FATHERHOOD IN THE CHILD SUPPORT SYSTEM: AN INNOVATIVE PROBLEM‐SOLVING APPROACH TO AN OLD PROBLEM1

The article is a summary of the development of the District of Columbia Superior Court's Fathering Court Initiative. The Fathering Court Initiative is a problem‐solving court that has developed an innovative approach to child support cases that involves noncustodial parents returning from a period of incarceration. The program is designed to operate as a court based partnership between government and private sector organizations that match resources with family needs to promote responsible co‐parenting.     

The underexamined assumptions of the invisible hand: Monetary incentives as policy instruments

To alleviate overcrowding in pretrial detention facilities, the City of New York established a program offering substantial budgetary increments to those district attorneys' offices in the city that reduced the number of long-term detainee cases. The experience with this program suggests that the inherent assuptions underlying a monetary incentive strategy—the existence of capacity, the avoidability of goal displacement, and the efficacy of financial rewards—need to be carefully examined if implementation is to be successful.     

Partisan and ideological belief systems: Do they differ?

In this paper a direct comparison is made between the cognitive content of ideological and partisan belief systems. A quasi-experimental design was used in a two-part study. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a partisan or ideological condition and asked to categorize and then scale contemporary leaders, groups, and issues as either Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. Results indicate that the meanings of partisan and ideological belief systems are quite similar — their cognitive attributes (issues, groups, and leaders) are interchangeable at the categorical level and highly correlated (r=0.86) in their degree of typicality. Political sophistication is determined to contribute significantly to the degree to which partisan and ideological belief systems are related. For politically sophisticated subjects (Ss) the two belief systems are highly related (r=0.90), whereas for low sophisticates, the belief systems are only moderately related (r=0.50). Sophistication also plays an important role in structuring Ss' own issue preferences. High sophisticates in both the liberal-conservative and Democratic-Republican conditions exhibit a greater level of issue constraint, which can be interpreted as either ideological or partisan constraint.Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 1983.     

The maturing of development administration

This article traces the evolution of the concepts underlying development administration since its origin as a distinct subdiscipline in the early 1960s. It relates the main thrusts in development administration to changing theories and approaches to economic and social development, especially the appropriate functions of the state, the implications of modernization, and the capabilities of people outside the modern core in urban centres. Seven major themes have emerged during the past decade. Their acceptance among academics and practitioners has produced a more sophisticated, realistic and useful appreciation of the relationships of public administration to development. Though this bodes well for the future, an unsolved problem is the continuing intellectual hegemony of Western concepts and practices, despite an impressive number of highly trained Third World scholars and well-established Third World institutions operating in this field. There is evidence that the ongoing search for effective indigenous management practices will greatly enrich development administration as a field of inquiry and of practice.     

Black-box models of candidate evaluation

All contemporary models of candidate evaluation are memory-based models in that they treat the direction and strength of evaluation as a function of the mix of positively and negatively valued (valenced) information retrieved from memory. Yet, oddly enough, despite the assumption that memory mediates judgment, none of the major models looks at the processes involved in what information voters recall and how that evidence was integrated into a summary evaluation. In this sense then, political science models of vote choice are black-box models: They are silent about how voters actually go about interpreting information and integrating the evidence into a summary evaluation of the candidates. In this article we critique the major political science models, call attention to the implicit assumptions they make about what evidence is assumed to be in memory, and conclude with an argument for introducing process into our explanations of vote choice.     

Predicting Consistency Between Officially Recorded and Self-Reported Records of Arrest

National Youth Survey Family Study (NYSFS) respondents were examined to identify the characteristics of individuals and their sociological environments, that would make them more likely to have consistency between self reported and officially recorded records of arrest. Somewhat surprisingly, it was found that those most likely to be at risk of arrest (males, high exposure to delinquent friends, higher level of substance use) are more likely to have consistency between officially recorded and self-reported arrests. Findings will be helpful in both producing more accurate information on arrests and in increasing sensitivity to the possibility of bias in arrest records that may be based on sociodemographic or behavioral characteristics of the individual.