Unpacking the Relationships between Impulsivity,Neighborhood Disadvantage,and Adolescent Violence: An Application of a Neighborhood-Based Group Decomposition

Scholars have become increasingly interested in how social environments condition the relationships between individual risk-factors and adolescent behavior. An appreciable portion of this literature is concerned with the relationship between impulsivity and delinquency across neighborhood settings. The present article builds upon this growing body of research by considering the more nuanced pathways through which neighborhood disadvantage shapes the development of impulsivity and provides a situational context for impulsive tendencies to manifest in violent and aggressive behaviors. Using a sample of 12,935 adolescent from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) (mean age?=?15.3, 51% female; 20% Black, 17% Hispanic), we demonstrate the extent to which variation in the association between impulsivity and delinquency across neighborhoods can be attributed to (1) differences in mean-levels of impulsivity and violence and (2) differences in coefficients across neighborhoods. The results of a series of multivariate regression models indicate that impulsivity is positively associated with self-reported violence, and that this relationship is strongest among youth living in disadvantaged neighborhoods. The moderating effect of neighborhood disadvantage can be attributed primarily to the stronger effect of impulsivity on violence in these areas, while differences in average levels of violence and impulsivity account for a smaller, yet nontrivial portion of the observed relationship. These results indicate that the differential effect of impulsivity on violence can be attributed to both developmental processes that lead to the greater concentration of violent and impulsive adolescents in economically deprived neighborhoods as well as the greater likelihood of impulsive adolescents engaging in violence when they reside in economically disadvantaged communities.     

Labour Demands,Regime Concessions: Moroccan Unions and the Arab Uprising

This article investigates how public employee unions mobilised to take advantage of Morocco's Arab uprising. Leveraging their positions as operators of public institutions, these unionists exploited the unrest to strategically advance their interests. Two points emerge from this account of state—labour relations in Morocco. First, a spike in labour contestation began in early 2010, presaging the unrest that rocked Moroccan cities in 2011. Second, the unions secured their demands through traditional tactics of labour mobilisation—joining street protests, exaggerating material demands, and threatening negotiation walkouts. This strategy, however, became more efficacious during the Arab uprising. Fearing urban riots that had historically grown from labour protests since the 1980s, regime elites conceded to union demands, many of which they had previously rejected in the 2000s.     

Continuity through Co-optation: Rural Politics and Regime Resilience in Morocco and Mauritania

Morocco and Mauritania's regimes differ radically in their political structures and contemporary histories, yet they employed several similar strategies to secure survival during the Arab uprisings. Besides limited repression, constitutional reforms and palliative concessions, both regimes also used a distinct strategy of co-optation to aid authoritarian resilience. Targeting rural politicians with weak party affiliations for co-optation, regimes used it to build and reinforce loyalist political parties in the late 2000s. Once the uprisings began, both regimes deployed these loyalist parties to undertake counter-revolutionary activities to contain and counterbalance the power of youth and Islamist movements.     

Importation, deprivation, and varieties of serving time: An integrated-lifestyle-exposure model of prison offending

Using data on 208 male, former inmates in a midwestern state, the current study extended the importation/deprivation debate by developing an integrated model of prison offending. The model contained attitudinal measures, self-control, perceptions of prison conditions, prison lifestyles, objective measures of prison conditions, and controls. Structural equation modeling indicated that both the importation and deprivation theories of inmate behavior were salient, however, their effects were mediated by the inmate's lifestyle while imprisoned, specifically, his participation in the inmate economy.