Breaking the chain: Confronting issueless college town disturbances and riots

Law enforcement agencies and institutions of higher education have confronted increasing numbers of violent and destructive campus riots and disturbances over the past decade. Problematic is the fact that these riots typically have no underlying cause, other than students’ quest for excitement. Responding to gaps in the empirical literature about these events, this study used data from two waves of surveys to systematically examine those involved in a recurring problem event in a college town that was subject to a police crackdown. The analyses drew on survey responses from over eight hundred event participants in 2002 and 2003, and the results revealed that increased enforcement had a significant effect on crowd composition, including the gender and race of participants, repeat visitors, out-of-town participants, and perceptions about the subjects' overall experience. Implications for law enforcement and community strategies to decrease the size and destructiveness of such problem events are outlined.     

Does Coproduction of Public Services Support Government's Social Equity Goals? The Case of U.S. State Parks

The growing phenomenon of government-supporting charities prompts the question of whether these institutions help or hinder public values of equity in service access. Logit and tobit regression analysis using multiple data sources from the California and Florida state parks systems compares public parks with and without supporting “friends” groups. The results suggest that while parks philanthropy has produced real benefits in rallying citizen support for improved public spaces, it also introduces some distributional consequences that policy makers should not ignore. Namely, a philanthropic failure hypothesis is supported whereby wealthier Florida counties with greater income inequality are more likely to benefit from a charity supporting a nearby state park. Finding no similar result in California, the authors conclude that the association between community wealth and park charity presence may also depend on state characteristics such as the funding structure of each state park system, not just community wealth differences.     

China’s rise: what about a transatlantic dialog?

Asia Europe Journal - This essay examines and evaluates China’s global rise and the state of the transatlantic discussions about this issue. Since 2010, the rise of China has been accompanied...     

Explaining legislators’ positions on outside income limits: Voting on honoraria ceilings in the U.S. Senate, 1981–1983

This article examines roll-call voting by members of the U.S. Senate on three proposals to limit members’ outside income in the 1980s. I find that several factors influenced legislators’ votes on outside income limits legislation (OILL). First, financial self-interest was an important constraint on members’ willingness to support OILL. Members who earned more honoraria were less likely to vote yes, but this opposition was neutralized when limits were attached to the compensating mechanism of a pay raise. Senators from poorer states were generally more likely to support honoraria limits alone but less likely to support limits linked to a pay raise, suggesting a responsiveness to constituent interests in both cases. Finally, when OILL was linked to a pay raise, electoral considerations became prominent in legislators’ vote decisions, with electorally vulnerable members less likely to vote yes.     

Understanding Children's Use of Secrecy in the Context of Eyewitness Reports

To investigate socioemotional influences on children's eyewitness accuracy, we examined children's reports for activities they were motivated to conceal. Forty-eight 3–6-year-old children participated in a standardized play session with their mothers. Half of the children were told by an experimenter not to play with certain toys, but did so at the urging of their mothers, who told their children to keep the play activities secret. The remaining children were not restricted from playing with the toys, nor told by their mothers to keep the play activities secret. Later, all children were interviewed about the activities with free narrative and detailed questions. Half were given an interview that consisted of highly suggestive questions; half were given an interview consisting of specific, less suggestive questions. Results indicated that older children who were instructed to keep events secret withheld more information than did older children not told to keep events secret. Younger children's reports were not significantly affected by the secret manipulation. There were no significant effects associated with interview type. We discuss implications for understanding the development of children's knowledge and use of secrecy, and applications of the research to issues that arise when child witnesses give reports in legal contexts.