Noisy Retrospection: The Effect of Party Control on Policy Outcomes

Retrospective voting is vital for democracy. But, are the objective performance metrics widely thought to be relevant for retrospection—such as the performance of the economy, criminal justice system, and schools, to name a few—valid criteria for evaluating government performance? That is, do political coalitions actually have the power to influence the performance metrics used for retrospection on the timeline introduced by elections? Using difference-in-difference and regression discontinuity techniques, we find that US states governed by Democrats and those by Republicans perform equally well on economic, education, crime, family, social, environmental, and health outcomes on the timeline introduced by elections (2–4 years downstream). Our results suggest that voters may struggle to truly hold government coalitions accountable, as objective performance metrics appear to be largely out of the immediate control of political coalitions.

Parental Involvement in Education

This chapter examines the key factors of parental involvement in relation to African-American students' academic success. Researchers identified that school failure is common among low-income African-American youth in the United States. This achievement gap requires a review of areas, such as poverty and crime, family environments, parenting styles, and academic race stereotypes, that could possibly affect African-American's academic achievement. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey revealed that opportunities exist in reducing poverty and crime in African-American communities. Additionally, factors such as school-district locations may impact African Americans' perception of education. Most low-income schools lack educational resources to support students with increased learning needs which leads to greater disparities in developmental outcomes. Using social-cognitive theory as a framework, the authors found that increased parental involvement may improve African-American students' self-efficacy for increased academic motivation.

Heirs Apparent in Juxtaposition: David in Samuel-Kings and Michael Corleone in The Godfather

We read together the story of David in 1 Samuel 16-2 Kings 2 and that of Michael Corleone in The Godfather. They both begin outside the main power structure, the kingdom of Saul and the crime family, and then rise, often through the use of violence, to the top: King and Don. David’s decisive slaying of Goliath is matched by Michael’s assassination of Sollozzo and McCluskey. After the killings both are now recognized as serious “players” in their respective structures. As they move up the power chain David and Michael, as characters in biblical narrative and modern film, are haunted by the possibility that their stories could have been different: the innocent young shepherd and the decorated Marine. Both could be separate from the violence and corruption of Israelite monarchy and of the Corleone family.

Familiar Gangsters: Gang Violence, Brotherhood, and the Media’s Fascination With a Crime Family

Media reports can have a significant and lasting impact on public perceptions about crime and criminals. Jonathan, Jarrod, and Jamie Bacon gained notoriety in Vancouver through substantial media coverage for their involvement in gang-related shootings and criminal activity. The present study examines how the media have portrayed the Bacon brothers and their importance in the region’s gang scene. We examine all articles published in the area’s largest newspaper, the Vancouver Sun, mentioning the Bacon family between 2008 and 2015 ( N = 401). Specifically, we explore the media’s depiction of the Bacons through developing a thematic content analysis, with themes tested in a keyword analysis using a corpora comparison with a set of reference articles. We argue that the Bacon brothers’ family relationship, tumultuous gang alliances, and alleged involvement in Vancouver’s worst gang-related shooting led to the media overreporting and sensationalizing their criminal activity and prominence in the local gang landscape. In addition, we contend that the popular theme of crime families provided the media with a narrative that proved useful in a context where the police and the courts were simultaneously trying to adapt to the emerging reality of violent gang conflict.

The Godfather Trilogy

The Godfather Trilogy forms an important body of work in American cinema, not only because the films, particularly Part I (1972) and Part II (1974), have received acclaim from journalists, critics, and audiences but also because they have received so much attention from academics. The emphasis in the study and appreciation of the trilogy has, however, been on Parts I and II, partly because of their complexity and longevity but also because of how they helped redefine the gangster genre in portraying the Mafia on film, and because of the films’ contributions to the development of New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (all of which have formed important perspectives in academic approaches to the trilogy). Part III (1990) has been felt by critics either to be a disappointment or a coda to the prior incarnations of the series, although it has also attracted academic interest for these very reasons. It is, however, Parts I and II that have served as the main focus of critical attention and not only as gangster films—even if the study of genre has had further influence because their generic revisions introduced the Mafia film. This innovation has produced a range of academic responses that locate the films via reference to histories of organized crime and author Mario Puzo’s representation of the Mafia crime family in the novel on which Parts I and II are based as well as accounts that extend discussion to consider their influence on related representations of the criminal underworld, their impact on popular conceptions of the Mafia, and their representation of Italian-American ethnicity and related areas such as the family and gender. The family has also formed another nexus of connections in criticism because it is so often treated in relation to American culture, and this has also generated a significant body of work on the political and ideological consideration of capitalism in the films. Finally, because Francis Ford Coppola was an important influence in New Hollywood Cinema, there have also been significant considerations of all three films by reference to auteur theory and to Coppola’s balancing of artistic and commercial imperatives.

The CR‐Ω+ Classification Algorithm for Spatio‐Temporal Prediction of Criminal Activity

We present a spatio‐temporal prediction model that allows forecasting of the criminal activity behavior in a particular region by using supervised classification. The degree of membership of each pattern is interpreted as the forecasted increase or decrease in the criminal activity for the specified time and location. The proposed forecasting model (CR‐Ω+) is based on the family of Kora‐Ω Logical‐Combinatorial algorithms operating on large data volumes from several heterogeneous sources using an inductive learning process. We propose several modifications to the original algorithms by Bongard and Baskakova and Zhuravlëv which improve the prediction performance on the studied dataset of criminal activity. We perform two analyses: punctual prediction and tendency analysis, which show that it is possible to predict punctually one of four crimes to be perpetrated (crime family, in a specific space and time), and 66% of effectiveness in the prediction of the place of crime, despite of the noise of the dataset. The tendency analysis yielded an STRMSE (Spatio‐Temporal RMSE) of less than 1.0.