic structural models are fitted to both the “traditional” and “alternative” forms of computing auto theft and burglary rates over the twenty-seven-year period from 1947–1974, in order to determine how well they perform on statistical and substantive grounds over the estimation period. Ex-post forecasts of the 1975–1979 observed crime rates, used to gauge the accuracy of these models, reveal few differences between the two kinds of rates in terms of how well they forecast. Both types of rates forecast well with the exogenous variables employed here and lead to similar substantive conclusions. The forecasts of the “traditional” rates are consistently, but only slightly, more accurate than those of the “alternative” rates (in most cases the differences are less than 1 percent). It is argued that the criticism of official data may be overstated and that little benefit accrues from the modification of the rate base for some purposes.     

Congressional Response to Mandate Elections

Elections from time to time are widely believed to carry a mandate, to express a message about changed policy preferences of the electorate. Whatever the accuracy of such beliefs—a matter about which we are skeptical—perceptions of a mandate should affect the behavior of actors in government. Politicians lack the scholarly luxury of waiting for careful analyses. They must act in the months following elections. We postulate that many will act as if the mandate perceptions were true, veering away from their normal voting patterns. This is driven by election results and interpretations that undermine old calculations about what voters want. As the flow of information gradually changes these perceptions, and the election becomes more distant, members of Congress return to their normal position. We first ask, how would members observe an emerging consensus of mandate? And then we model the duration of the change in behavior in an event‐history framework. That permits a depiction of important movements of the median member and, from this, inferences about policy impact.