Shannon Jenkins

A Woman's Work Is Never Done? Fund-Raising Perception and Effort among Female State Legislative Candidates

The lack of female politicians has been attributed to a lack of female candidates for office. However, the reason why there are so few female candidates is not clear. The author examines whether differences in fund-raising perceptions and effort between female and male state legislative candidates contribute to the lack of female candidates. The results indicate that women do tend to be more concerned about fund-raising, as is evidenced by greater effort devoted to this campaign function as compared to their male counterparts. Women use more techniques and rely on more sources to secure funds for their campaigns. This suggests that part of the reason women are reluctant to run for office may be due to the fact that they will have to devote more effort to a task candidates generally find distasteful.

The Impact of Party and Ideology on Roll Call Voting in State Legislatures

To assess the relative impact of party and ideology on legislative behavior, I utilize survey-based measures of legislator ideology to examine voting in five state legislatures. The results suggest that, although party and ideology both influence voting, the impact of party is greater. The magnitude of this impact varies, however, from chamber to chamber. The activity of parties in the electoral arena explains part of this variance, with more active parties having more influence. Thus, research on legislative behavior should focus on the context surrounding the decision-making process in order for us to understand the influences on voting.

Examining the Influences over Roll Call Voting in Multiple Issue Areas: A Comparative US State Analysis

Examinations of roll call voting have found that issue salience affects the influences over roll call voting in different issue areas. However, it is unclear whether these findings can be extended to legislatures generally as studies have focused only on the US congress or one US state legislature. This article examines the influences over roll call voting in 15 issue areas in five legislative chambers in four US states. The results show the influences over roll call voting vary based on issue salience, but chamber variations suggest that features in the political environment, such as party competition and the resources available to legislators, are just as important in understanding the factors that influence roll call voting.

‘He's One of Ours’: A Case Study of a Campus Response to Crisis

Early on Friday, 19 April 2013, officials at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth learned that one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was an enrolled student. That morning, the entire campus was transformed into both a crime scene and a potential target for an act of domestic terrorism. This article examines the campus response to this crisis, based on interviews with campus officials and a review of a task force report produced to review the campus response. This case study speaks to three important issues in the crisis management literature. Having a crisis plan helps (1), but testing of these plans is critical for an effective response (2). Furthermore, the plan must allow for real‐time decision making that is both centralized and decentralized (3).

Service Learning and Simulations.

Both service learning and simulations have been shown to positively impact student outcomes, but they are not often used together. This article examines how to effectively combine these active learning styles to reap the benefits of both. After examining a case in which the two were combined and the impact this approach had on student evaluations and learning outcomes, I discuss how such projects can be successfully executed in a variety of other classes.

The Impact of In-Class Service-Learning Projects

Service-learning has been shown to have many benefits, but it is often difficult to coordinate such projects due to increased outside demands on students’ time. One option is to make arrangements for students to fulfill their service obligations during regularly scheduled class time. This article examines whether the decrease in face time mitigates the positive impact of service-learning projects by comparing two sections of a political science class focusing on education policy; one of which had a service-learning requirement while the other did not. The results suggest the negative impact that reduced face time might have on student outcomes and course evaluations was offset by the positive impact of the service-learning project.

101 Chambers: Congress, State Legislatures and the Future of Legislative Studies

tics. Cutbacks are occurring throughout the West, under both left and right governments. And antipoverty programs based only on benefits and services for the needy, such as traditional welfare, failed to address the lifestyles that helped to make families poor— especially nonwork by parents and unwed pregnancy. Evaluations showed that welfare accomplished more if it required work. The voters and most politicians agreed, even if academics dissented. So the welfare reform of the 1990s was substantially bipartisan. When Congress reauthorized welfare recently, even Democrats accepted the end of entitlement. On the other hand, the nation is spending more on welfare than before reform, because of the cost of the child care and other subsidies necessary to support work. In some ways the welfare state has expanded, as federal and local governments now do more to advance the working poor. Thus, reform was far from an unalloyed conservative triumph. The author is better at analyzing the political structure of the welfare state. He shows how private agencies that first helped the poor in the Progressive era were subordinated to large government programs in the 1930s and 1960s. Later, professional groups like doctors and social workers obtained public funding from programs while retaining much of their autonomy. Most recently, human service executives have imposed managed care on the professionals. All of these groups now struggle for power within the welfare state. Stoesz also explains persuasively why the child welfare system, which is often ignored, commonly fails to protect poor children from abuse and neglect. On his account, child welfare workers have abandoned serious research into what works in favor of political correctness, thus undercutting their own authority. The incompetent, under-funded system has become one of several “networks of negligence” to which we consign the more disordered poor, alongside public long-term care and mental hospitals. The middle class, drawing on the private sector, is much better served. The author thinks liberals can recover the initiative in social policy only if they return to the pragmatism that built the welfare state. Like conservatives, they must advance proposals for new programs that appeal to research and experience about what works. They should abandon old-style bureaucracy and uniform benefits for more innovative structures that tailor benefits to the needs of individuals, the better to promote opportunity and mobility. He is vague, however, about what this means. He never seriously addresses the dysfunctional patterns—nonwork, unwed pregnancy, crime—that prevent benefits alone from overcoming poverty. Indeed, he says that government must “presume competence” in the poor. Welfare reform, in contrast, avoided that assumption, presuming that the poor needed direction as well as benefits if they were to work and get ahead. Stoesz is a better sociologist of the welfare state than he is a policy advocate. He has a good sense of who has won and lost in the welfare wars. But to turn around liberal fortunes, he would have to be more realistic about the poor themselves, not only about those who serve them.

