Attorney communication and impression making in the courtroom

This study investigated the effectiveness of attorney communication and impression making in the courtroom. Trained in-court observers rated attorney presentations for factual and legal informativeness, organization, articulateness, and rapport during the opening statement phase of 50 trials. After the trials, jurors were asked to evaluate the attorneys' overall articulateness. enthusiasm, and likableness during the trial. The attorneys were then questioned about their own performance on these indices. The results revealed that the opening statements of prosecuting attorneys were judged by observers as better organized and more factually and legally informative than defense attorneys. However, these variables were not related to trial outcome. Juror evaluations of prosecuting attorneys more closely agreed with these attorneys' self-perceptions of courtroom performance while defense attorneys rated themselves significantly more favorably than did jurors. More courtroom experience did not generally lead to better courtroom performance during opening statements for either prosecuting or defense attorneys, and often resulted in significant overestimations of general performance relative to juror evaluations, particularly among defense attorneys. System constraints operating in favor of prosecutors and performance feedback mechanisms available to prosecutors but not to defense attorneys are discussed. These mechanisms may account for the discrepancies between juror perceptions of attorneys and attorney self-perception.     

Municipal Socialism Then and Now: some lessons for the Global South

Given the large and growing literature opposed to the privatisation of services such as water and electricity, it is peculiar that so little has been written about the experience of ‘municipal socialism’—a set of roughly analogous historical movements that used local governments to challenge private service delivery and advance ‘socialist’ agendas from the late 1800s to the 1940s. Although primarily a European and American phenomenon, and emerging from different contexts than those prevailing today, municipal socialism found widespread support and transformed many public services. Results were mixed, with some experiments being little more than (pre)Keynesian attempts to revitalise capital accumulation in the face of ‘irrational’ private sector services, but the lessons are important as these experiments provided the first intellectually and politically sustained resistance to privatisation and other prototypical forms of what we now call neoliberalism, and demonstrated the possibility of effective service delivery by the public sector. This paper reviews these experiments, focusing on the experience of the United Kingdom and drawing lessons for contemporary efforts to build alternatives to privatisation in cities in the South, where local-level, socialist-oriented reforms have been relatively strong.     

Formative Evaluation of an Evidence-Based Intervention to Reduce Long-Term Foster Care: Assessing Readiness for Summative Evaluation

As part of the federal Permanency Innovations Initiative, this local grantee implemented an evidence-based intervention to improve outcomes for children with serious emotional disturbance. The project approach integrates the tenets of implementation science and program evaluation. Formative evaluation used a small sample (n = 76) to assess implementation integrity and statistical association to recommend whether the intervention was ready for summative evaluation (SE). Results showed that most process expectations were met. Statistical findings suggested that the intervention was associated with higher rates of reunification for treatment families as compared to families receiving services-as-usual. Thus, the intervention was recommended for SE.     

Replication with Attention to Numerical Accuracy

Numerical issues matter in statistical analysis. Small errorsoccur when numbers are translated from paper and pencil intothe binary world of computers. Surprisingly, these errors maybe propagated and magnified through binary calculations, eventuallyproducing statistical estimates far from the truth. In thisreplication and extension article, we look at one method ofverifying the accuracy of statistical estimates by running thesesame data and models on multiple statistical packages. We findthat for two published articles, Nagler (1994, American Journalof Political Science 38:230–255) and Alvarez and Brehm(1995, American Journal of Political Science 39:1055–1089),results are dependent on the statistical package used. In thecourse of our replications, we uncover other pitfalls that mayprevent accurate replication, and make recommendations to ensurethe ability for future researchers to replicate results.     

On the Overreport Bias of the National Election Study Turnout Rate

Consumers of the National Election Study (NES) should be concernedif the survey has a bias that is increasing with time. A recentarticle by Barry Burden claims that for presidential elections,there is an increasing overreport bias, or turnout gap, betweenthe NES turnout rate and the observed turnout rate caused bydeclining NES response rates. I show that the increasing turnoutgap is an artifact of the universes these two turnout ratesare based on. Reconciling the two universes shows no systematicincrease of the reconciled turnout gap in presidential electionsfrom 1948 to 2000, and furthermore demonstrates that the post-1976rise in NES response rates (until 2000) is rewarded in a lowerturnout gap. In addition, I offer another theory to explainthe turnout gap. If respondents have an equal propensity tomisreport that they voted when they did not, as turnout declines,the number of nonvoter respondents increases and so does theturnout gap. I show that in multivariate analysis this theoryoutperforms Burden's response rate driven theory, though neithertheory reaches statistical significance.