Statecraft, Social Policy, and Governance in Latin America

This article develops an analytical framework designed to examine social policy as a strategic approach to issues of state-society relations and the problem of governance in Latin America. It argues that in Latin America and particularly Brazil social protection policy flowed from initiating capacity concentrated originally in the state, and specifically in a techno-bureaucratic elite connected to a strong executive. The policy, however, produced structures wherein initiative capacity was dispersed into a multiple of intermediate points at the nexus between the state and civil society. This in turn led to an immobilized dissipation of initiative cizpacity in this specific policy area which was symptomatic of, and reinforcing to, a generalized immobilism or power implosion that periodically has gripped these sociopolitical formations, producing shifts from formally democratic to authoritarian regimes and vice versa.     

Statistical Procedures for Analyzing Factors Affecting Judicial Sentences Using Simultaneously Derived Crime Seriousness and Sentence Severity Scales

A variety of characteristics of the defendant, the case, and the court potentially could affect judicial sentences. Building on a recently published method for scaling the seriousness of the crimes and the severity of sentences, this paper describes procedures for investigating factors affecting sentence severity. An empirical example illustrates the procedures, as well as the problems of interpretation and analysis that arise in statistical studies of sentencing.     

Legal Reform in the Context of Islamic Fundamentalism: An Analysis of Trends and Prospects

Because of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, many established institutions in the Islamic world have come under fire. Among these are the legal institutions. In this paper, an attempt is made to outline the trends and prospects associated with legal reform within the context of Islamic fundamentalism.     

DELINQUENCY AND THE STRUCTURE OF ADOLESCENT PEER GROUPS*

Gangs and group‐level processes were once central phenomena for criminological theory and research. By the mid‐1970s, however, gang research primarily was displaced by studies of individual behavior using randomized self‐report surveys, a shift that also removed groups from the theoretical foreground. In this project, we return to the group level to test competing theoretical claims about delinquent group structure. We use network‐based clustering methods to identify 897 friendship groups in two ninth‐grade cohorts of 27 Pennsylvania and Iowa schools. We then relate group‐level measures of delinquency and drinking to network measures of group size, friendship reciprocity, transitivity, structural cohesion, stability, average popularity, and network centrality. We find significant negative correlations between group delinquency and all of our network measures, suggesting that delinquent groups are less solidary and less central to school networks than nondelinquent groups. Additional analyses, on the one hand, reveal that these correlations are explained primarily by other group characteristics, such as gender composition and socioeconomic status. Drinking behaviors, on the other hand, show net positive associations with most of the network measures, suggesting that drinking groups have a higher status and are more internally cohesive than nondrinking groups. Our findings shed light on a long‐standing criminological debate by suggesting that any structural differences between delinquent and nondelinquent groups are likely attributable to other characteristics coincidental with delinquency. In contrast, drinking groups seem to provide peer contexts of greater social capital and cohesion.     

The Fly Ball Effect: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding the Impacts of Short‐Term Seed Grants

The federal government has long used grants‐in‐aid to encourage state and local governments to carry out federal policies. Little research has been done that examines how short‐term seed grants affect program continuation. We propose the “fly ball effect” as a theoretical framework for understanding how seed money should impact program maintenance. Our theory suggests that short‐term seed grants by themselves should result in considerable funding uncertainty and program eliminations or stagnation once the initial grant money expires. We use data from drug court start‐ups in four states to provide empirical support for our theory. We argue that understanding the logic of the fly ball effect can help granting governments to improve the effectiveness of their grant funding systems, at least as measured by strong program continuation and expansion.     

The Rising Tide Economy: Lessons from the Squeezed Middle for Progressive Economic Policy

For all its rhetorical potency, the policy implications of the ‘squeezed middle’ are yet to be fully explored. This article looks at what the phenomenon means for the design and prosecution of progressive economic policy. It argues that any progressive government today needs to adopt a new first order goal of economic policy: ensuring that the material wellbeing of ordinary working people rises when the economy grows, a project referred to as ‘building a rising tide economy’. This objective would sit in addition to the traditional goals of sustained GDP growth, high employment, low inflation and poverty reduction. It would have real implications across a range of important policy areas.     

Anticipating Uncertainty: The Strategy-Structure Problem in Public Bureaucracy

The connection between administrative structure and policy strategy for public agencies is neither well understood, nor widely appreciated in political science. Much more emphasis is placed on the structure of linkages between bureaucracies and other political institutions. In this article, 1 advance an argument explaining the importance of strategy in policymaking for public agencies, and demonstrate how the concept needs to be refined in order for it to have meaning for public sector organizations. Strategy is analyzed in terms of two categories of uncertainty: generalized and contingent. Because of the ubiquitousness of generalized uncertainty in public policymaking, developing a capacity for anticipating uncertainty problems is critical in strategy formation. Whether that capacity exists is a function of administrative structure. 1 further present an argument for why structure deserves consideration as a political and technical matter, and not simply as a consequence of political preferences.     

Perceptions About the Poor,Their Legal Needs,and Legal Services*

The Legal Services Corporation is faced with the problem of allocating limited resources in order to meet the legal needs of the poor. It is forced into the dilemma of setting priorities, creating workable regulations to meet an ambiguously defined and elusive concept of legal need. Current regulations require annual reports by legal services programs that are based, in part, on the assessment of eligible clients' needs as expressed by the attitudes of clients, the private bar and other interested persons. These regulations are premised on implicit assumptions relating attitudes, problems experience, legal need, and the relevancy of nonclient perceptions. This study examines these assumptions in an analysis of perceived problems, attitudes toward the allocation of legal services resources, and how these differ between the eligible client community, the private bar and public agencies in a community served by one legal service program in California.