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Although promising dating violence programs have emerged, little is known about their effectiveness for Mexican American youth, a vulnerable and understudied population. The purpose of this study was: (1) to offer culturally-grounded recommendations towards the development of effective Teen Dating Violence (TDV) programs and/or the modification of existing programs, and (2) to identify potential barriers to Mexican American youth's participation in TDV programs. Using the perspectives of Mexican American youth (15 to 17 years old) and a phenomenological study design, focus groups ( N = 14) were conducted that were homogeneous by gender and level of acculturation (low/bicultural/high). Youth provided recommendations for program design (i.e. Design it to explore between-group and within-group cultural variability, Design it to be broad in scope, and Keep it positive) and program implementation (i.e. Make the program fun and non-threatening, and Involve peers, couples, and individuals) within the context of acculturation. Adolescents' suggestion of a program delivered in smaller groups that support sharing within peer relationships may stem from a desire for intimacy within close relationships – re-creating a sense of familismo. Teen dating violence programs best meets the needs of Mexican American adolescents by including programmatic components that are grounded in personalized cultural values.

This article specifically examines the role of national political parties in the light of European integration. It introduces the functions that are normally associated with parties, which allows for a systematic evaluation of the performance of national parties in the European Union. Probing these functions that parties are reputed to implement, it arrives at the conclusion that national parties are fairly unsuccessful in fulfilling their core tasks at the European level.

Despite the attention given to presidential candidates every statement and gaffe by the national media, elections can be won and lost by campaign's field efforts. In new research, Joshua Darr looks at how presidential campaigns can push coverage of their candidates in local newspapers. He finds that the best way for a campaign to earn positive coverage in local news is by targeting smaller newspapers. Those campaigns which did saw four times more positive stories about their candidate compared to those areas where the campaign was not active.

ObjectivesThis article examines the effects of partisan control of government on income distribution within the United States.MethodsUsing newly available data, we estimate the effects of unified Democratic and Republican Party control at the state and national levels on the share of income going to the top 1 percent of income earners, by state, between 1917 and 2011.ResultsWe find that unified party control at the state level has minimal impact on income going to the top 1 percent of income earners within the states, but that unified party control at the federal level does have an effect. Moreover, we find that over the long term, unified Democratic control at the federal level leads to less income going to the top 1 percent, while unified Republican control increases income going to top earners.ConclusionsDespite the increased focus on federalism and state policy in studies of income inequality, our findings suggest that federal‐level political factors are important for understanding the share of income going to the top income earners in the United States, particularly in the contemporary era.

In this article we investigate how parties 'close out the electoral market' by monopolizing the channels of upward mobility for aspiring politicians (by reducing the number of independents). We analyse data from (1228) single-member constituency elections from three sub-Saharan African countries (Ghana, Malawi and Zambia) and six national legislative elections. We find that level of incumbent governing party support is the strongest predictor in explaining the likelihood that independent candidates would run for office at the constituency level across all three cases'

AbstractPublic institutions seeking to facilitate effective decision making by boundedly rational constituents often must determine what information to provide and in what form to provide it. Ideally, this determination would reflect an understanding of how different kinds, forms, and sources of information are processed by constituents and influence constituents' beliefs. However, research on this topic—especially in the context of educational institutions, and with a focus on official numerical information versus electronic word of mouth—has been minimal. Considering the case of state governments wishing to inform citizens about their schools, we examine how parents and the US public evaluate schools after receiving two increasingly abundant kinds of school quality information: numerical government ratings and online parent comments. Using an online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample, we find that perceptions of school quality are heavily influenced by parent comments even when these comments appear alongside official ratings. By contrast, the effects of official numerical ratings appear modest. Additional findings suggest that the comments' influence results from preferences for the information's source (parents over government) and style (narrative over numerical), and that nonprofit organizations are more trusted messengers of performance information than state governments. These results advance our theoretical understanding of the effects of different kinds of information on belief, and we conclude the article by discussing their implications for how public institutions disseminate information to their constituents.