Supremacy and hegemony: a reply to Palmer and Martin

In a 2019 article in this journal, which drew on previous work, we argued by examination of a number of extremely important cases that the senior judiciary is in the process of attempting to create judicial supremacy in the UK. It is doing so, not by democratic debate, but by legal procedural innovation incomprehensible to the electorate. Invited by the journal to reply to a criticism of our argument by Dr Stephanie Palmer and Dr Stevie Martin, we have sought to defend our account of the undemocratic procedural novelty of those cases.     

PARTICIPATORY MANAGEMENT Toward a Science of Correctional Management

Participatory management as an intervention technique to effect change in the prison environment requires a restructuring of the prison Incision-making process. Inmates must be given increased responsibility and be aUowed to participate meaningfully in decision-making. The inmate subculture is posited as being one of the major impediments to successful interventions within the prison setting; participatory management neutralizes its effects, replacing the traditional oppositional character of staff/ inmate relationships with a coalition of staff and inmates.     

Seats That May Not Matter: Testing for Racial Polarization in U.S. City Councils

Abstract: Critics of the Voting Rights Act claim that electoral structures used by city councils lead to racially polarized legislatures in which African American members are consistently outvoted by white majorities. Using council votes from six cities, this study shows that the critics' claim is exaggerated. In only one city were African American council members generally less likely to be on the winning side of votes because of their race. Polarization is more of a concern for particular issues: members with large black constituencies were less likely to be on the winning side of votes on housing or police affairs in four cities.     

How unstable? Volatility and the genuinely new parties in Eastern Europe

Abstract.  Measuring of party system stability in Eastern Europe during the first decade of democratic elections presents problems. The traditional quantitative measure – volatility – does not distinguish between the dynamics among incumbent parties and the rise of genuinely new ones. I propose a new additional measure – success of genuinely new parties – and compare it to volatility. The subsequent performance of initially successful genuinely new parties is analysed. While volatility has been remarkably high in East European countries, the genuinely new parties have, in general, not been very successful. Instability of party systems in the region stems rather from the inner dynamics of incumbent actors than from the rise of new contenders.     

TANGLED WEBS? MANAGING LOCAL MIXED ECONOMIES OF CARE

This article addresses two main issues about the emergent forms of social care provision in the development of a more mixed economy of welfare in Britain in the 1990s. The first concerns patterns of inter-organizational relationship within local mixed economies of care, paying particular attention to the inter-section of competitive and collaborative models of such relationships. The second concerns the emergence of a'managerial mode of co-ordination'as the dominant force in ordering intra- and inter-organizational relationships in such mixed economies. The article draws on research conducted in two such local mixed economies of care and addresses some of the theoretical problems involved in trying to analyse these new patterns of relationship.     

SOME MISLEADING CONCEPTIONS IN SENTENCING RESEARCH

Most studies of sentencing practices in both adult and juvenile courts have compared the relative power to predict dispositions of “legal” variables, such as the seriousness of offense and previous arrest record, and “extralegal” variables, such as race and social class. It is suggested that this is a misleading model for research on the decision-making process in juvenile courts. Instead, results presented here indicate that the juvenile court uses a model of substantive decision-making oriented toward the character and social environment of offenders. Social background variables are found to be more important determinants of disposition than either “legal” or “extralegal” variables.     

POST-PRISON SUCCESS PREDICTION A Preliminary Florida Study

This preliminary study attempts to prepare the foundations for obtaining a valid predictive measure for the chance of “success” for a prisoner leaving the Florida penal system. A random sample of 200 Florida prison system releases is analyzed from several vantage points Parolee versus expvee popubtion differences are studied and a variant of the California Base Expectancy Scale is constructed for Florida. To overcome the weakness of utilizing the same predictive model for a broad spectrum of prisoners, an attempt is made to describe homo geneous subpopulations. Through the use of cluster analysis, one such subpopulation is identified and predictive ability for this group is shown to be greatly increamd.