Coming to Terms with Intramural Differences Over Policy Frameworks: How Policy Researchers Accommodate Rival Claims Among their Peers

Although we readily scrutinize conflicts among political stakeholders, similar attention is seldom paid to how we deal with contestable understandings within our own field of inquiry. Debates over competing scholarly perspectives and contested models are rarely subject to any systematic postmortem or attempts to account for differential survival. Given the indeterminacy of many of our conceptual schemes, empirical data seldom carry the day to a resolution all can accept. Accordingly, there are eventually many different versions of any given dispute, each offering a different path to resolution or equanimity. Disputants retire and conflicts fade, providing a demographic resolution of sorts, but not a scientific or a conceptual one. The work presented here claims that there is much to be gained from systematic scrutiny of our conceptual disputes, especially as a means to access the different perspectives we assume to handle them. We argue that there is an internal logic to the different perspectives on any given dispute. It is not the dispute per se that draws our interest; but rather, how any given dispute generates multiple interpretations and reconstructed versions. We propose and illustrate an approach to analyzing disputes that makes their internal logic more transparent and attends to the pathways that emerge for resolution. We will find, in the process, that there are some reliable routes to conciliation and some fault lines that remain unstable.     

Searching for Symptoms of Political Shirking: Congressional Foreign Travel

Despite the hypothesized propensity for shirking to marklegislative institutions, the evidence is rather equivocal;moreover, most of the research has focused exclusively onlegislator voting, thereby constraining whatevergeneralizations might emerge. The purpose of this paper is tocontribute to the debate over the question of politicalshirking by extending the range of phenomena examined toinclude congressional foreign travel. Our analysis providesevidence that opportunism is a problem in Congress. We findthat last-period problems have arisen in the area of foreigntravel, and that increased scrutiny to the problem on the partof Congress only shifted consumption patterns, i.e.,legislators began taking foreign junkets near, but not at theend of, their legislative careers. Not all foreign travelshould be construed as worthless junketing since there isstrong evidence that some foreign travel is related tomembers' responsibilities on congressional committees.     

Church attendance,meaningfulness of religion,and depressive symptomatology among adolescents

Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 451 adolescents at a public high school in Texas during the spring semester 1989. The instrument used contained the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and items to determine participants' gender, frequency of church attendance, and meaningfulness of one's religion. Based on social support research and the writings of Carl Jung and Viktor Frankl, it was predicted that those who attended church frequently and those who viewed their religions as providing meaning for their lives would have lower BDI scores than their classmates. The findings supported these predictions. Implications and a discussion of the results are included.Received Ed.D. in educational psychology from University of Illinois. Main research interests are substance abuse in adolescents, drug use prevention strategies, and suicidal ideation in adolescents.Received Ph.D. in general psychology from Boston University. Main research interest is psychology in interdisciplinary perspective, with a specialization in the psychology of religion.Pursuing a M.Ed, in school psychology at Southwest Texas State University. Main research interests are psychological testing and assessment.     

Truth,Lies, and Videotape: An Investigation of the Ability of Federal Parole Officers to Detect Deception

The ability of a group of Canadian federal parole officers to detect deception was investigated over the course of 2 days of lie detection training. On the first day of training, 32 officers judged the honesty of 12 (6 true, 6 fabricated) videotaped speakers describing personal experiences, half of which were judged before and half judged after training. On the second day, 5 weeks later, 20 of the original participants judged the honesty of another 12 videotapes (again, 6 pre- and 6 posttraining). To isolate factors relating to detection accuracy, three groups of undergraduate participants made judgments on the same 24 videotapes: (1) a feedback group, which received feedback on accuracy following each judgment, (2) a feedback + cue information group, which was given feedback and information on empirically based cues to deception, and (3) a control group, which did not receive feedback or cue information. Results indicated that at baseline all groups performed at or below chance levels. However, overall, all experimental groups (including the parole officers) became significantly better at detecting deception than the control group. By the final set of judgments, the parole officers were significantly more accurate (M = 76.7%) than their baseline performance (M = 40.4%) as well as significantly more accurate than the control group (M = 62.5%). The results indicate that detecting deceit is difficult, but training and feedback can enhance detection skills.     

The incongruous achiever in adolescence

The authors wished to study some of the internal psychological dynamics of achievement in a nonpatient identified high school population. Questionnaires were administered to the Grade 13 students and their parents in a large high school. A number of students whose achievement and educational plans were not congruous with their general background were selected for interview. The findings suggest that a wide variety of ages and developmental stages can be discerned as critical points in the development of a student's attitude toward higher education. These students have many values in common, and their values appear related to a positive or negative identification with parental values. The students themselves show a wide range of personality integration. They relate in a special way to a wide variety of teachers' personalities.Received M.D. from University of Alberta, Edmonton, in 1969 and completed specialty training in psychiatry at University of Toronto in 1974. Main interests include psychoanalysis, community psychiatry, and currently antabuse implants.Received M.D. from University of Toronto in 1960, D. Psych. from University of Toronto in 1963, C.R.C.P.(c) in 1965, and F.R.C.P. in 1972. Main interests include adolescent psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychiatric residency training programs, and mental health delivery systems.     

Russia’s civil service: professional or patrimonial? Executive-level officials in five federal ministries

ABSTRACT

The issue of poor performance of the Russian federal bureaucracy is addressed by linking performance to type of official, through analysis of biographical data on deputy ministers and division (departament) heads in five federal ministries since 2012, supplemented by internet searches on behavior, particularly of a corrupt nature. Education, previous career experience, and recruitment, including its timing relative to superiors and subordinates, are analyzed, in order to determine whether officials behave primarily as members of patrimonial teams, as members of problem-solving organizations, as self-serving individuals, as the instruments of capture by commercial organizations, or as servants of bureaucratic agency interests. The data do not strongly support any one conclusion, but problem-solving officials have the strongest presence.     

Trump the antisemantic,and the boundaries of populism

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider Donald Trump as an “antisemantic” president, and link antisemanticism to broader forms of populism. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism, I explore the political and discursive domains as intrinsically linked in the Trumpian moment. Second, I turn to a theory of the antisemantic, showing its difference from the Orwellian universe. Where the Orwellian model depends on the inversion of meanings, the Trumpian paradigm (“Truth isn’t truth”) attacks the foundations of meaning itself. In the Trumpian age the internet also acts as a dark multiplier, thinning out meaning through its distortions and profusion. As counterpart to these patterns, I show how the antisemantic rests on certain symbolic fixities, especially around boundaries and the “uber” symbol of the wall. I end with some notes on how to reconstruct a sense of accountability in meaning, and to think of boundaries that are transitive and generative rather than singular and walled.