Legal Representation in the Juvenile Dependency System: Travis County,Texas’ Parent Representation Pilot Project

This study examines outcomes related to a parent representation pilot program in Travis County, Texas. Participation in the pilot program was related to earlier attorney appointment, a higher percentage of attorney presence across the life of the case, and a higher percentage of permanent outcomes for children. Parents’ percentage of presence at hearings across the life of the case was related to the child being returned home, dismissal of the juvenile dependency petition, and permanent management conservatorship. Early attorney appointment (i.e., less than 10 days from the initial hearing to full appointment) was related to permanent case outcomes.     

Constituent Communication Through Telephone Town Halls: A Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress

Telephone town halls are an increasingly prevalent method for members of Congress (MCs) to communicate with constituents, even while garnering popular criticism for failing to facilitate engagement and accountability. Yet scholars have paid little attention to the events and their effects, and even less to how they might be improved. To remedy this problem, we report on a field experiment in which four MCs joined their constituents in telephone town halls. Overall, participation in an event improved constituents’ evaluations of the format in general, and of the MC in particular. Furthermore, we studied how these events might be improved by evaluating a reform—a single‐topic focus with predistributed briefing materials—designed to enhance deliberative interaction. This reform enhanced effects on opinions of the format without significantly altering effects on attitudes toward the MC. Our results suggest that telephone town halls hold promise for constituents, officeholders, and democratic practice.     

Geographic Representation in Party‐Dominated Legislatures: A Quantitative Text Analysis of Parliamentary Questions in the German Bundestag

Political representation in European democracies is widely considered partisan and collectivist. This article, however, stresses that there is more to the representative process in European democracies than just its textbook version. It emphasizes the role of geographic representation as a complementary strategy in party‐dominated legislatures that is characterized by two distinct features. First, legislators employ distinct opportunities to participate in legislative contexts to signal attention to geographic constituents without disrupting party unity. Second, these activities are motivated by individual‐ and district‐level characteristics that supplement electoral‐system‐level sources of geographic representation. We empirically test and corroborate this argument for the German case on the basis of a content analysis of parliamentary questions in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–13). In this analysis, we show that higher levels of localness among legislators and higher levels of electoral volatility in districts result in increased geographic representation.     

The talk–listen–respond (TLR) model of representatives on Twitter

Despite the existing research on how elected representatives use Twitter, there are few comparative studies and none that considers Israel, a country that differs from most democracies in its electoral system. This study has two levels of analysis. The first is the country level, in which the author compares and explains how representatives in four countries – the US, Canada, Australia and Israel – use the talk, listen and respond model to achieve their goals. The second is the individual level, in which the author analyses how personal characteristics such as gender and age, and political characteristics such as seniority and membership in the opposition or coalition affect the frequency of use of Twitter. Using quantitative data, it is demonstrated that representatives vary in the frequency of their use of Twitter. On the country level, Australian representatives use Twitter more often than their counterparts in other countries. On the individual level, first-term members, members of the opposition, and older representatives use Twitter more often than those with more seniority, coalition members, and younger legislators.     

REPRESENTATION DISPARITIES AND IMPARTIALITY: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF PARTY PERCEPTION OF FEAR,PREPARATION, AND SATISFACTION IN DIVORCE MEDIATION WHEN ONLY ONE PARTY HAS COUNSEL

While other authors have regarded both the presence and the absence of attorneys in family law mediation as cause for concern, little attention has been given to the questions raised when one party is represented and the other is pro se. This article presents data on mediating parties' premediation concerns, fears, and feelings of preparedness, as well as their postmediation satisfaction with the mediation process. The mediating parties are grouped based on each couple's representation status, for example, both represented by attorneys, both pro se, or one attorney‐represented party and one pro se party (mixed representation cases). The data show that mixed representation cases are the most likely to report concern, fear, and unpreparedness. Mixed‐representation cases also reported the lowest levels of satisfaction after the mediation. Some implications for mediation practice are discussed, as are suggestions for future research.     

Doubling Down: Inequality in Responsiveness and the Policy Preferences of Elected Officials

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference‐induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws that could disproportionately impact minority groups are also less likely to engage in nonpolicy responsiveness to minority groups. We conducted a field experiment in 28 US legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino and white constituents. If legislators supported voter identification laws, Latino constituents were less likely to receive constituency communications from their legislators. There are significant implications regarding fairness in the democratic process when elected officials fail to represent disadvantaged constituency groups in both policy and nonpolicy realms.     

Disempowering Music: The Amandla! Documentary and Other Conservative Musical Projects

Scholars of black South African popular music have established important connections between music and society. Lara Allen’s studies of pennywhistle-kwela, Christopher Ballantine’s research on marabi and African jazz/mbaqanga,and David Coplan’s social history of black city music, among others, have underwritten the new literature in South African musicology and cultural studies. Previous neglect of black popular culture has made oral testimony crucial to the writing of these musical pasts. Recent investigations in the field, which are preoccupied with the articulation of black struggle to music, and the expression of struggle through music, have adopted a more popular format. Within these, the autobiographies of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela are integral, as is Lee Hirsch’s documentary film, Amandla!. The popularity of these studies and their subjects, and their foregrounded debt to oral testimony and veneration of ‘the Struggle’ has tended to foreclose scrutiny of their representational politics. This article questions whether their homological substitution of music and musicians for anti-apartheid struggles in a postapartheid South Africa enables the radical stories they would tell of that past.     

Women's Substantive Representation: Defending Feminist Interests or Women's Electoral Preferences?

To what extent does the inclusion of marginalised groups in policymaking institutions influence policy outcomes? This article examines whether and under which conditions female legislators are more likely to represent women's interests compared with male legislators. Building on the literature on women's substantive representation, it is argued that the advocacy of women's interests by female representatives depends on a number of factors, namely party affiliation, contact with women's organisations, electoral district, and seniority. This argument is evaluated using vote-level fixed-effect models based on a unique data set from a direct democratic context that combines representatives' voting behaviour, women's voting preferences, and recommendations from feminist groups. The findings show that female legislators defend feminist interests more than their male colleagues but that they only marginally respond to women's electoral preferences. Moreover, gender has its most visible effect within the populist party.