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Citizen Assessments (citizen + assessment)
Selected AbstractsIntuitive Lawmaking: The Example of Child SupportJOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2009Ira Mark Ellman Setting the amount of a child support award involves tradeoffs in the allocation of finite resources among at least three private parties: the two parents, and their child or children. Federal law today requires states to have child support guidelines or formulas that determine child support amounts on a uniform statewide basis. These state guidelines differ in how they make these unavoidable tradeoffs. In choosing the correct balance of these competing claims, policymakers would do well to understand the public's intuitions about the appropriate tradeoffs. We report an empirical study of lay intuitions about these tradeoffs, which we compare to the principles underlying typical state guidelines. As in other contexts in which people are asked to place a dollar value on a legal claim, we find that citizen assessments of child support for particular cases conform to the pattern that Ariely and his co-authors have called "coherent arbitrariness": the respondent's choice of dollar magnitude may be arbitrary, but relative values respond coherently to case variations, within and across citizens. These patterns also suggest that our respondents have a consistent and systematic preference with respect to the structure of child support formulas that differs in important ways from either of the two systems adopted by nearly all states. [source] The Condition of Community Streets and Parks: A Comparison of Resident and Nonresident EvaluationsPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 3 2005Michael J. Licari Practitioners and scholars are concerned that citizen surveys about community services are heavily influenced by respondents' opinions on other issues and by their sociodemographic backgrounds. We search for these biases by examining the extent to which citizen assessments of streets and parks in Iowa communities match the assessments of a nonresident. The citizens' ratings correlate significantly with the nonresident's ratings, indicating that citizen evaluations are not entirely the product of other influences. However, further analysis reveals some bias. In particular, streets are rated higher in wealthy towns, towns high in political efficacy, and towns where residents rate government services good overall. Parks are rated higher in towns where people come together to solve problems and in towns where people rate government services good overall. Even with these biases, our research indicates that citizen evaluations convey reasonably accurate information about the condition of community streets and parks. [source] Consumer versus citizen preferences in contingent valuation: evidence on the role of question framing,AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL & RESOURCE ECONOMICS, Issue 4 2005Ville Ovaskainen Rather than individual consumer preferences, responses to referendum-style contingent valuation surveys on environmental goods may express citizen assessments that take into account benefits to others. We reconsider the consumer versus citizen hypothesis with a focus on the role of framing information. Survey data on conservation areas in Ilomantsi, Finland, are used. Different versions of the valuation question were used to encourage the respondents to take the consumer or the citizen role. The citizen version expectedly resulted in substantially fewer zero-WTP responses and protests and higher mean and median WTP, suggesting that the framing information has a major effect on the preferences expressed. The findings support the idea of multiple preferences. For a more confident interpretation of contingent valuation responses, future studies should recognise their intended use in survey design and gain information about respondents' motives to determine the presence and type of altruistic motives. [source] What citizens think about the police: assessing actual and wished-for frequency of police activities in one's neighbourhoodJOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2005Satu Salmi Abstract The aim of the study was to find out what were citizens' assessments of actual and wished-for frequencies of 12 police activities in two typical Finnish neighbourhoods. Data were collected from 3271 adults and 986 young people with a mail questionnaire. Actual and wished-for frequencies were separately analysed using Homals. Both analyses produced a dimension indicating the assessed (actual or wished-for) frequency of police work, disregarding the content of the 12 police activities. In addition, each analysis produced a dimension describing the tendency to give a ,don't-know' answer. The latter two non-substantive dimensions were interpreted as indicating that the general level of knowledge of police activities was not high among the citizens. When comparing the frequency assessments of ongoing police activities and the wishes concerning these activities, it was found that citizens wished the police to increase all cited activities, particularly foot patrolling, helping and supporting victims and giving crime prevention advice. Citizens appeared to be responsive to the activities related to community policing and preventive police work. All four dimensions were related with background characteristics of respondents (age, gender, city and living conditions), but these relations were not strong. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | ||||||||||