Revising Images of Public Punitiveness: Sentencing by Lay and Professional English Magistrates

England grants unusually broad responsibility for sentencing of criminal offenders to voluntary part-time lay magistrates who, like their legally trained professional colleagues, sentence a wide range of offenders. Using simulated cases, archival analyses, and observational techniques, this article compares the sentencing decisions of the lay and professional magistrates in London. The study reveals no evidence of the lay preference for more severe sentencing that is typically shown in public opinion polls. The extent to which legal training, court experience, panel decisionmaking and role within the court system can explain the relative leniency of the lay magistrates are considered Consistent with results from other studies, these findings suggests that when laypersons assign sentences to particular offenders rather than express generalized satisfaction or dissatisfaction with current sentencing practices, laypersons are no more punitive than professional judges.     

A new dawn? french women and the liberation

This article draws on extensive archival and oral sources from Britanny, Toulouse, and Paris. It will discuss a number of aspects of the Occupation and Liberation experience for French women. It will first explore the importance attributed to the fact that women eventually gained their political rights in 1944, a measure that also saw an end to the “first wave” feminist movement that had believed that suffrage would resolve the “women's condition” and herald the start of a new era for women. This article will then move into an analysis of women and Collaboration during the Occupation offering a new approach to women's political involvement during the war. It finishes by presenting an overview of women's relationship to paid employment, the area where there was perhaps the greatest unfulfilled potential for women to experience a new beginning in the post-war period.     

Judging Bias: Juror Confidence and Judicial Rulings on Challenges for Cause

The judge in a jury trial is charged with excusing prospective jurors who will not be impartial. To assess impartiality, prospective jurors are typically asked whether they can be fair. Using an experimental paradigm, we found that small changes in jurors' self‐reported confidence in their ability to be fair affected judges' decisions about bias but did not affect the judgments of either attorneys or jurors. We suggest why a judge's role and unique relationship with jurors is likely to foster a decision strategy based on reported juror confidence, and we discuss the implications of our analysis for current legal debates over jury selection practices. Unexpected patterns in our results also highlight the ways in which perceptions of impartiality are affected, in part, by the social characteristics of the observer.     

Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method

In recent years, a widespread consensus has emerged about the necessity of establishing bridges between quantitative and qualitative approaches to empirical research in political science. In this article, we discuss the use of the synthetic control method as a way to bridge the quantitative/qualitative divide in comparative politics. The synthetic control method provides a systematic way to choose comparison units in comparative case studies. This systematization opens the door to precise quantitative inference in small‐sample comparative studies, without precluding the application of qualitative approaches. Borrowing the expression from Sidney Tarrow, the synthetic control method allows researchers to put “qualitative flesh on quantitative bones.” We illustrate the main ideas behind the synthetic control method by estimating the economic impact of the 1990 German reunification on West Germany.     

The relative success of private funders and government funders in funding important science

Regression analysis is used to test the effects of funding source (and of various control variables) on the importance of the article, as measured by the number of citations that the article receives. Funding source is measured by the number of private and the number of government grants mentioned in the acknowledgements section. The importance of an article is measured by an “early” count (of citations through October 1992), and a “late” count (of citations through July 2002). Using either measure of article importance, the evidence suggests that private funders are more successful than the government at identifying important research. Jel classification D 780 . H 110 . O 310