National Defense,Environmental Regulation,and Overhead Democracy: A View from the “Greening” of the U.S. Military

This study examines the patterns of politics accompanying efforts to hold the United States military accountable to U.S. environmental and natural resources (ENR) laws in the post-Cold War era. This analysis (1) uses three cases to describe what happened, and why, (2) to test several propositions related to military accountability to ENR laws in the post-Cold War era; (3) to offer a typology of tactics used that may help inform future research on intragovernmental regulation more generally; and (4) argues that public agencies have a responsibility to comply with the regulatory processes that hold them accountable to U.S. ENR laws.     

Politics,Public Opinion,and Privatization: A Test of Competing Theories in Great Britain

Reforms known collectively as the new public management (NPM) are sweeping governments worldwide. For a movement espousing customer-based service orientations, there is a curious paucity of research on citizens' attitudes toward these reforms. We know little about how citizens feel about them, how they arrive at their conclusions, and how durable their attitudes are likely to be. Using citizen attitudes culled from the 1987--1992 British General Election Panel Survey, we apply multiple regression analysis to begin exploring these issues in one critical area of NPM reform: privatization of state-owned enterprises. We find that the overall predictive power of the five theoretical perspectives culled from public opinion research and operationalized in our model is quite respectable, but that evaluations are too complex for any single explanation of public opinion formation to capture. We also find that British attitudes toward privatization were most associated with cue-taking from leaders and parties, ideological moorings associated with individualism, and income. From these findings we offer a set of hypotheses suitable for testing in future research—most especially, a disparate impact hypothesis—that have important implications for practice and theory-building regarding public opinion and market-based administrative reforms worldwide.     

Predicting case conviction and domestic violence recidivism: measuring the deterrent effects of conviction and protection order violations

Previous research offered little guidance on sentencing outcomes for protection order (PO) violations in cases of domestic assault and whether PO violation charges affected offender recidivism rates. Using data from local court records, this study examined the effect of PO violation charges on the odds of case conviction relative to dismissal, and whether case conviction or a PO violation charge results in lower domestic violence rearrest rates compared to offenders not receiving these sanctions. The models indicate that PO violation charges has no significant effect on the odds of conviction or recidivism rates, and these trends were not significantly different for convicted versus dismissed offenders. Findings are discussed in relation to previous research with recommendations for future areas of study.     

Stem Cell Research, Regulatory Regimes, and Citizens’ “Calculus of Consent” in the European Union

What factors affect support for the development of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research? Ordered logit analysis of responses to a 2005 Eurobarometer survey finds that Europeans with greater trust in the European Union and national hESC regulatory systems report significantly more support for hESC research. Higher levels of religiosity and concern for the moral status of the fetus reduce support for hESC research, while citizens more interested in politics, those getting their news from the print media, more highly educated respondents, and those reporting higher knowledge about stem cells tend to be more supportive of the technique. Nevertheless, the objectively more knowledgeable citizens exhibit less consistency in their support.