Much of the scholarship on democratization has a myopic focus on economic conditions. Using Afrobarometer and Latinobarómetro survey data, the article examines how crime victimization and perceptions of crime influence citizens' attitudes toward democracy. After elaborating on several theoretical frameworks that help illuminate the relationship between crime and support for democracy, the article applies fixed effects and generalized hierarchical linear models to the cross‐national survey data. The results show that a citizen's perception of public safety is as important a factor as any socio‐economic variable in predicting support for and satisfaction with democracy. This finding is important because widespread support for democracy among the citizenry is considered a requisite for the consolidation of democracy.

The development of a school improvement plan (SIP) has become an integral part of many school reform efforts. However, there are almost no studies that empirically examine the effectiveness of SIPs. The few studies examining the planning activities of organizations have generally focused on the private sector and have not provided clear or consistent evidence that such planning is effective. Some studies have even suggested formal planning can lead to inflexible and myopic practices or may simply waste time and resources. This study explores the relationship between the quality of SIPs and school performance by examining a unique dataset from the Clark County School District, the fifth largest school district in the nation. The study finds that, even when controlling for a variety of factors, there is a strong and consistent association between the quality of school planning and overall student performance in math and reading.

The goal of this article is to provide insight on the predictive value of California's inmate classification system. The authors argue that the current system is based heavily on an inmate's sentence length and that such an indicator provides little or no predictive value for inmate misconduct and is therefore not meeting the policy objectives assigned to classification and risk assessment. The authors use a large data set (N = 13,000) based on incident reports from 1992 to 1994 to test the hypothesis that the length of an inmate sentence is positively related to the rate of serious misconduct. The findings show that an inmate's sentence length is not related to infraction rates during incarceration and that a multivariate analysis produces negative coefficients.

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