MEASURING LEVELS OF PARTY IDENTIFICATION DOES QUESTION ORDER MATTER?

This article examines whether asking the vote question beforeparty identification alters the strength of partisanship andits relationship to vote choice. It employs the 1992 BritishElection Survey, which included a random split half-sample experiment,and the 1992–93 American Election Study Panel, where thequestion order for party identification and the vote were changed.The results show that altering the question ordering had verylittle effect in Britain and no significant effect in the UnitedStates. These results are consistent with the notion that partyidentification is one of the more enduring and stable componentsof mass political behavior in both presidential and parliamentarysystems.     

Differences in preferred level of arousal in two sub-groups of problem gamblers: A preliminary report

Twelve problem poker machine players and thirteen horse race gamblers (20 males and 5 females; age range 28–69) completed a series of questionnaires which assessed levels of anxiety, their preferred state of arousal and their motivations to gamble. As predicted, problem poker machine gamblers were found to be more anxious and reported avoiding arousal more frequently than the horse race gamblers. Alternately, problem horse race gamblers were found to prefer heightened levels of arousal and appeared to gamble to achieve these optimal levels of arousal. However, there was no difference between the groups on proneness to boredom. The present results provide evidence which is consistent with the Reversal theory and its application to the field of problem gambling.     

Generalized Laplacian approximations in Bayesian inference

This paper presents a new Laplacian approximation to the posterior density of η = g(θ). It has a simpler analytical form than that described by Leonard et al. (1989). The approximation derived by Leonard et al. requires a conditional information matrix R_η to be positive definite for every fixed η. However, in many cases, not all R_η are positive definite. In such cases, the computations of their approximations fail, since the approximation cannot be normalized. However, the new approximation may be modified so that the corresponding conditional information matrix can be made positive definite for every fixed η. In addition, a Bayesian procedure for contingency-table model checking is provided. An example of cross-classification between the educational level of a wife and fertility-planning status of couples is used for explanation. Various Laplacian approximations are computed and compared in this example and in an example of public school expenditures in the context of Bayesian analysis of the multiparameter Fisher-Behrens problem.     

Police Reforms in Child Abuse Investigation: Their Success and Limitations in the Struggle to Uphold Children's Rights

SUMMARY. The past decade has shown increased awareness, concern and understanding about the extent of child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, and the caring agencies response to listen to and to support the young victims. This article looks at the response of the police service over that decade to meet such demands and to work jointly and responsively with social services to further the welfare and protection of children. It also examines the constraints and limitations of the police and social services when they attempt to uphold the rights of child victims and to gain redress through the criminal justice system     

Will taxpayers ever like taxes?: Responses to the U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986

Major policy changes like the 1986 Tax Reform Act (TRA) in the United States provide natural experiments to study attitudinal and behavior responses to law. Surprisingly, public evaluations of the TRA became increasingly negative after passage, while general support for the tax system became more positive in response to the changes. To explain this puzzle, we propose a dynamic model of taxpayer attitudes that is consistent with the observed loose linkage between logically-connected concepts. We briefly review the political context, objectives and impacts of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, and present several studies testing the impact of self-interest, prior beliefs, and social discussion on changes in attitudes and behavior.Results suggest that the complexity of taxes and difficulty in knowing objective impacts weakens the role of self-interest in attitudinal changes, thereby strengthening the role of prior beliefs and discussion. Evaluations of tax laws are most responsive to more politically-oriented influences.     

Estimation of noncentrality parameters

We propose some estimators of noncentrality parameters which improve upon usual unbiased estimators under quadratic loss. The distributions we consider are the noncentral chi-square and the noncentral F. However, we give more general results for the family of elliptically contoured distributions and propose a robust dominating estimator.