Government Organization and Power

We develop a theoretical framework to examine how government organization affects its power and size. The framework abstracts from distortions that arise from the means of government finance and separates government power into two dimensions—pure coercive power and pure pricing power. A government can exert its coercive power to shift the demand for its services outward and grow too large. It can simultaneously exert its pricing power to restrict output along a given demand curve to earn rents. Consequently, neither size nor rents alone are reliable indicators of the extent to which government provision of services is nonoptimal.     

Kruskal–Wallis, Multiple Comparisons and Efron Dice

The Kruskal–Wallis test is a rank–based one way ANOVA. Its test statistic is shown here to be a quadratic form among the Mann–Whitney or Kendall tau concordance measures between pairs of treatments. But the full set of such concordance measures has more degrees of freedom than the Kruskal–Wallis test uses, and the independent surplus is attributable to circularity, or non–transitive effects. The meaning of circularity is well illustrated by Efron dice. The cases of k = 3, 4 treatments are analysed thoroughly in this paper, which also shows how the full sum of squares among all concordance measures can be decomposed into uncorrelated transitive and non–transitive circularity effects. A multiple comparisons procedure based on patterns of transitive orderings among treatments is implemented. The testing of circularities involves non–standard asymptotic distributions. The asymptotic theory is deferred, but Monte Carlo permutation tests are easy to implement.     

Aestheticisation of Politics: From Fascism to Radical Democracy

The “aestheticisation of politics”, a term coined by Walter Benjamin, refers to a critique of various modes of politics considered to be irrational in leftist, critical theory. The critique ties aestheticised politics to fascism and capitalism, thereby precluding the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic aesthetic politics. This paper challenges that position first by working through Wolfgang Welsch’s semantic clarification of the term “aesthetics”, then by deriving different senses of “aestheticised politics” from the range of meanings given by Welsch. A typology of aestheticised politics, from fascist to communist, depicts the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic political aesthetics.     

Adaptive Cluster Sampling in Two‐stage Sampling

Adaptive cluster sampling can be a useful design for surveying rare and clustered populations. Here we present a new development in adaptive cluster sampling where we use a two‐stage design and extend the complete allocation sampling method. In the proposed new design the primary sample units are selected and, depending on the value of a preset condition, the entire primary unit is surveyed, as in complete allocation sampling. In the next step, if a second condition is met, the surrounding primary sample units are selected. We review the efficiency of the proposed design for sampling the New Zealand Castle Hill buttercups and provide unbiased estimators for the population total and sampling variance.     

Impact of Intensive Case Management on Child Welfare System Involvement for Substance-Dependent Parenting Women on Public Assistance

This study examined the impact of intensive case management (ICM) on decreasing child welfare system involvement in a sample of substance-dependent parenting women who participated in a welfare demonstration study comparing ICM to usual screen-and-refer models employed in welfare settings. Previous research established the effectiveness of ICM in both increasing engagement in substance abuse treatment and in promoting abstinence, and the current study tested whether ICM had downstream impacts on child welfare outcomes not directly targeted by the intervention. The sample included 302 mothers recruited from welfare offices and their 888 minor children. Child welfare outcomes were available from administrative records for four years following study entry and included incident reports and out-of-home child placements. An initial positive effect of ICM was found on child placements, but its impact lessened over time and was likely due to the increased contact with case managers that occurred early in the study. Overall, minimal benefits of ICM were found, suggesting that while ICM was effective in the areas of treatment engagement and abstinence, there were no downstream benefits for child welfare outcomes. Implications of findings in terms of increased need for cross-system collaboration are discussed.     

