Publication Type: Traditional Presentation
Abstract: Award-winning author and environmental educator Rochelle Strauss explores the themes found in her new book – One Well: the Story of Water on Earth. A review of ideas, activities and lesson plans will provide educators with innovative tools to teach about water and empower students to take action.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Scholars of democracy are necessarily concerned with the factors that either contribute to or limit its sustainability. The regular turnover of power is often identified as one such factor (Huntington 1991). If those in power will submit to the electorate and cede the state to challengers, then it is reasonable to claim that the democratic “rules of the game” are firmly entrenched. A lack of political turnover, therefore, is widely considered pathological. It is argued that democracy without turnover is at best fragile and untested; at worst, it is not really democracy at all. If political turnover is impossible or unlikely, then every challenge to the government represents a challenge to the democracy (Suttner 2004). Without turnover, democracy is assumed to be a short-lived state of affairs.

Botswana and South Africa seem anomalous in this regard. In neither country has the ruling party ever lost an election; Botswana’s BDP has governed since independence in 1966, while the ANC in South Africa has won every election since the end of apartheid in 1994, increasing its vote share each time. Yet both countries conduct regular, free and fair elections that are contested by multiple political parties. This fact, in addition to their relative stability and prosperity, make it difficult to declare their democracy insufficient in terms of turnover alone.

I argue that the turnover test forces democracy into a false polarity. I argue with Carothers (2002) that there is no reason to see oppressive dictatorship and multi-party democracy as mutually exclusive end states toward which all political systems necessarily tend. As Carothers suggests, it is entirely possible that states will reach equilibrium somewhere between these extremes. Looking at Botswana and South Africa as case studies, we need not assume that they are poised to fall in one direction or the other. Given the possibility of alternative equilibria, we must assess the extent to which the interests of the people are represented by politicians and expressed in policy, irrespective of turnover.

I evaluate the quality of democracy in Botswana and South Africa in two ways. First, I analyze the performance of both governments from an institutional perspective; second, I use data from the Afrobarometer surveys to assess the attitudes toward democracy expressed by citizens of each country. Both suggest that these governments are responsive to the needs of their citizens despite the lack of turnover.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: If particularism is the government’s propensity to provide private rather than public goods, then, empirically, some countries have more particularistic trade policies than others. Such variation in trade-policy particularism may have important effects on economic efficiency, corruption, interest-group lobbying, and other political-economy outcomes. Whether this is so remains unclear, however, because we currently lack systematic measures of trade-policy particularism. This paper develops such a measure for 113 countries and various years from 1990 to 2000. The measure is based on the sectoral specificity of tariffs and is thus more closely related to the underlying concept of particularism than are other common proxies such as the standard deviation of tariff rates. Moreover, the measure is uncorrelated with the level of tariff protection and is thus not simply a proxy for the latter. The measure is thus well-suited to testing a wide range of hypotheses on the causes and consequences of trade-policy particularism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: New York State is now in the process of institutionalizing integrated domestic violence courts, in which a single judge hears all criminal, family and divorce matters for a family experiencing domestic violence. The hypothesized advantages of such a model – more informed judicial decision-making, more coherent case outcomes, and improved victim safety and satisfaction – are leading increasing numbers of jurisdictions in the United States and United Kingdom to implement it in some form; yet those advantages have yet to be proven.

This process and final outcome evaluation examines the adjudication of families’ criminal domestic violence, civil and matrimonial cases in the Suffolk County Integrated Domestic Violence (IDV) Court, which has been in operation since 2002. Through court observations, interviews with stakeholders and litigants, and data analysis, the evaluation assesses the realization of the court’s promise, assessing such issues as consistency of court orders across cases, litigant access to representation on civil cases, increased offender accountability and access to services for children.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: An important property of any party system is the range of issues it presents to the electorate. Party systems are often characterized in terms of the level of ideological polarization, but rarely in terms of the relative amount of issue choice afforded to voters; what we refer to as issue fractionalization. In this paper, we present an innovate approach to measuring issue fractionalization and we examine what explains variation in issue fractionalization over time. Following the issue competition literature, we would expect that parties emphasize different issues (issue divergence is the norm) and that parties in opposition are more likely to diversify their issue appeal than parties in government. This theoretical approach does not, however, explain why issue fractionalization changes over time. We present an alternative explanation that draws upon the dynamic representation model. We argue that issue fractionalization is primarily driven by public opinion, and that parties in government as well as opposition parties are driven by the same incentives to diversify (or narrow) their issue appeal (issue convergence is the norm). These propositions are tested by analyzing party leader speeches in two parliamentary systems, Britain and Denmark, in the period 1953-2007, using time series analysis.