Modes of participation over the adult life span

Sidney Verba and Norman Nie, in their 1972 workParticipation in America, advance the notion that political participation is not unidimensional, but is comprised of different modes. In recent years, the availability of panel and cross-sectional time series data has led to greater interest in the temporal dimension of political participation. Using data from nine American National Election Studies, we confirm the Verba and Nie findings with respect to voting and campaign participation and expand upon them. We examine the factor structure of indicators used in composite indices of voting and campaign participation and find that the structure of participation is stable across age groups, cohorts, and periods, confirming that composite indices of voting and campaign participation are not confounded by age, cohort, or period effects.This study was supported by grants from the Wayne State University Graduate School and the National Institute on Aging (NIA 5 AG06344-02).     

Invisible decisive coalitions in large hierarchies

This paper examines the extent to which organizational hierarchies are democratic or (in the more usual language of administrative studies) participative, in the sense that the views of a large proportion of organizational membership are taken into account when an organizational choice is made. We view organizations as making choices in a “bottom-up” manner: subordinates recommend options to their superior, and if subordinates are in sufficient agreement their superior accepts their advice. We prove that as the number of levels in the hierarchy increases, organizational choices can be dominated by a smaller and smaller proportion of the total organizational membership. In the limit, a vanishing small proportion of the membership can dominate policymaking.     

Books in review

His books include Two-Person Game Theory: The Essential Ideas; Fights, Games and Debates;and Mathematical Models in the Social Behavioral Sciences.     

The Downsian model of electoral participation: Formal theory and empirical analysis of the constituency size effect

This paper applies a game-theoretic model of participation under uncertainty to investigate the negative relationship between constituency size and voter turnout rates: theconstituency size effect. We find that this theoretical model accounts for almost all of the variation in turnout due to size in cross sectional data from school budget referenda.     

RETHINKING AMERICAN JAIL DEATH RATES: A COMPARISON OF NATIONAL MORTALITY AND JAIL MORTALITY, 1978, 1983

This article provides insights in to the problem of jail deaths in America by drawing upon relevant data from the 1978 and 1983 National Jail Censuses and other official sources. The goal o f the research is to compare national death trends with jail death trends in order to determine (1) if the problem is as grave as the available literature suggests, and (2) if any major changes have occurred as a result of federal court activism. Indeed, we found that when an adjusted general population death rate is employed certain cause-specific rates are actually lower in jail. This generalization, while true for natural causes and homicides, was not the case for suicides. Depending upon which general population rates are compared with which jail rates, inmates committed suicide at a rate that was between five and fifteen times higher than the rate for free-world citizens. Between censuses, the general trend in jail death rates was generally downward, although once again suicide rates tended to exhibit less of a decrease than the rates for homicides and death by natural causes. Possible explanations for this anomaly and policy implications are addressed in the article.     

Offsetting Collections in the Federal Budget

Offsetting collections are one of the largest and least understood types of transactions in the federal budget. This article discusses a number of the most common questions that arise with regard to offsetting collections.     

Cashing out food stamps: Impacts on food expenditures and diet quality

On July 1, 1982, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico implemented a cash food assistance program, known as the Nutrition Assistance Program, as a replacement for the existing Food Stamp Program. The Nutrition Assistance Program differs from the former Puerto Rico Food Stamp Program in two important respects: cash replaced coupons as the form of issuance and eligibility standards and benefits were reduced to bring program costs into line with a reduced funding level. Based on household food use survey data collected before and after the introduction of the Nutrition Assistance Program, this paper examines the program's impacts on household food expenditures and diet quality. The results of the analysis indicate that the cashing out of food stamp benefits in Puerto Rico had virtually no impact on food expenditures and diet quality, while restrictions on eligibility and benefits under the Nutrition Assistance Program caused a decline in the money value of food used at home of about 2 percent and reductions in the availability of food energy and five specific nutrients ranging from 1.8 to 3.2 percent of the adult male Recommended Dietary Allowances.     

Peers,parents, and adolescent drug use in a rural community: A two-wave panel study

This study examined the relative influence of changes in orientations to ward peers and parents on the drug-use patterns of a panel of rural youths. It was hypothesized that, when the changes in orientations that occurred over a three-year period of time were evaluated, the level of involvement with either alcohol or marijuana would be highest for those youths experiencing movement toward positions sympathetic to the use of drugs. The data analysis revealed that after three years there was greater distance between youths and their parents on the subject of drugs, and that those youths who experienced the greatest movement were also the most heavily involved with drugs. The single best predictor of the use rate for either type of drug was the level of past use, followed by changes in the level of drug-related conflict with parents. Among the peer-based measures, changes in the frequency of both pro- and antidrug-use discussions were found to make a significant contribution only in the case of marijuana use.A version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, August 1985, Washington, D.C.He received his Ph.D. from the University of Montana. His research interests include death and dying in American jails and professional socialization in criminal justice vocations.