Suchergebnisse

Judges are important not only as initiators & proponents of court reform; they are also central to its implementation. It has been proposed that judges assume a role that would also make them important instruments of reform. Recent proposals for greater judicial intervention in pretrial processing of civil cases are examined here; the degree to which these would represent a departure from current practice, & evidence for the effects of the proposed changes are examined. 2 Tables, 21 References. Modified HA.

Beverly Blair Cook ("Public Opinion and Federal Judicial Policy" [abstracted elsewhere in this section]) has presented evidence that federal district judges responded to PO in their sentencing of draft offenders during the Vietnam War. This conclusion is questioned. Reanalysis of Cook's data at both the national level & the district (state) level fails to support her conclusion that judges responded to PO; rather, they appear to have been sensitive to more enduring features of their local political climates. In Judicial Policy: Change Over Time, Beverly Blair Cook (U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) finds that Kritzer's reanalysis fully supports the existence of a relationship between PO & court output. Kritzer's tacit definition of local PO as differing from national PO is inappropriate. Rejection of the hypothesis that judicial response to PO exists is premature. 3 Tables, 2 Figures, Appendix. Modified HA.

Although much of the data that political scientists deal with are essentially qualitative, traditionally they have been analyzed as though they met the criteria of an interval scale, primarily because the tools available for analysis of interval data have been more powerful than those for use with nonmetric data. With the development of new methods for analyzing nominal level data, several techniques for multivariate contingency table analysis are now available. An introduction to those techniques is provided, focusing on the linear model approach described by James E. Grizzle, C. Frank Starmer, & Gary G. Koch ("Analysis of Categorical Data by Linear Models," Biometrics, 1969, 25, 489-504). 8 Tables, Appendixes. Modified HA.

P. Converse's The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964) (no further publication information provided) launched the debate on the absence or presence of ideology in mass US politics. Insufficiently elucidated is the question of the role of ideology within American political elites. Until the mid 1960s, opinion was sharply divided. One school of thought, headed by McClosky et al (1960 -- no further publication information provided), claimed that greater ideological differences exist among political elites than among the general public. A second school of thought took the position that despite such differences, there is overall agreement between political elites (Mills, 1956; & Bell, 1960 -- no further publication information provided). The principal weakness of both viewpoints is that they neglect to define "ideology" or fail to recognize its components. Here, "ideology" is defined as a "system of beliefs centered upon a small number of central principles." To determine the absence or presence of elite ideology, an examination was made of interrelationships between belief elements. Of particular importance was the concept of "constraint," since it indicated the presence of a subjacent, "meaningful" structure. Through factor analysis of attitude scales rather than individual items, it was concluded that Converse's argument was correct: elite attitudes exhibit more constrainment than mass attitudes. In addition, when attention was focused on behavior rather than words, & when the behavior was the result of specific conflicts & well-defined interests, evidence of structuring became clearly recognizable. It is recommended that students of American political behavior be less eager to reject an ideological perspective in their examination of political elites. 6 Tables, Appendix. Modified AA.