101 Chambers: Congress, State Legislatures and the Future of Legislative Studies – By Peverill Squire and Keith E. Hamm

tics. Cutbacks are occurring throughout the West, under both left and right governments. And antipoverty programs based only on benefits and services for the needy, such as traditional welfare, failed to address the lifestyles that helped to make families poor— especially nonwork by parents and unwed pregnancy. Evaluations showed that welfare accomplished more if it required work. The voters and most politicians agreed, even if academics dissented. So the welfare reform of the 1990s was substantially bipartisan. When Congress reauthorized welfare recently, even Democrats accepted the end of entitlement. On the other hand, the nation is spending more on welfare than before reform, because of the cost of the child care and other subsidies necessary to support work. In some ways the welfare state has expanded, as federal and local governments now do more to advance the working poor. Thus, reform was far from an unalloyed conservative triumph. The author is better at analyzing the political structure of the welfare state. He shows how private agencies that first helped the poor in the Progressive era were subordinated to large government programs in the 1930s and 1960s. Later, professional groups like doctors and social workers obtained public funding from programs while retaining much of their autonomy. Most recently, human service executives have imposed managed care on the professionals. All of these groups now struggle for power within the welfare state. Stoesz also explains persuasively why the child welfare system, which is often ignored, commonly fails to protect poor children from abuse and neglect. On his account, child welfare workers have abandoned serious research into what works in favor of political correctness, thus undercutting their own authority. The incompetent, under-funded system has become one of several “networks of negligence” to which we consign the more disordered poor, alongside public long-term care and mental hospitals. The middle class, drawing on the private sector, is much better served. The author thinks liberals can recover the initiative in social policy only if they return to the pragmatism that built the welfare state. Like conservatives, they must advance proposals for new programs that appeal to research and experience about what works. They should abandon old-style bureaucracy and uniform benefits for more innovative structures that tailor benefits to the needs of individuals, the better to promote opportunity and mobility. He is vague, however, about what this means. He never seriously addresses the dysfunctional patterns—nonwork, unwed pregnancy, crime—that prevent benefits alone from overcoming poverty. Indeed, he says that government must “presume competence” in the poor. Welfare reform, in contrast, avoided that assumption, presuming that the poor needed direction as well as benefits if they were to work and get ahead. Stoesz is a better sociologist of the welfare state than he is a policy advocate. He has a good sense of who has won and lost in the welfare wars. But to turn around liberal fortunes, he would have to be more realistic about the poor themselves, not only about those who serve them.

Review of What's the Use of Lectures?

The lecture is still one of the staples of university classrooms. Sometimes this is due to the fact that this is the only pedagogical device with which some professors are familiar. But sometimes this is due to the subject matter at hand or circumstances beyond our control, such as large class sizes or unaccommodating classroom layouts. In these situations, for many of us, the question then becomes if one is forced to lecture, how can one do this in such a way so as to maximize the effectiveness of lecturing? Donald Bligh’s classic book, What’s the Use of Lectures?, is an excellent aid to political scientists who seek to improve their lecturing skills. Bligh asserts in the first section that we need to know what lectures can do before we can determine the best way to utilize them. After examining the research, he concludes that lectures are equally effective at teaching information (as compared to other methods of instruction), but they are less effective in promoting thought about a subject or changing attitudes or behaviors. Thus, he concludes here, the acquisition of information should be the key objective of lecturing. With that in mind, in the rest of the book Bligh looks at how people acquire and remember information and how an understanding of these processes can be utilized to improve upon lecture techniques. So for example, Bligh tells us the two key things to understand about memory are that there is a limit to the number of items people can hold in their short-term memory at any given point in time and the information we hold in our short-term memory begins to decay after two seconds. The implications for lecturing are several. First, lecturers should attempt to make key points in less than two seconds in order to prevent forgetting. Next, silence between remarks is critical, so as not to create interference between what was said and what comes next. Finally, as the average number of items that can be stored in short-term memory is seven, lecturers are advised to design their lectures around this fact. Throughout this book, Bligh emphasizes that lecturers must not assume that their own experiences in the classroom as students are typical of how most students