The Imprisonment Crisis in America: Introduction

This article provides an overview of recent trends in imprisonment rates in America and introduces the articles in this issue of The Review of Policy Research. Incarceration rates have increased by more than 500 percent since the early 1970s and have now reached a rate of almost 700, higher than anywhere else in the world. The impact has been particularly hard on racial minorities, especially women (whose incarceration rate went from around 8 in 1975 to 59 in 2001). The “war on drugs” has been one of the main reasons behind the increases in imprisonment, along with the more general “get tough on crime” movement that began in the late 1970s. The articles in this issue center around how this recent trend in incarceration impacts the entire society, but especially poor communities. Several of the articles focus on race, age and gender as important variables, in addition to the tendency of the parole system to sort of “recycle” released prisoners back into the prison system.     

Terrorism and Transportation Policy and Administration: Balancing the Model and Equations for Optimal Security

September 11 was the catalytic event that clearly demonstrated that transportation security was a virtual myth. We had obviously overinvested in efficiency-based mechanisms and procedures while the security and safety standards provided by effectiveness considerations were being increasingly ignored. This article analyzes the increasingly dangerous situation as it unfolded and provides an Emerging Entrepreneurial Management and Public Policy Model designed to provide insights towards rebalancing our transportation security and public policy considerations as we attempt to design, implement, and pay for optimal security systems to deal with the terrorism threats we face in the early twenty-first century. Rebalancing the model and the equations will require increased focus, will, and skills. It will also be a lot more expensive . . . in both the private and the public sectors.     

Mixed electoral rules’ impact on party systems

The growing literature about mixed electoral systems has addressed their effect on party systems, voting behavior, campaign strategies, legislative roll-call voting, and other issues in a handful of countries. But, the effect of mixed systems has not been fully evaluated cross-nationally or longitudinally. Using data from the World Bank’s Database of Political Institutions, we address this gap in the literature by investigating two related questions. First, do mixed electoral rules produce different election outcomes than other election rules? Second, are these results attenuated by the definitions of mixed systems that scholars employ? We find that mixed systems generate outcomes that are distinct from other electoral systems and that these findings are generally robust across different definitions.     

Party knowledge and candidate knowledge: constituency campaigning and voting and the 1997 British General Election

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the electoral impact of constituency campaigns in British General Elections. Much is now known about the electoral consequences of local campaigns on parties’ constituency vote shares. Yet more remains to be discovered about the impacts of these local campaigns on voters’ knowledge of parties and candidates. Analysis of data from the 1997 British General Election demonstrates that the local campaign is associated with improved voter knowledge of who is standing for each party in a constituency, which is, in its turn, associated with an increased chance of voting for the party in the election, other things being equal. Campaign efforts at different scales, from the national to the local, have different impacts on voters’ knowledge.     

A Party of a Different Color? Race,Campaign Communication,and Party Politics

Although studies have examined the contents of party images and the impact of those images on candidate evaluations, we do not have an understanding of the conditions that lead to party image change. In this article, I examine the impact of racialized campaigns on perceptions of individuals' party images. Moreover, I explore the factors that mediate the campaigns' effects. I argue that the success of a strategy's ability to alter party images depends on the strength of the individuals' extant party images. Using the 2000 Republican National Convention as a case study, I find that party images are indeed malleable. Further, I find that race, party identification, and education mediate party image change.     

The alternative vote and interethnic moderation: A reply to Fraenkel and Grofman

The alternative vote (AV) is a preferential electoral system that tends to reward political moderation and compromise. Fraenkel and Grofman have modeled the likely effects of AV in severely divided societies, in order to impugn AV as a tool of interethnic accommodation. In this response, I show that Fraenkel and Grofman’s model is based on extreme assumptions that bear no relation to party and voter behavior in such societies. Models based on realistic assumptions about strategic behavior and cross-national experience with AV both demonstrate that AV generally provides centripetal incentives that can contribute to interethnic coalition-building and accommodation.     

North-South Climate Change Negotiations: A Sequential Game with Asymmetric Information

This article determines the conditions under which theSouthern countries should act together, or separately, whilenegotiating with the North about climate change policy andabout the conditions for future Southern engagement. The papermodels the international negotiations with complete and withasymmetric information in a dynamic framework. Results showthat, depending on their characteristics, the differentplayers can obtain benefits delaying the moment of theagreement.