The relationship between substance use, drug selling, and lethal violence in 25 juvenile murderers

The goal of the present study was to determine the relationship between substance use, drug selling, and lethal violence in adolescent male homicide offenders and their victims. The study employed a retrospective review of criminal justice databases and medical examiner records for murders committed by 25 adolescent males incarcerated in the Commonwealth of Virginia juvenile correctional centers from February 1992 to July 1996. The perpetrator sample was 84% African American and 16% white. The average age at the time of the offense was 15.0 years (range = 13.0 to 17.7 years). The victims were 84% male, 60% African American and 32% white. The median victim age was 28.0 years (mean = 34.8, range = 17 months to 75 years). The results indicated that 52% of the murders were committed by juveniles with identified involvement in drug selling, and 28% of the murders were drug-related. Toxicology results indicated recent drug or alcohol use in 27% of the victims; while 74% of the perpetrators reported substance use, 35% indicating daily use. Using discriminant analysis, it was possible to accurately classify 86% of the drug-related murders with the variables of recent victim drug use and perpetrator substance use history. The results indicated that adolescent males involved in the sale and distribution of illegal drugs comprised a significant percentage of those incarcerated for murder. Recent victim drug use and perpetrator substance use may be important variables in identifying drug-related juvenile homicides. These results underscore the link between substance use, drug selling, and lethal violence.     

Forecasting Errors in the Averseness of Apologizing

Apologizing is often seen as the appropriate response after a transgression for perpetrators. Yet, despite the positive effects that apologies elicit after situations of conflict, they are not always delivered easily. We argue that this is due—at least in part—to perpetrators overestimating the averseness of apologizing, thus committing a forecasting error. Across two laboratory experiments and one autobiographical recall study, we demonstrate that perpetrators overestimate the averseness they will experience when apologizing compared to the averseness they experience when they actually apologize. Moreover, we show that this effect is driven by a misconstrual of the effects of an apology. Perpetrators overestimate the potentially negative effects of apologizing while simultaneously underestimating the potentially positive effects of apologizing. This forecasting error may have a negative effect on the initiation of the reconciliation process, due to perpetrators believing that apologizing is more averse than it actually is.     

Small winners and big losers: strategic party behaviour in the 2017 Dutch general election

Abstract

This article analyses party strategies during the campaign for the Dutch general election of March 2017, making use of issue-yield theory. It investigates whether parties strategically emphasise high-yield issues, by juxtaposing the issue opportunities provided by voters with parties’ issue emphasis during the campaign. More specifically, it asks whether parties strategically emphasised issues that were expected to reward them electorally. Analysing voter preferences and party campaign data, it is found that parties and most of their constituencies show high ideological consistency, that parties emphasise mostly positional issues and thus choose a conflict-mobilising strategy, and that most parties emphasise high-yield issues rather than following the general political agenda. Four small parties that won significantly behaved strategically while the social democrats – who severely lost – hardly did. The findings imply that the issue-yield framework can help to explain the election result in the fragmented Dutch multi-party context.     

The Economic Cost of March 11: Measuring the Direct Economic Cost of the Terrorist Attack on March 11, 2004 in Madrid

This article attempts to measure the direct costs that the terrorist attacks of 3/11 had on the economy of the region of Madrid. The evaluation has been made applying conservative criteria, and the results obtained have to be considered as minimum. The result indicates that the terrorist attacks caused a loss of nearly 212 million euros to the regional economy of Madrid, equivalent to 0.16 percent of the regional GDP (0.03 of the national GDP). This confirms that the immediate economic dimension of a terrorist attack such as the one of 3/11—apart from human catastrophic consequences—is relatively low.     

Does User Co-Production of Public Service Delivery Increase Satisfaction and Trust? Evidence From a Vignette Experiment

Whereas it is assumed that involving users in the delivery of public services yields more positive evaluations of those services, this study shows that levels of satisfaction and trust are not necessarily positively affected by such user co-production. An experimental vignette design among students (n = 174) is used to analyze the differences concerning trust and satisfaction between co-produced and non-co-produced public services. In some cases, the results suggest, co-production actually leads to less satisfaction and trust. This might be explained by the self-serving bias, which states that co-producers take credit for success but blame service providers for failure.     

The Party as Pariah: The Exclusion of Anti-Immigration Parties and its Effect on their Ideological Positions

During the past three decades, anti-immigration parties have emerged all over Western Europe. Some of them have been treated like any other party by their mainstream opponents and a few have even become members of governing coalitions (e.g., the Austrian FPÖ). Other such parties have been politically excluded: established parties have refrained from any cooperation with them and in some cases even refused to enter into a political debate with their politicians. This article investigates how the strategy of ostracising anti-immigration parties affects the internal dynamics within these parties. In particular, we assess whether these parties radicalise as a result of this strategy, and, conversely whether it has a moderating effect when these parties are approached more pragmatically. Our analyses, regarding ten parties at several moments in time, show that anti-immigration parties that were not ostracised became more moderate, whereas those that were treated as outcasts continued to be extremist.     

Between Continuity and Change: Ostpolitik and the Constructivist Approach Revisited

To social constructivists, West German Ostpolitik, as implemented under the social-liberal government of Chancellor Willy Brandt in the early 1970s, is an excellent example of norms and identities influencing foreign policy. According to constructivists, Ostpolitik involves a continuous social process in which decision-makers are increasingly guided by norms such as ‘peace’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘Europeanness’. However, constructivist analyses of Ostpolitik remain too abstract to answer the question why West German reunification policy was first put on an international sidetrack, before it subsequently took the initiative in international détente and caused national and international political commotion. Only when the constructivist emphasis on the influence of norms is linked to more traditional decision-making models of bureaucratic and government politics, and their focus on political interests, does it become clear that the answer lies in the dynamics of the continuous political struggle between Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD).     

Nationality swapping in the Olympic field: towards the marketization of citizenship?

Nationality swapping in sports is commonly assumed to be a rapidly expanding practice that is indicative of the marketization of citizenship. Sports are said to have become wholesale markets in which talent is being traded for citizenship. In this article, we seek to empirically explore such claims by analysing 167 athletes who have competed for two different countries in the Summer Olympic Games. It seems that most switches occurred after the 1990s. Then, following a citizenship as a claims-making approach, we introduce the work of Bourdieu so as to connect citizenship as both legal status and practice with normative claims. The analysis reveals that the practice of nationality switching is shaped by structural conditions of the Olympic field. First, a complex realm of citizenship laws and regulations produces conditions under which athletes make legitimate claims to citizenship. Second, through a mechanism of reverberative causation, prior migrations are often echoed in contemporary nationality swapping . Only a limited number of athletes acquired citizenship via the explicit market principle we call jus talenti. Claiming that instrumental nationality swapping is indicative of the marketization of citizenship obscures the complex interplay between structures of and practices within the Olympic field.     

The paradox of collective action: Linking interest aggregation and interest articulation in EU legislative lobbying

Olson's logic of collective action predicts that business interest associations face fewer collective action problems than citizen action groups. This article challenges this assumption by arguing that forming an organization comes with different collective action problems than voicing a joint policy position. This leads us to examine an important paradox: Citizen groups face challenges in establishing themselves as organizations but find it relatively easy to position themselves on policy issues, whereas the reverse is true for business associations. We study this paradox empirically based on interviews with spokespersons of interest organizations active in the European Union and find support for our hypotheses. Our findings demonstrate that citizen groups position themselves on policy issues more easily than business interests and that this competitive advantage is amplified when policy issues attract the attention of the media.