Does Separation or Divorce Make any Difference? An Interactional Perspective on Intimate Partner Violence with Focus on Marital Status

This article reports a study of the impact of marital status on interactional aspects of intimate partner violence (IPV) among help-seeking women. Are there differences among marital status groups concerning (a) other sociodemographic variables, (b) IPV categories, (c) interactional IPV variables, and (d) perception and interpretation of IPV? A representative sample of 157 women recruited from family counseling, the police, and shelters were interviewed. There was no significant sociodemographic difference among the marital status groups. There were no significant differences pertaining to IPV categories, neither for IPV severity, injury, duration, frequency, mortal danger, and regularity, nor for physical, psychological, or sexual IPV. However, multivariate logistic regression showed that post-separation women were significantly more likely to have (a) had longer duration since the last psychological and sexual IPV episode, (2) reported the physical IPV to be more predictable, and (3) used more active coping strategies against physical IPV. However, our research was not able to determine if perception and interpretation predict actual leaving behavior, or vice versa, or how the victim’s subjective perception and interpretation of the IPV changes over time.     

The Impact of Assembly Size on Representativeness

Choosing the number of seats in a legislature is a balancing act between efficiency and representativeness. This article focuses on representativeness and hypothesises that the larger the assembly, the higher the vote–seat proportionality, the higher the number of parties represented, and the higher the representation of otherwise under-represented groups. An approach using simulations of elections is introduced and applied in testing the hypotheses in the case of Danish local elections. Two thousand six hundred and forty-six elections are simulated, and a positive, but non-linear, relationship is demonstrated between number of seats and proportionality, number of parties, and percentage of women councillors.     

Right-wing Euroscepticism and populism: investigating the concept of ‘the people’

ABSTRACT

Right-wing Eurosceptic political groups gained ground in the elections for the European Parliament in May 2014. The electoral victory of right-wing Euroscepticism was accompanied by a concern that populism is (once again) spreading in Europe. Associating right-wing Eurosceptics with populism raises the question of whether critiques of populism can be directly extended to right-wing Euroscepticism. By reconstructing the right-wing Eurosceptic concept of ‘the people,’ this article demonstrates that the Eurosceptic concept of the people has a dual meaning that encompasses both a transnational and a national concept of the people. The article concludes that while Euroscepticism shares ideological features with populism, it is problematic, due to the internal structure of the promoted concept of the people and the European political environment, directly to extend recent critiques of populism to right-wing Euroscepticism.     

Trust and verification: balancing agency and stewardship theory in the governance of agencies

ABSTRACT

Many government services are delivered by (partially) autonomous agencies. Governments need effective measures for contracting, steering, and monitoring agencies and to balance control and trust. In the literature, control-based agency theory and trust-based stewardship theory have often been portrayed as alternative and competing approaches. In empirical studies in public administration, however, these approaches often find mixed and contradictory results. Against this background, this article analyzes how a combination of trust- and control-based approaches, explicitly founded on agency and stewardship theory, can help explain when participants find a given governance regime to be most satisfactory. A survey instrument is developed which, for the first time, fully measures the rich concept of stewardship theory in conjunction with agency theory. The analysis of the governance of Dutch agencies shows that government indeed combines governance solutions from both theoretical camps and illuminates under which conditions this combination is most satisfactory.     

Why do military dictatorships become presidential democracies? Mapping the democratic interests of autocratic regimes

Public Choice - Recent data show that virtually all military dictatorships that democratize become presidential democracies. I hypothesize that the reason is that military interests are able to...     

The determinants of democracy: a sensitivity analysis

Public Choice - Numerous studies—operating with diverse model specifications, samples and empirical measures—suggest different economic, social, cultural, demographic, institutional and...     

Encounters With Irregular Migrants in Social Work—“Collateral Damage” and Reframing of Recognizability in Swedish Public Social Services

The aim is to explore experiences and considerations of social workers regarding irregular migrants, understood as being prone to be “collateral damage.” It is revealed that some social workers approve assistance exceeding that which can find support in the national legislation. They are hereby addressing the normative conditions for recognition and installing new frames for apprehending irregular migrants. This process is referred to as a reframing of recognizability. By exceeding the limits of “belonging,” social workers question their profession's national link as well as the inability of a nationally anchored understanding of social work to deal with irregular migrants.     

Is social media intelligence private? Privacy in public and the nature of social media intelligence

ABSTRACT

SOCMINT (SOCial Media INTelligence) is increasingly considered relevant and cost efficient information, and the exploitation of social media information in the name of security and public safety is generally regarded as unproblematic. We will critically scrutinize this claim and argue that the exploitation of such information by Intelligence and Security Services raises new ethical concerns. Drawing on recent moral discussions about privacy, we will argue that individuals have an interest in privacy in public spaces, including online spaces. We will discuss the role of such public privacy interests and argue that the systematic surveillance of social media platforms by security authorities potentially entail a negative chilling effect.     

Long-term consequences of being placed in disciplinary segregation†

Being placed in restrictive housing is considered one of the most devastating experiences a human can endure, yet a scant amount of research has been conducted to test how this experience affects core indicators of prisoner reentry such as employment and recidivism. In this article, we use Danish registry data, which allow for us to link penal conditions to postrelease outcomes, to show how the reentry outcomes of individuals placed in disciplinary segregation, which is placement in restrictive housing because of disciplinary infractions, compare with those sanctioned for in-prison offenses but not placed in segregation. The results from matched difference-in-differences analyses show that Danish inmates placed in disciplinary segregation experience larger drops in employment and larger increases in the risk of being convicted of a new crime in the 3 years after release from a correctional facility than do Danish inmates who were sanctioned for a serious offense but not placed in disciplinary segregation as a result. Because being placed in disciplinary segregation, and restrictive housing more broadly, is so common, these results indicate that restrictive housing placement may be a key moderator of the effects of incarceration that merits more attention from criminologists, provided the associations shown here represent causal effects and generalize.