Mandates, Powers, and Policies

Elections provide a mandate to pursue a set of policies. Party label provides a concise ideological cue for voters to choose among candidates, and research on industrial democracies verifies a link between the parties voters elect and subsequent policy outcomes. The combination of inchoate party systems and economic vulnerability elsewhere may weaken the link between voter choice and policy. When examining economic policies in Latin America, there is some controversy as to whether governments carried out "reform by surprise"—promising one thing during a campaign while implementing another in office. We test whether the ideological reputations of executives' and legislators' parties explain whether they adopt market-oriented policies. We find that the future behavior of presidential candidates is difficult for voters to predict. However, the ideological reputation of legislators is a reliable predictor of policy outcomes, and the relationship is clarified by the prospects of collective action by legislative delegations.     

Black Cities/White Cities: Evaluating the Police

It is well known that African Americans and whites hold different views of the police, but nearly all of the previous research has been conducted in majority white settings. This research examines the relationship between race and evaluations of the police in majority black versus majority white contexts. Social dominance theory and the research on racial threat predict that when the racial majority changes, the relationship between race and attitudes toward police will change. We find that, in majority black contexts, the traditional relationship between being black and having negative evaluations of the police disappears, and it disappears because whites' evaluations of the police become more negative. Black evaluations of the police are relatively consistent across racial contexts. Also, white racial attitudes affect police evaluations in majority black contexts, but not in white contexts, while African American racial attitudes are inconsequential in both contexts. Furthermore, if a white citizen is victimized by crime in a black city, it has greater ramifications for evaluations of the police than if the victimization had occurred in a white city. All of this suggests that whites' views of the police may be more racialized than the views of African Americans.     

Competitive Tendering and Contracting, and Auditing: The Implications of the High Court Judgment in Esanda Finance

This article argues that the High Court has provided a timely warning of the legal dangers facing managers in their commercial dealings when engaged in competitive tendering and contracting (CTC). The Esanda case illustrates the increasingly close relationship between public administration and aspects of corporate governance.     

Taking the Keys from Grandpa

Recent highly publicized traffic accidents involving older drivers have led to renewed interest in state policies and administrative practices that award and renew drivers’ licenses in the American states. Because the probability of traffic accidents is linked to the medical conditions that are more prevalent among the elderly, and because the number of older drivers is expected to rise over the next several decades, one might expect that this will be an increasingly important policy issue. This article discusses variations that are observed across states in law and administrative practice. A longitudinal analysis of data on crashes involving elderly drivers in fifteen states indicates that crash rates are directly related to the length of the renewal cycle for older drivers and inversely related to the stringency of testing at renewal. It is also likely that states requiring physicians to report conditions that would impair driving will experience lower crash rates. A secondary analysis of policy impacts on the licensing rates is not conclusive, a finding that is attributable to inaccuracies in the reported numbers of licensed drivers.     

Looking for Locals: Voter Information Demands and Personal Vote-Earning Attributes of Legislators under Proportional Representation

Proportional representation systems affect the extent to which elected legislators exhibit various attributes that allow them to earn a personal vote. The sources of variation in personal vote-earning attributes (PVEA) lie in informational shortcuts voters use under different electoral rules. List type (closed or open) and district magnitude (the number of legislators elected from a district) affect the types of shortcuts voters employ. When lists are closed, legislators' PVEA are of decreasing usefulness to voters as magnitude (and hence the number of candidates on a list) increases. When lists are open, legislators' PVEA are increasingly useful to voters as magnitude increases, because the number of candidates from which voters must choose whom to give a preference vote increases. As predicted by the theory, the probability that a legislator will exhibit PVEA—operationalized as local birthplace or lower-level electoral experience—declines with magnitude when lists are closed, but rises with magnitude when lists are open .     

Fiscal Institutions,Credit Ratings,and Borrowing Costs

This paper investigates the impact of fiscal institutions on state government borrowing costs. We find that institutions have both a direct and indirect effect on interest costs paid by state governments. Revenue limits are associated directly with higher interest costs; expenditure limits, stricter balanced budget rules, and restrictions on state debt issuance are indirectly associated with lower interest costs because they lead to higher credit ratings. It appears that investors and bond raters incorporate information on fiscal institutions into their assessment of state government credit quality.     

Representations of the family in postwar British amateur film: family histories in the Lane and Scrutton collection at the East Anglian Film Archive

This article examines the construction of the postwar British family in amateur film with reference to the Sidney Lane and Cecil Scrutton collection held at the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA), particularly the films covering 1948 – 1961. Heather Norris Nicholson argues that home movies contribute to ‘an understanding of leisure and visual-related practices of consumption as well as the social processes by which people came to give themselves, and others, identities’ in the mid-twentieth century (Nicholson, H. N. [2004]. At Home and Abroad with Cine Enthusiasts: Regional Amateur Filmmaking and Visualizing the Mediterranean, ca. 1928 – 1962’. Geojournal, 49, 323–333). By considering the social and historical contexts in which these home movies were produced, and using accompanying notes by one of the filmmaker’s sons, the leisure time films of Lane and Scrutton can be analysed in order to understand how the amateur cine hobby ideologically constructed family, community and national identity in postwar Britain. The images of Christmas parties, daytrips and holidays in these films reveal much about this particular family, and are therefore very illuminating to the social historian and film scholar of today.