Testing times: Exploring staged responses and the impact of blame management strategies in two examination fiasco cases

This article examines the responses of ministers facing high levels of blame in the press after serious failures in the public exam system for school-leavers in Scotland in 2000 and England in 2002. It develops a method for systematic analysis and comparison of the behaviour of officeholders facing blame, tests the hypothesis that ministers will accept personal culpability only after other ways of handling blame have been exhausted and uses time series intervention models to show how one can estimate the impact of strategies on the next day's blame level. The basic sequencing hypothesis is partially upheld by the observed behaviour in these cases, though many other kinds of blame responses do not display a clear sequence. The intervention analysis also raises questions about the claimed effectiveness of presentational strategies for managing blame.     

Electoral volatility and parties’ ideological responsiveness

For a number of decades now, scholars have been indicating that ties between citizens and parties are eroding. As a consequence, electoral behaviour has become more volatile and also more unpredictable. The consequences of this process of change on parties’ strategic behaviour have, however, received little attention. In this article, the impact of dealignment on parties’ strategic behaviour is examined, with the focus being on the extent to which parties are responsive to the mean voter. The expectation of dealignment allowing parties ‘to move around more freely’ leads to the hypothesis that parties are more responsive in a context of dealignment. The analyses provide evidence that is in line with this expectation. Ideological responsiveness is conditioned by the level of volatility in the electorate. The conclusion to draw from these results is that dealignment, which profoundly affects voters’ behaviour, leads parties to become more responsive to the mean voter.     

STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY AND HOMICIDE: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE BLACK‐WHITE GAP IN KILLINGS*

This paper examines the relationship between race and violent crime by directly modeling the racial gap in homicide offending for large central cities for 1990. We evaluate the role of black‐white differences in aspects of both disadvantage and resources in explaining which places have wider racial disparities in lethal violence. The results show that where residential segregation is higher, and where whites' levels of homeownership, median income, college graduation, and professional workers exceed those for blacks to a greater degree, African Americans have much higher levels of homicide offending than whites. Based on these results, we conclude that the racial homicide gap is better explained by the greater resources that exist among whites than by the higher levels of disadvantage among blacks.     

Labour Constitutions and Occupational Communities: Social Norms and Legal Norms at Work

This paper considers the interaction of legal norms and social norms in the regulation of work and working relations, observing that, with the contraction of collective bargaining, this is a matter that no longer attracts the attention that it deserves. Drawing upon two concepts from sociology – Max Weber's ‘labour constitution’ and Seymour Martin Lipset's ‘occupational community’ – it focuses on possibilities for the emergence, within groups of workers, of shared normative beliefs concerning ‘industrial justice’ (Selznick); for collective solidarity and agency; for the transformation of shared beliefs into legally binding norms; and for the enforcement of those norms. If labour law is currently in ‘crisis’, then a promising route out of the crisis, we argue, is for the law to recover its procedural focus, facilitating and encouraging these processes.     

US Science Education: The View from a Practicing Scientist

Science and mathematics education in the US is failing to produce an adequate number of American scientists. Foreign postdoctoral fellows and students who typically remain in the US and become permanent residents and citizens increasingly populate US research laboratories. Were these foreign scientists to return home upon completion of their training, we would be facing a severe shortage of well‐trained research personnel in US laboratories. The contributions of foreign scientists to US scientific research have been important and impressive, but as noted above, there are dangers in relying on other countries to provide the basic education of scientists to fill our US laboratories.     

People: hearts and minds Towards rebirth of the public service ethic

No country will escape the enormous forces that are now buffeting the public sector worldwide. The massive changes underway are affecting people—public servants and citizens alike—and not just bottom lines. Standard approaches to dealing with change may unwittingly overlook the fact that Public Services are first and foremost “people systems”. The article provides a timely reminder that players in public organizations—senior officials, middle managers and front-line workers—experience change differently given their distinct perspectives and levels of authority. While responses to change may vary considerably within organizations, a common humanity is what ultimately unites people. As a result, governments that choose to ignore rather than acknowledge the human side of change may experience needless difficulty in bringing about the successful renewal of the public sector. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)     

FELONY MURDER AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: AN EXAMINATION OF THE DETERRENCE QUESTION

A proper test of the deterrent effect of the death penalty must consider capital homicides. However, the criterion variable in most investigations has been total homicides—most of which bear no legal or theoretical relationship to capital punishment. To address this fundamental data problem, this investigation used Federal Bureau of Investigation data for 1976–1987 to examine the relationship between capital punishment and felony murder, the most common type of capital homicide. We conducted time series analyses of monthly felony murder rates, the frequency of executions, and the amount and type of television coverage of executions over the period. The analyses revealed occasional departures (for vehicle theft and narcotics killings) from the null hypotheses. However, on balance, and in line with the vast majority of capital punishment studies, this investigation found no consistent evidence that executions and the television coverage they receive are associated significantly with rates for total, index, or different types of felony murder.