Perceived helpfulness and use of professional services by abused women

Many abused women use professional and community services and begin to talk to professionals about the abuse they have endured. This article presents and discusses results of a study of 270 abused women who used the services of professionals and service agencies. The article presents information on the frequency of contact and the perceived helpfulness of different professions. Also presented are the types of responses which were considered to be useful and ineffective. This study revealed that the most frequently contacted professions were not necessarily perceived to be the most helpful. Further, certain responses of the service providers were more frequently reported to have value.     

Governance, Management, and Performance: They Matter

Books reviewed in this article:
Carolyn J. Heinrich and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., eds., Governance and Performance: New Perspectives
Patricia W. Ingraham, Philip G. Joyce, and Amy Kneedler Donahue, Government Performance: Why Management Matters
Janet M. Kelly and William C. Rivenbark, Performance Budgeting for State and Local Government     

Determinants of interest group formation

It is widely recognized that interest groups affect both microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. However, few researchers have attempted to discern empirically the factors that contribute to interest group activity. This paper provides a test of several theories of group formation in a panel setting. A nation’s stability, socioeconomic development, political system, size, and diversity all appear to contribute to interest group formation, as predicted by theory.     

Win,lose, or withdraw: A categorical analysis of career patterns in the House of Representatives, 1948–1978

The literature on incumbency advantage has focused on margin as an indicator for electoral security. But while electoral margin is a goodex ante measure, it is a poorex post measure of security. Further, existing work has not integrated the choice of retirement with changes in the level of security. To improve the specification and definition of “marginality”, a multinomial LOGIT model is proposed where the dependent variable is categorical. Account is therefore taken of all the ways a Representative's term in office can end, including reelection, defeat, retirement, or pursuit of other office. The sample includes all U.S. Representatives elected for the first time between 1948 and 1978. The results indicate that (1) margin in the previous election is a significantex ante proxy for the probability of electoral defeat, and (2) while the electoral safety of all incumbents in the House has been increased, the increases are greater for members elected for the first time in the period since 1965.     

The Supply of University Enrollments: University Administrators as Utility Maximizing Bureaucrats

The supply of enrollments in higher education has receivedrelatively little attention in both theoretical and empiricaleconomic research. To address this, we formulate and test amodel of the supply of enrollments in higher education inwhich administrators are modeled as utility maximizingbureaucrats. We find evidence that individual presidents andprovosts have a significant effect on enrollment supply andfaculty demand in a panel of eleven public colleges anduniversities in Maryland from 1988 to 1996, implying thatinstitutions have enough market power to permit thepreferences of administrators to influence enrollment supplyand faculty demand.     

Rural development from the ground up: agro-food initiatives in Tasmania

Concerns about the decline of rural agricultural communities have recently refocused on new economic opportunities available in regional food production. This article analyses three on-the-ground case studies of rural development projects in Tasmania, Australia that aimed to develop new regional food opportunities. It analyses these projects to identify how local food producers can create viable economic alternatives in rural settings. The projects illustrate that the existence of regional food assets alone is not enough to guarantee economic development success: rural producers need connections into relevant knowledge networks if they are to identify and respond to new agro-food market opportunities.