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This research was undertaken to examine the impact of political, economic, and institutional variables upon black employment outcomes in several hundred American cities. The results reveal that public employee unions exert a significant negative impact upon black job success in unreformed cities. However, public employee unions do not influence minority employment patterns in reformed communities. These findings strongly suggest that a critical reevaluation of the conventional wisdom regarding the policy effects of reformed institutions is called for.

The research on the distribution of urban public services has made a valuable contribution in enhancing our understanding of urban politics. However, this literature is criticized because the authors employed cross-sectional rather than longitudinal designs, relied upon single rather than multiple indicators of the distributional pattern, and emphasized bureaucratic rather than political explanations of distributional outcomes. In this article, the distribution of park and recreation services in Chicago is analyzed for a 22-year period, revealing that a redistribution of resources between white and black wards occurred during this time. One conclusion is that class has replaced race as the primary determinant of the service distribution pattern.

Explores the development of political orientations by conducting a partial test of a cognitive-developmental hypothesis. Political socialization; Whether sequential stages of cognitive development can be demonstrated for different age groups; How 526 twelfth graders from Texas were surveyed; How the questionnaire explored the cognitive and affective orientations of the respondents toward a number of political authorities and institutions and its results.

The research on the distribution of urban public services has made a valuable contribution in enhancing our understanding of urban politics. However, this literature is criticized because the authors employed cross-sectional rather than longitudinal designs, relied upon single rather than multiple indicators of the distributional pattern, and emphasized bureaucratic rather than political explanations of distributional outcomes. In this article, the distribution of park and recreation services in Chicago is analyzed for a 22-year period, revealing that a redistribution of resources between white and black wards occurred during this time. One conclusion is that class has replaced race as the primary determinant of the service distribution pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The research reported here examines the neighborhood distribution of park and library services in Houston. The analysis reveals that inequalities in distribution on the basis of race and wealth are dispersed rather than cumulative. The distribution of park acreage and facilities is equal while the location pattern is skewed in the direction of low income neighborhoods. The distribution of library resources favors upper income neighbor hoods, while the spatial distribution of branch libraries advantages black and other low income areas. Distributional decisions are made on the basis of bureaucratic rules and appear to be little affected by explicit racial and socioeconomic criteria. However, these rules may have distributional consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ecological analysis of crime rates has been a traditionally important approach to analyzing the causes of crime. Over the years, this approach has profited from the use of increasingly sophisticated data analysis techniques. A recent article in this journal on intracity crime rates offered such an analytic refinement-with the discovery of similar curvilinear relationships between both personal and property crime and customary socioeconomic predictors. Such a finding for both types of crime is quite different from the results indicated in previous research. The present article reexamines comparable data on urban crime, adding further statistical and theory-based refinements to the analysis. The results here show distinctive relationships for property and personal crime. This paper serves, then, to integrate careful empirical analysis into available criminogenic theory and into the conventional wisdom of ecological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]