Dual Identity Development and Adjustment in Muslim Minority Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Dual identity (e.g., strong ethnic and national identity) is a psychological resource for minority groups, but how it develops during adolescence is less clear....     

Legislatures of Small States: A Comparative Study

This article, drawing upon a quantitative survey of over 80 parliamentarians, as well as website surveys combined with qualitative interviews, explores the degree of usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by Swedish parliamentarians. It also begins to consider any implications for party organisations and parliamentary authorities. The authors suggest that, by 2005, Swedish MPs were becoming ‘electronic parliamentarians’ and that this, combined with the growing usage of political blogs, places increasing demands upon party organisations and the Riksdag to consider the broader management and accountability issues of greater ICT usage by individual MPs. The authors argue that there is a pressing requirement for further research on these organisational and institutional dimensions by scholars of legislative studies, particularly, given the developments in ICT-advanced political systems, like Sweden.     

Market structure and disempowering regulatory intermediaries: Insights from U.S. trade surveillance

Public agencies outsource a wide variety of tasks to nonstate actors, or what can be referred to as regulatory intermediaries. In certain circumstances, these agencies may seek to disempower those regulatory intermediaries by reclaiming, duplicating, or transferring the outsourced task. When will these disempowerment attempts be successful? This article presents the Market Structure Hypothesis, which contends that the level of competition between regulatory intermediaries will, all things equal, determine whether disempowerment attempts succeed. To test this hypothesis, this article examines the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's attempts to acquire the independent capacity to conduct nationwide trade surveillance in the 1980s (Market Oversight Surveillance System) and 2010s (Consolidated Audit Trail). Evidence derives from archival materials, a Freedom of Information Act Request, and 60 interviews in Oxford, London, Toronto, New York City, and Washington, DC. The empirical results corroborate the hypothesis' expectations, contributing to our understanding of public-private partnerships and shedding new empirical light on an understudied topic of securities regulation.     

A review of experimental design in forensic taphonomy: moving towards forensic realism

Forensic taphonomy as a discipline requires standardization to satisfy Daubert criteria for scientific data to be admissible in court. In response, there has been a shift towards quantification of methodology and estimating the postmortem interval. Despite these advances, there are still biases and limitations within the discipline not explicitly addressed in the early stages of experimental design nor in final published works. In this article, unresolved debates with respect to the conductance and reporting of forensic taphonomic research are reviewed, beginning with the nature of experimental cadavers, human or animal analogues and their body size, and second, the forensic realism of experimental setups, specifically with respect to caging, clothing and number of carcases. Pigs, albeit imperfect, are a good model to gain a general idea of the trends that may be seen in humans in subsequent validation studies in facilities where human donors are available. To date, there is no consensus among taphonomists on the extent of the effect that body mass has on decomposition progression. More research is required with both human cadavers and non-human analogues that builds on our current knowledge of forensic taphonomy to answer these nagging questions. This will enable the discipline to make the reliable assumption that pigs and donor decomposition data can be applied to homicide cases. A suite of experimental design aspects is suggested to ensure systematic and standardized data collection across different biogeoclimatic circumstances to identify and quantify the effects of potential confounding variables. Such studies in multiple, varied biogeographic circumstances with standardized protocols, equipment and carrion will facilitate independent global validation of patterns. These factors are reviewed to show the need for adjustments in experimental design to ensure relevance and applicability of data within locally realistic forensic situations. The initiation of a global decomposition data network for forensic taphonomists is recommended.

Key points

• Pigs are a valuable, albeit imperfect, proxy for human decomposition studies.
• There are few or conflicting data on effects of carcase size, carrion ecology, exclusion cages and scavengers.
• We recommend single, clothed, uncaged carcases for baseline research to reflect regionally specific forensic casework.

     

Measuring Neoliberalism: Development and Initial Validation of a Scale of Anti-Neoliberal Attitudes

Critics of neoliberalism argue that so-called meritocratic and identity-neutral social policies and political positions actually reinforce and exacerbate intersecting inequalities, namely racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and ethnocentrism/xenophobia. The purpose of these studies was to develop and initially validate a scale of neoliberal attitudes from a wide range of existing instruments that reflect anti-neoliberal theory. A series of three studies resulted in a 25-item instrument—the Anti-Neoliberal Attitudes Scale (ANAS)—that exhibits initial evidence of construct validity, internal consistency, and test–retest reliability. Exploratory factor analysis with students from two universities revealed a four-factor structure of Racism and Sexism Awareness, Communitarian Values, Multicultural Ideology, and Inequality Consciousness. However, a confirmatory factor analysis with an independent sample of undergraduate students suggests a bifactor model in which the general factor explains most of the variance and that the instrument should be treated as a single scale, rather than independent subscales. Significant correlations with measures of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation suggest convergent validity. Temporal stability was established via a test–retest analysis in an independent sample of undergraduate students. Finally, responses from a sample of MTurk workers provided evidence of the ANAS’s incremental validity when compared to an existing measure of neoliberal beliefs. Implications for future empirical work on the psychological dimensions of neoliberalism are discussed.

     

Unheeded warning of war: why policymakers ignored the 1990 Yugoslavia estimate*

This article examines the lack of policy response to the 1990 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that predicted the collapse of Yugoslavia. Contrary to common criticisms of estimative intelligence, the NIE was accurate and unambiguous. Why was good intelligence unheeded? For some policymakers, the analysis was not closely tied to their interests and competed with other priorities for attention; for those who were substantive experts, the NIE’s grim message was hard to accept. Moreover, policymakers read intelligence reports in the context of popular concepts – a lingering Cold War lens distorted more than it clarified. Finally, while the NIE made hard-hitting judgments, it did not include any analysis of opportunities to influence the outcome. Rather than pushing an already difficult estimate to the breaking point, including opportunities would likely have increased the odds of policymakers taking action. These lessons have broader implications for analytical tradecraft and the often-challenging relationship between intelligence and policy.     

Marriage and Divorce in the Supreme Court and the Law Commission: for Love or Money?

The case note considers the impact of the Supreme Court decision in Radmacher v Granatino regarding pre‐nuptial and other classes of nuptial agreement, together with recent proposals of the Law Commission for reform of the law relating to marital property agreements generally. It explores in particular the question of what, if any, core obligations of marriage cannot – or should not – be excludable by agreement.