A Tale of Two American Cities: Disaster,Class and Citizenship in San Francisco 1906 and New Orleans 2005

Destruction, notes David Harvey, “is often required to make the new urban geography out of the wreckage of the old.”² The history of San Francisco's Chinatown following the 1906 earthquake and fire and New Orleans' public housing following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 reveal how powerful class interests collude with the fog of disaster to lay claim to the urban spaces of the poor and marginal. In two historic U.S. disasters we witness the concerted efforts of urban elites to confiscate the spaces of two politically vulnerable populations: the Chinese in 1906 and low‐income African‐Americans in 2005. The widely varying outcomes of these two attempts reveal a good deal about the intersection of calamity, class, race, and citizenship in American history.     

Communicating Uncertain Science to the Public: How Amount and Source of Uncertainty Impact Fatalism,Backlash, and Overload

Public dissemination of scientific research often focuses on the finding (e.g., nanobombs kill lung cancer) rather than the uncertainty/limitations (e.g., in mice). Adults (n = 880) participated in an experiment where they read a manipulated news report about cancer research (a) that contained either low or high uncertainty (b) that was attributed to the scientists responsible for the research (disclosure condition) or an unaffiliated scientist (dueling condition). Compared to the dueling condition, the disclosure condition triggered less prevention‐focused cancer fatalism and nutritional backlash.     

Modern Multi-line Slot Machine Games: The Effect of Lines Wagered on Winners,Losers, Bonuses,and Losses Disguised as Wins

We simulated the commercially available multi-line slot machine game “Money Storm,” including its bonus wins. Our results show that after a specified amount of time (such as 1 or 50 h), when players played a single line, there were marked differences between one player and the next—a few won a lot, others lost far more than average. When playing 20 lines there were fewer big winners and fewer players quickly losing a large percentage of their money. We simulated a Gambler’s Ruin scenario whereby players arrived with $100 and made $1 wagers until broke. Again we saw a reduction in the variability among player as the number of lines wagered increased, fewer players lost their entire bankroll quickly, and fewer players had big wins. The bonus wins in Money Storm contribute approximately 24 % to the payback of the game, and our simulations of bonus wins shows that with 20 lines wagered the players spend approximately 11 % of their time in bonus wins. With one line wagered, there are no losses disguised as wins while with 20 lines wagered the majority of hits are losses disguised as wins. Players using multi-line machines can thus tune the characteristics of the machine gambling experience to match their preferred pattern, though most seem in practice to bet on the most possible lines. Our results serve to inform researchers, counsellors, gamblers and others about how slot machines are designed, and the effect that wagering on multiple lines has on short-term and long-term play, bonus wins, and losses disguised as wins.     

Inter‐parent Aggression as a Precursor to Disengagement Coping in Emerging Adulthood: The Buffering Role of Friendship Competence

Using multi‐informant data drawn from a prospective study involving 184 youth, mother‐perpetrated and father‐perpetrated partner aggression during early adolescence (the age of 13) was examined as a predictor of five types of disengagement coping strategies in emerging adulthood (the age of 21): behavioral disengagement, mental disengagement, denial, substance use, and restraint. The ability to develop close friendships, or friendship competence, was examined as a moderator of these links. Results suggest that inter‐parent aggression in early adolescence can predict reliance on disengagement coping 8 years later, but that friendship competence can buffer against the reliance on disengagement coping. Moreover, close friendship competence was not directly related to partner aggression by mothers or fathers, suggesting that friendship competence develops along an independent developmental track and thus may truly serve as a buffer for young adults with a history of exposure to inter‐parent aggression.     

Experiences of Biological Parents and Their Older Children in Out-of-Home Care for the First Time

This article will examine the parenting characteristics and challenges that faced a cohort of families participating in an exploratory qualitative research study. This study sought to describe the experiences and characteristics of parents whose children were placed in the child welfare system in early-to-late adolescence (ages 12–18), thus gaining an understanding of the parenting challenges faced as they were able to maintain their children in their homes for a significant portion of their lives. The families of older youths entering care for the first time described how alcohol and drug abuse impacted their relationships with children, significant others, jobs, and their mental health status. A significant issue that emerged in several of the cases were older children who initiated a report to child welfare themselves.