Prosecuting Juveniles as Adults

In Minnesota, the 1980 legislature statutorily defined a class of juvenile offenders presumed on the basis of age, alleged offense, and record of prior felony offenses to be unfit for treatment in the juvenile court. In this article we evaluate the effect of Minnesota's revised waiver statute by comparing cases in which waiver proceedings were initiated and in which transfer occurred for two time periods, before and after adoption of the legislatively defined presumptive criteria. Our findings suggest that the objective criteria adopted by the Minnesota legislature are not, in themselves, an adequate means for selecting juveniles for transfer to adult court. The criteria identify many juveniles whose records on close examination do not appear to be very serious and fail to identify many juveniles whose records are characterized by violent, frequent, and persistent delinquent activity.     

Toward a theoretical explanation of premature cabinet termination

Abstract. We propose a rational choice model of premature cabinet termination involving considerations of expected gain in terms of electoral payoffs, policy payoffs, or portfolio payoffs. This approach, which distinguishes contextual variables that will generally affect the nature of cost-benefit calculations made by political actors from the factors that are most likely to have a direct impact on a particular decision to precipitate a cabinet crisis, leads us to several testable hypotheses. We provide a first illustrative test of our predictions with data from the Netherlands.     

Elite perceptions of mass preferences in The Netherlands; biases in cognitive responsiveness

Abstract. Several studies have shown dissimilarities between political leaders and voters in terms of political attitudes and policy preferences. Though many explanations have been offered for this phenomenon, the knowledge factor has been overlooked. The basic question of this paper is how knowledgeable politicians are of the political opinions of their voters as well as of the general public. Forty-six national Dutch politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of the public at large and of their own voters who agree with specific political statements. These estimates were then compared with the actual distribution of opinions. Though using a rather strict criterion it has been found that politicians tend to give inaccurate estimates of the public's support for various political issues. The inaccuracy does not differ between members of the government and members of parliament, but politicians of parties in office appear to perform worse than members of opposition parties. The data do not support the hypothesis about politicians' ability to correctly estimate majority and minority opinions, or to accurately localize their own voters relative to the public at large. Furthermore it is observed that politicians overestimate rather than underestimate differences in opinion between the electorate and their own voters. No difference is found in politicians'estimates of political issues which can or cannot be classified in terms of 'left' or 'right'. In addition, politicians do not judge their voters to be more right-wing than they actually are. Contrary to our hypothesis, Social-Democratic politicians are not more likely to show a 'conservative bias' in estimating their voters' preferences compared to politicians from the Christian-Democratic and Liberal parties. Finally, the relevance of our findings for political sciences as well as some normative consequences are briefly discussed.     

Potentials and limitations of executive leadership: the Austrian cabinet since 1945

Abstract. This article analyzes the Austrian cabinet along the representation-efficiency and the leadership-collective decision-making dimensions. After outlining the respective traditions of the Austrian cabinet some information about the personal styles of Austrian chancellors and their respective ability for leadership is provided. Some aspects of pre-ministerial careers are analyzed in terms of the representation-efficiency dimension, while a discussion of cabinet life tries to detect indicators for the systematic analysis of the leadership-collective decision-making dimension. The final section links the two dimensions: in the Austrian case high leadership efficiency on the one hand and collective decision-making representation on the other appear to be positively correlated.     

THE DELIVERY OF POLICE SERVICES: An Experiment in Team Policing

This article considers team policing as a method of deploying police manpower and examines the impact of an experiment in one neighborhood in a medium-sized American city. The first section reviews team policing in light of earlier police reforms and sets forth the basic tenets and expectations of team policing as a deployment strategy. Next the design of the quasi-experiment is discussed. The program is evaluated in terms of its impact upon a number of criteria, including attitudes toward the police, the evaluation of police services, clearance rates, and crime rates. While no reduction in crime rates was detected, a favorable impact was made in most other areas.     

Women are more likely than men to blame structural factors for women's political under-representation: Evidence from 27 countries

Over time, gender and politics research has made progress in identifying those factors that result in low numbers of women in political institutions and in making evidence-informed suggestions about how to ameliorate them. These factors include discrimination in party recruitment processes, male-dominated political culture and broader gender inequalities in society. In contrast, little is known about public opinion regarding these drivers of women's political under-representation, especially whether to who or what women assign blame for the under-representation of women in politics differs from men. This article provides the first discussion and analysis of blame assignment for women's numeric under-representation in politics. In doing so, it outlines and operationalises a framework that distinguishes between meritocratic explanations of women's under-representation, whereby the blame for women not holding political office in greater numbers is assigned to women themselves, and structural explanations, whereby social forces external to women are seen to result in their numeric under-representation. Cross-national data from 27 European countries is used to show that women are significantly more likely than men to assign blame for women's numeric under-representation to structural factors. The hierarchical nature of the dataset is exploited using multilevel models and significant differences in levels of structural blame assignment between countries is found as well as between-country variation in the probability of women assigning blame to structural explanations for women's under-representation. Finally, the category of structural explanations is disaggregated in order to assess their relative prominence and to provide strong corroborative evidence that women predominantly assign blame for women's under-representation to political culture over other structural blame factors. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the study's findings for policy makers contemplating the pursuit of gender equality policies aimed at increasing women's political representation and makes suggestions for the direction of future research in this area.