Bush: The Sequel

This article examines the likely foreign policy initiatives of the U.S. under the leadership of George W. Bush. The new president has outlined a fairly thorough critique of America's international behavior in the 1990s. Because a leader's public statements arguably serve to persuade various audiences and to build support for policy change, the article takes Bush's words quite seriously—along with those spoken or written by his closest foreign affairs advisors. Bush intends to abandon the so-called Clinton Doctrine and deploy national missile defenses. He is critical of American policies toward China and Russia, but has not presented bold new initiatives toward those powers. Under the rubric of "compassionate conservatism," Bush may alter U.S. relations toward the Global South in some interesting ways. The president and his advisors often purport to be realists, but the article demonstrates that their own words belie this claim as they often justify policies based on ideals rather than the pursuit of power.     

The Single Audit Act of 1984: A Survey of Practitioners

The Single Audit Act of 1984 (SAA) attempted to strengthen Congress's control over disbursement and monitoring of federal funds intended for governmental and nonprofit entities. The SAA's primary agent of federal control is the auditor. This article examines the historical development of the SAA and discusses the results of a survey of auditors and accountants who are members of the Intergovernmental Auditing Forum. The survey addresses auditors' conception of the SAA and the auditor's role in achieving better control of federal disbursements.     

Race and treating other people's children as adults

Juvenile offenders are sometimes transferred to a criminal court where they may stand trial as adults. The rationale for this current trend cannot be justified based on evidence from developmental psychology, the evidence of consistent positive effects for particular intervention strategies, and ethical arguments for justification of punishment. The rationale in actuality reflects the selective manipulation of the alternative conceptions of young people as dependent and vulnerable or as autonomous and responsible to continue to justify policies that entail cultural and racial discrimination. Discretionary decisions at various stages of the justice process amplify racial disparities as minority youths proceed through the system and result in more severe dispositions than for comparable White youths.     

Developments in health care finance

Costs, quality, and access are the central themes in health care policy in the United States. In the 1980s the predominate issue is becoming access, and the likelihood for universal health coverage, or a national health insurance program, is growing. This paper explores how the America health care system got to this point and examines the present conditions, the trends, and the consequences of those trends.     

Personality and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment: Evidence from Germany

Research based in the United States, with its relatively open educational system, has found that personality mediates the relationship between parents’ and child’s educational attainment and this mediational pattern is especially beneficial to students from less-educated households. Yet in highly structured, competitive educational systems, personality characteristics may not predict attainment or may be more or less consequential at different points in the educational career. We examine the salience of personality in the educational attainment process in the German educational system. Data come from a longitudinal sample of 682 17 to 25 year-olds (54% female) from the 2005 and 2015 German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Results show that adolescent personality traits—openness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness—are associated with educational attainment, but personality plays a negligible role in the intergenerational transmission of education. Personality is influential before the decision about the type of secondary degree that a student will pursue (during adolescence). After that turning point, when students have entered different pathways through the system, personality is less salient. Cross-national comparisons in a life course framework broaden the scope of current research on non-cognitive skills and processes of socioeconomic attainment, alerting the analyst to the importance of both institutional structures and the changing importance of these skills at different points in the life course.     

Trial and Error: Lawyers and Nonlawyer Advocates

Nonlawyer advocates are one proposed solution to the access to justice crisis. Theory and research suggest that nonlawyers might be effective, yet scholars know very little, empirically, about nonlawyer practice in the United States. Using data from more than 5,000 unemployment insurance appeal hearings and interviews with lawyers and nonlawyers who represent employers in these hearings, this article explores how both types of representatives develop expertise and what this means for effectiveness. We find judges play a critical role in shaping nonlawyer legal expertise and nonlawyers develop expertise almost exclusively through “trial and error.” We find evidence that while experienced nonlawyers can help parties through their expertise with common court procedures and basic substantive legal concepts, they are not equipped to challenge judges on contested issues of substantive or procedural law in individual cases, advance novel legal claims, or advocate for law reform on a broader scale. These findings have implications for future access to justice research and interventions.     

The use of discretion in prison disciplinary committees

Prison disciplinary committees are faced with the formal role responsibility of adjudicating disciplinary cases in an equitable manner and the informal role responsibility of supporting the authority of the staff members who file charges of rule violations by inmates. Analysis of 630 disciplinary cases reveal that dispositional decisions vary according to the number of charged rule violations and that the pattern of the dispositional decisions can be explained by role conflict but not by the thesis that the cases vary in terms of the adequacy of the evidence supporting blameworthiness.