Criminal justice faculty and criminal justice students: A case for the missing data

This article reviews the most current criminal justice education research. It examines the interrelationship between the work of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the Joint Commission on Criminology and Criminal Justice Education and Standards, and the National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police, and describes and compares some of their more important findings. Discussed are types of criminal justice programs; characteristics of criminal justice faculty, particularly in terms of earned academic degrees; agency work experience; commitment to research and teaching; types of criminal justice curricula, as typified by certain educational philosophies; and criminal justice students. Although this article notes several areas with which future research might become fruitfully involved, the area in need of most immediate attention, and the area that current research has all but ignored, is the criminal justice student.     

Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century: Toward a Scholarly and Practical Agenda

We understand civic engagement to mean people participating together for deliberation and collective action within an array of interests, institutions and networks, developing civic identity, and involving people in governance processes.     

Democratizing the Administrative State: Connecting Neighborhood Councils and City Agencies

Citizen participation in government decision making, especially at the local level, has received heightened attention with regard to its promise for improved governance. The overarching administrative ethos of the administrative state creates barriers to citizen participation in governance. Developing and nurturing citizen participation in the presence of the administrative state is a significant challenge. Drawing on the literary tradition of public engagement and learning, this article models a developmental strategy of participation that offers one avenue for achieving meaningful partnerships between city agencies and neighborhood councils in a metropolitan environment. We present a model of citizen participation that brings neighborhood councils and city agencies together in a collaborative partnership. This model is based on the literature on citizen participation, which focuses on the significance of interactive processes in building trust among participants and creating mutual understanding and agreement.     

Issue Perceptions of Parties and Candidates: A Comparison of Norway and the United States

We examine how clearly citizens in Norway and the United States perceive the ideology and issue positions of parties and candidates. Following in the tradition of Campbell & Valen (1966) and Granberg & Holmberg (1988). we ask: Does the political system matter? We also consider the role of individual sophistication and whether sophistication has different consequences in the two cultural setting. Across a broad range of issues, we find that citizens in Norway have a sharper view of party positions than those in the United States. Sophistication influences the clarity of issue perception in both countries. However, the hypothesis that sophistication matters more in the US is not well supported.     

Political evocation and styles of candidate evaluation

Recent work in cognitive processing and individual decision making has emphasized that individuals vary in the criteria they bring to bear to evaluate political objects. In this paper we argue that individual differences are but one piece of the decision-making puzzle, and that environmental factors are also important. Of particular interest to us is the idea that different candidates evoke different evaluative criteria. Using data from a 1984 sample of undergraduates and the 1980 National Election Study, we find evidence that political evocation effects do exist. This result has implications for understanding both the decision calculus of individuals and the collective rationality of the electorate.