Can Incarcerated Felons Be (Re)integrated into the Political System? Results from a Field Experiment

How does America's high rate of incarceration shape political participation? Few studies have examined the direct effects of incarceration on patterns of political engagement. Answering this question is particularly relevant for the 93% of formerly incarcerated individuals who are eligible to vote. Drawing on new administrative data from Connecticut, we present evidence from a field experiment showing that a simple informational outreach campaign to released felons can recover a large proportion of the reduction in participation observed following incarceration. The treatment effect estimates imply that efforts to reintegrate released felons into the political process can substantially reduce the participatory consequences of incarceration.     

How Aspiration to Office Conditions the Impact of Government Participation on Party Platform Change

Considerable ambiguity exists regarding the effect of government/opposition status on party platform change. Existing theories predict that (1) it has no effect, (2) opposition parties change more, (3) opposition parties change more after several spells in opposition, and (4) parties’ responses vary because of different goal orientations. We propose that a party's aspiration to office, measured by its historical success or failure in entering office, determines a party's reaction to being in opposition or government. We hypothesize that, because of loss aversion, parties with low office aspiration change more when they are in government than when they are in opposition. Conversely, parties with high office aspiration change more as opposition party than as government party. We find evidence for these hypotheses through a pooled time‐series cross‐sectional analysis of 1,686 platform changes in 21 democracies, using the Comparative Manifesto Data and an innovative measure of party platform change.     

Implementing Performance Budgeting at the State Level: Lessons Learned from New Jersey

This article considers barriers and strategies for implementing performance budgeting in real-time application by a state-level government. The lessons learned from the State of New Jersey’s implementation of the Governor’s Performance Budgeting Initiative offer guidelines for public and nonprofit sector organizations attempting similar efforts. Data was gathered through a series of focus groups with key executive-level administrators. Observations and recommendations for enhancing and reenergizing current performance budgeting strategies for a state or agency are suggested.     

The Educational and Professional Goals of International Students in Public Service Degrees

International student enrollment in public service degrees such as Public Administration in the United States has grown rapidly. Harnessing this growth to improve the knowledge and expertise of employees in public service is a vital opportunity. However, our survey of public service schools shows that international students perceive an extensive lack of support with financial and linguistic challenges. Furthermore, schools practice little performance evaluation concerning international student experience. We conclude that schools collect more data on international students and communicate better information about programs to improve services and ensure that students know accurately what to expect from their overseas education.     

The Invisibility of Wage Employment in Statistics on the Informal Economy in Africa: Causes and Consequences

Abstract

This article challenges the claim, along with the statistics that support it, that self-employment is by far the dominant employment status in the informal economy. The article begins by reviewing key insights from relevant literature on the informal economy to argue that conventional notions of ‘wage employment’ and ‘self-employment’, while unfit for capturing the nature and variety of employment relations in developing countries, remain central to the design of surveys on the workforce therein. After putting statistics on Tanzania’s informal economy and labour force into context, the analysis reviews the type of wage employment relationships that can be found in one instance of the informal economy in urban Tanzania. The categories and terms used by workers to describe their employment situation are then contrasted with those used by the latest labour force survey in Tanzania. The article scrutinises how key employment categories have been translated from English into Swahili, how the translation biases respondents’ answers towards the term ‘self-employment’, and how this, in turn, leads to the statistical invisibility of wage labour in the informal economy. The article also looks at the consequences of this ‘statistical tragedy’ and at the dangers of conflating varied forms of employment, including wage labour, that differ markedly in their modes of operation and growth potential. Attention is also paid to the trade-offs faced by policy-makers in designing better labour force surveys.     

Ein bisschen Theorie und wenig Empirie: Die öffentlichen Finanzen als Thema der bundesrepublikanischen Politikwissenschaft (1949–1989)

This article examines how political scientists in West Germany (1949–1989) dealt with public finance issues. Facing the enormous challenges of establishing a democracy and coming to terms with the legacy of National Socialism, it shows that neither tax nor budget policy played much of a role in this fledgling discipline during the first two decades of this country’s history. This was changing during the 1970s with the emergence of the largely neo-Marxist influenced debates about the nature of the state, when attention turned toward its finances. The resulting scholarly works argued primarily at the meta-level, however. It was not until the 1980s that researchers produced their first empirically sound, international comparative studies, focusing above all on budget policy.     

Deterrence and delinquency: An analysis of individual data

Is commission of crime deterred by fear of arrest? Individual self-reported data on the commission of three crimes are analyzed in relation to perceived probabilities of arrest for more than 3000 French-speaking teenagers of the Montreal school population in 1974. The crimes are shoplifting, drug use, and stealing an item worth more than $50.00. In addition to the effect of the individuals' perceptions of the probability of arrest for the three crimes, age, sex, and previous arrest record are also taken into account. The data are all categorical. A multivariate log-linear probability model is estimated in order to test hypotheses concerning the direction and magnitude of bivariate associations among the variables. We conclude that there is clear evidence of a negative association between the subjective probability of arrest for each crime and the frequency of commission of that crime. We also find some negative cross-effects of the perceptions of the probability of arrest for one type of crime on the commission of another, holding constant the direct effects.     

A cocaine body packer with normal abdominal plain radiograms. Value of drug detection in urine and contrast study of the bowel

Drug packets are usually detected by ordinary abdominal radiographs, which is of major importance in the apprehension and prosecution of drug body packers, but false negatives may occur. We report the case of a cocaine body packer who had used the prograde route and in whom the initial abdominal plain films were normal. The diagnosis of cocaine body packing was assessed by seldom-described complementary methods of detection, including drug detection in the urine and contrast study of the bowel.