This article suggests a dynamic construct, classifying societies according to their dominant method of resolving conflicts in the area of libel and "dangerous words" on a continuum from self-help to mediation, with criminal and civil law remedies between. It may have application in other areas as well.
AbstractBureaucratic reputation is one of the most important concepts used to understand the behavior of administrative agencies and their interactions with multiple audiences. Despite a rich theoretical literature discussing reputation, we do not have a comparable measure across agencies, between countries, and over time. I present a new strategy to measure bureaucratic reputation from legislative speeches with word‐embedding techniques. I introduce an original dataset on the reputation of 465 bureaucratic bodies over a period of 40 years, and across two countries—the U.S. and the U.K. I perform several validation tests and present an application of this method to investigate whether partisanship and agency politicization matter for reputation. I find that agencies enjoy a better reputation among the members of the party in government, with partisan differences less pronounced for independent bodies. Finally, I discuss how this measurement strategy can contribute to classical and new questions about political–administrative interactions.
In: State politics & policy quarterly: the official journal of the State Politics and Policy section of the American Political Science Association, Band 11, Heft 4, S. 415-439
AbstractThe author improves on the measurement of U.S. state public opinion by (1) applying previous methods used only on cross-sectional data to create dynamic measures of state public opinion and (2) providing a systematic comparison of the performance of the various methodological approaches on these dynamic measures. The author shows that scholars can use multilevel regression, imputation, and poststratification (MRP) coupled with a simple moving average to measure state public opinion over time. Compared to aggregation, the MRP approach has less error and is more reliable, particularly for the less populated states. The author shows the applicability of the MRP approach by measuring and validating state partisanship and state ideology over time. The validated measures are available for public use. Armed with a method to measure state public opinion over time, scholars can begin to more fully understand the dynamic relationship between public opinion and policy in the U.S. states.
Previous investigations of static and dynamic acuity have shown only inconsistent relations between measures of these aspects of visual performance. In the present study, six static and six dynamic visual sensitivity measures were gathered on 49 persons aged 7 to 61 years (M = 31 years). Contrary to previous findings, it was determined that when treated as latent factors with multiple indices, static and dynamic sensitivity are significantly correlated (r = 0.52). Further, both measures show an age-related decline, with dynamic sensitivity the most affected. Results have a bearing on models of spatial vision, efforts to determine screening procedures for performance in natural settings, and hypotheses concerning ontogenic decline in visual function.