From Safety to Danger: Constructions of Crime in a Women’s Magazine

This study examines how the print media constructs signifiers of safety and danger for women. We analyze 155 news articles regarding crime and criminal justice from 1970 to 1990 in Chatelaine magazine, a Canadian women’s periodical. Both content and textual analyses are deployed to evaluate the media representations of crime and their role in facilitating images of fear and safety. We show that the meanings associated with women’s danger and safety in news narratives are socially constructed through claims, sources, content and culture. We find that news reporting did not initially incorporate signifiers of fear. However, crime messages increasingly included images of fear in the later reporting period. We argue that the transformations surrounding these images and texts are influenced by the rise in neoliberal thought in the 1980s. Our results indicate that ideological struggles external to the media are crucial to the representation of crime, which ultimately influence signifiers of danger and safety for women.     

INTEREST IN MARITAL RECONCILIATION AMONG DIVORCING PARENTS

This study offers the first research data on the interest of divorcing parents in marital reconciliation. A sample of 2,484 divorcing parents was surveyed after taking required parenting classes. They were asked about whether they believed their marriage could still be saved with hard work, and about their interest in reconciliation services. About 1 in 4 individual parents indicated some belief that their marriage could still be saved, and in about 1 in 9 matched couples both partners did. As for interest in reconciliation services, about 3 in 10 individuals indicated potential interest. In a sub‐sample of 329 matched couples, about 1 in 3 couples had one partner interested but not the other, and in 1 in 10 couples both partners were interested in reconciliation services. Findings were consistent across most demographic and marital factors. The only strong predictors of reconciliation interest were gender, with males being more interested than females, and initiator status, with far greater interest among those whose partner initiated the divorce. These findings are discussed in terms of attachment theory and future prospects of divorce services.     

China and India’s participation in global climate negotiations

In this paper, we discuss a range of issues concerning developing country participation in current global climate change mitigation negotiations, especially India and China. We argue that the problem of redefining ‘common yet differentiated responsibilities’ in a way which allows developing countries room to pursue their individual development goals while still achieving the necessary level of carbon mitigation is central to the debate. The choice of negotiating instruments, effective technology transfer and financial support, and other related issues have been raised principally by China and India, and may also be raised by several other countries. Kyoto non-compliance by Annex 1 countries will also greatly impact the negotiating power of China and India and other developing countries. We conclude that, once basic principles are clearly defined, the greatest incentive for China and India to participate in climate change negotiations is the prospect of future negotiating rounds that can be linked to a large number of climate change related issues, such as intellectual property, the potential for financial transfers and trade/market access.     

The Electoral Sweet Spot: Low‐Magnitude Proportional Electoral Systems

Can electoral rules be designed to achieve political ideals such as accurate representation of voter preferences and accountable governments? The academic literature commonly divides electoral systems into two types, majoritarian and proportional, and implies a straightforward trade‐off by which having more of an ideal that a majoritarian system provides means giving up an equal measure of what proportional representation (PR) delivers. We posit that these trade‐offs are better characterized as nonlinear and that one can gain most of the advantages attributed to PR, while sacrificing less of those attributed to majoritarian elections, by maintaining district magnitudes in the low to moderate range. We test this intuition against data from 609 elections in 81 countries between 1945 and 2006. Electoral systems that use low‐magnitude multimember districts produce disproportionality indices almost on par with those of pure PR systems while limiting party system fragmentation and producing simpler government coalitions.     

Manipulation and Single‐Peakedness: A General Result

This article considers environments in which individual preferences are single‐peaked with respect to an unspecified, but unidimensional, ordering of the alternative space. We show that in these environments, any institution that is coalitionally strategy‐proof must be dictatorial. Thus, any nondictatorial institutional environment that does not explicitly utilize an a priori ordering over alternatives in order to render a collective decision is necessarily prone to the strategic misrepresentation of preferences by an individual or a group. Moreover, we prove in this environment that for any nondictatorial institution, the truthful revelation of preferences can never be a dominant strategy equilibrium. Accordingly, an incentive to behave insincerely is inherent to the vast majority of real‐world lawmaking systems, even when the policy space is unidimensional and the core is nonempty.     

The Party Faithful: Partisan Images,Candidate Religion,and the Electoral Impact of Party Identification

We argue that the factors shaping the impact of partisanship on vote choice—“partisan voting”—depend on the nature of party identification. Because party identification is partly based on images of the social group characteristics of the parties, the social profiles of political candidates should affect levels of partisan voting. A candidate's religious affiliation enables a test of this hypothesis. Using survey experiments which vary a hypothetical candidate's religious affiliation, we find strong evidence that candidates’ religions can affect partisan voting. Identifying a candidate as an evangelical (a group viewed as Republican) increases Republican support for, and Democratic opposition to, the candidate, while identifying the candidate as a Catholic (a group lacking a clear partisan profile) has no bearing on partisan voting. Importantly, the conditional effect of candidate religion on partisan voting requires the group to have a salient partisan image and holds with controls for respondents’ own religious affiliations and ideologies.