Opinion Backlash and Public Attitudes: Are Political Advances in Gay Rights Counterproductive?

One long‐recognized consequence of the tension between popular sovereignty and democratic values like liberty and equality is public opinion backlash, which occurs when individuals recoil in response to some salient event. For decades, scholars have suggested that opinion backlash impedes policy gains by marginalized groups. Public opinion research, however, suggests that widespread attitude change that backlash proponents theorize is likely to be rare. Examining backlash against gays and lesbians using a series of online and natural experiments about marriage equality, and large‐sample survey data, we find no evidence of opinion backlash among the general public, by members of groups predisposed to dislike gays and lesbians, or from those with psychological traits that may predispose them to lash back. The important implication is that groups pursuing rights should not be dissuaded by threats of backlash that will set their movement back in the court of public opinion.     

Inequality and Support for Political Engagement in New Democracies

Existing studies of income inequality and political participation—including related literature, for example, on preferences for redistribution—leave us with the question of whether citizens see political democracy as offering ways to challenge market inequalities. Using original surveys in 13 Central and Eastern European countries, I find that those who see high and undesirable levels of income inequality have stronger demands for popular democratic participation than those who do not. In addition, neither the aggregate levels of support for political engagement nor individuals’ perceptions of inequality are coordinated with either national-level indicators of income inequality or democratic performance.     

Hooking Workers and Hooking Votes: Enganche,Suffrage, and Labor Market Dualism in Latin America

Labor market dualism—the segmentation of workers between formal, legally protected employment and informal, unprotected status—has long drawn attention from scholars and policymakers in Latin America. This article argues that lasting patterns of economic and political segmentation of workers arose earlier in the region's history than has previously been understood, well before the classic “incorporation” period. Late‐nineteenth‐century practices for the recruitment and retention of workers shaped Latin America's first sets of labor laws, most notably those governing union organization and individual worker job stability. Subsequently, these first laws served as important templates for development, constraining and conditioning the labor codes adopted under mass‐based politics. Using historical data drawn from Chile, Peru, and Argentina, this article shows how differing recruitment practices and variation in the extension of effective suffrage rights and electoral participation shaped early legal labor market segmentation and inequality in Latin America.     

Achieving behaviour change: Three generations of HIV/AIDS programming and jargon in Thailand

NGOs have played an important role worldwide in the fight to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS through achieving behaviour change. NGOs have often been at the forefront of innovative changes, influencing government and international programming activities. This paper identifies and analyses the evolution of the HIV/AIDS programmes of one NGO in Thailand over a period of ten years. Three generations of programming are identified both through distinct approaches to this area of work and through the changing jargon used to describe the people the programmes are aimed at.     

Work-Product Protection and Experts' Documents: The Ninth Circuit Strengthens the “Because of” Standard and Extends Protection to Dual Purpose Documents

Since the Supreme Court applied the work-product privilege to documents created by an attorney's representatives, so long as the documents were created in anticipation of litigation, the lower courts have attempted to interpret this application. The various circuit courts have addressed this issue as it relates to documents serving both litigation and nonlitigation purposes. Most recently, in November 2003 the Ninth Circuit joined the First, Second, Third, Seventh, Eighth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits when it adopted the rule that an expert's documents may be protected when they are prepared “because of the prospect of litigation.” In contrast, the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Circuits, Tenth and D.C. District Courts have constructed a stricter interpretation. Further, the Ninth Circuit's recent holding in United States v. Torf (In re: Grand Jury Subpoena) 350 F. 3d 1010 (9th Cir. 2003) sheds some more light on the scope of the work-product protection as it applies to environmental consultant's documents created in anticipation.     

The Challenge of Funding Consensus-Building Processes

Negotiation Journal -     

The garrison state revisited: civil–military implications of terrorism and security

Lasswell’s original vision of the garrison state was spurred by the increasing militarization of states in the industrial age. The advent of the Cold War seemed to confirm Lasswell’s predictions. In the post-industrial age, conventional warfare and the attendant mobilization of societies seem less probable, but the changing threat of terrorism may lead to a variation of Lasswell’s construct. While states no longer appear likely to evolve into a system of armed camps directed at one another, this article argues that the threat of terrorism may necessitate the garrisoning of society and enhance the role of military and police organizations, as Lasswell warned.     

A tragedy of the anticommons: local option taxation and cell phone tax bills

When multiple taxing jurisdictions overlap and fail to account for one another’s actions, they over-tax the common base. This is a prediction of the anticommons model, in which numerous parties have authority to exclude others from using a resource. This model further predicts that when governments over-tax the base, private parties will underutilize the resource, and underutilization will be greater as the number of parties with exclusion rights rises. We test these predictions by studying cell phone taxation and local option tax authority, which allows some cities, counties, and special-purpose districts to levy taxes on cell phone use. Consistent with theory, we find that the tax rate on cell phone service is higher when local governments have the option to tax. Further, the percentage of households owning cell phones is lower when there is the local option to tax, and ownership rates fall with the number of taxes levied.