Democratization and Political Change as Threats to Collective Sentiments: Testing Durkheim in Russia

Durkheim argued that acute political crises result in increased homicide rates because they pose a threat to sentiments about the collective. Though crucial to Durkheim's work on homicide, this idea remains untested. The authors took advantage of the natural experiment of the collapse of the Soviet Union to examine this hypothesis. Using data from Russian regions (N = 78) and controlling for measures of anomie and other covariates, the authors estimated the association between political change and change in homicide rates between 1991 and 2000. Results indicated that regions exhibiting less support for the Communist Party in 2000 (and thus greater change in political ideals because the Party had previously exercised complete control) were regions with greater increases in homicide rates. Thus, while democratization may be a positive development relative to the Communist juggernaut of the past, it appears that the swift political change in Russia is partially responsible for the higher rates of violence there following the collapse of the Soviet Union.     

Filing a Nuisance Claim to Induce Successive Lawsuits

In this article, I provide a rationale for nuisance suits. Ishow that a plaintiff may file a nuisance suit if he expectsthat his suit may induce suits by other plaintiffs. If an initialplaintiff is too pessimistic about this possibility, a nuisancesuit may not be filed even though it would be meritorious withjoinder with another plaintiff. In this case, lawyers may playthe role of reducing such coordination failure due to asymmetricinformation by providing potential plaintiffs with relevantinformation.     

Creating impressions: An experimental investigation of political advertising on television

Using an experimental design, this paper addresses a few basic, but important, questions about the influence of televised political advertising. How effective are different kinds of political spots in creating impressions of a candidate among viewers? Do negative ads work better than positive ads in creating favorable impressions? Do spots that focus on issues create more favorable impressions that spots that stress the traits of a candidate? Do two ads work better than one ad in creating impressions? Can the effects of a spot be undercut by a follow-up advertisement from the opposition? This paper offers some tentative answers to these questions.

     

Self-reported crime rates of women prisoners

This paper presents findings from the first study of female prisoners' self-reports of criminal activity. Using the criminal career paradigm to frame the analysis, self-reported estimates of crime participation and frequency rates were examined for eight felony crimes. Important similarities between women and men were found in overall patterns of crime. Specifically, a small proportion ofboth women and men described committing a large portion of the total crimes reported. These data also suggest that women and men are similar in violent crime participation — a finding that varies from the current literature. Once active in a crime type, women and men committed assault, theft, and forgery at significantly different rates; no gender differences were found in the annualized frequency rates of burglary, robbery, motor vehicle theft, fraud, and drug dealing. However, although statistical differences were not found in the overall frequency of drug dealing, specific patterns of drug dealing reflected considerable gender variation, with a larger proportion of the female sample committing very frequent (daily) drug dealing activity. The findings reflect the value of the criminal career paradigm for the study of gender differences. Future research should include largescale quantitative designs that allow detailed analyses of correlates of the distinct criminal career dimensions.Points of view are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice.This research was funded in part by the National Institute of Justice, Grant 87-IJ-CX-0048.     

Morphometrics of the hyoid bone for human sex determination from digital photographs

The identification of unknown remains is very important. When unknown remains are found, anthropologists first determine their sex and age. The sex of most skeletons is determined by their shape. In the hyoid bone, the shape is sex related, so it can be used forensically to determine the sex. This study focused on sex-based morphometry of the hyoid bone in Koreans using digital photographs. Hyoid bones from 52 males and 33 females were examined. For each subject, we took 34 measurements from photographs using a computer program, and the data were analyzed statistically using SPSS 11.0. Twenty-one of 34 measurements had significant sex differences (p<0.05). The discriminant functions based on three measurements (X(1)-X(3)) were as follows: The accuracy of discriminant functions is 88.2% in both groups, so these can be used to distinguish males from females in a statistically significant manner.