Bad for Men,Better for Women: The Impact of Stereotypes During Negative Campaigns

In this paper, we examine whether the impact of negative advertising on citizens’ evaluations of candidates depends on the gender of the candidates. Given common gender stereotypes, we expect negative campaigning aimed at women candidates will affect citizens differently than negative campaigning against male candidates. The results of our study, derived from a survey experiment conducted on a nationwide sample of more than 700 citizens, demonstrate that negative commercials are less effective at depressing evaluations of woman candidates, compared to male candidates. The findings are consistent and strong, across a range of forces that people use to assess competing candidates (i.e., affect and trait evaluations, people’s beliefs about issues, anticipated vote choice). The tight control of the experimental design, including randomization of respondents into different conditions that vary in only one way, demonstrates that the gender of the candidate influences people’s reactions to different types of negative commercials.

Breaking the Silence: Gender Mainstreaming and the Composition of the European Court of Justice

Why has it taken so long for member states to appoint women to the Court of Justice? Despite having won relatively significant policy instruments for equal treatment at work and high levels of legislative representation, women in the European Union have been slow to extend the demand for gender mainstreaming to courts. Prior to 1999, the Court of Justice had had one woman member until Ireland appointed Fidelma Macken in late 1999, and Germany appointed Ninon Colneric and Austria appointed Christine Stix-Hackl Advocate General in 2000.The 1995 U.N. meeting in Beijing was a catalyst for the demand for balanced participation of women and men in decision-making processes within the E.U., and it coincided with Sweden, Finland and Austria joining and championing the cause of gender equality. In 1999, the Commission published a report on women in the judiciary and women lawyers began to organize across Europe. After tracing the appointment process, I review the European Parliament's role in championing women on the Court and consider recent developments. Courts, particularly supranational and federal courts, are representative institutions even if their representative function differs from legislatures. Non-merit factors have always been a factor in judicial appointments and thus the demand for women on the bench is not a terrible deviation from merit. An all male bench is no longer legitimate. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Party composition in the American states: Clarifying concepts and explaining changes in partisanship since the 1950s

Students of state politics have long been interested in the partisanship and the degree of interparty competition in the American states. This has led to numerous attempts to quantify state-level partisanship and competition, the most significant by Ranney (1965). Interestingly, however, scholars have never specified clearly the relationship between these two concepts as measured by the Ranney index. This research attempts to do just that and reveals that the two are different measures which are related systematically. More important, understanding changes in a state's partisanship is determined to be crucial to understanding changes in its level of two-party competition. As such, in order to explain changes in partisanship and competition across the American states from the 1950s to the 1970s, we focus on accounting for changes in partisanship. To this end, changes in aggregate demographic variables account very well for states' movement along the Ranney index over the last 3 decades.The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order and imply that this paper is in every way a collaborative enterprise.     

An experimental trial of a dog-training program in a juvenile detention center

Journal of Experimental Criminology - This research examines the effect of a dog-training program among juveniles ordered to a county juvenile detention facility in a large, Midwestern city. A...     

Hotbed of Radicalization or Something Else?: An Ethnographic Exploration of a Muslim Neighborhood in Ceuta

A series of police raids in Príncipe Alfonso, a Muslim neighborhood located in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, “confirmed” law enforcement officers' worst fears: the barrio, long considered a hotbed of Islamist radicalization, had succumbed to the influence of extremists, making Spain more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. However, the meager results of the raids, as well as delays in the ensuing criminal investigation, raised troubling questions about the alleged terrorist plot and outsiders' perceptions of the Muslim community. Seeking answers to these questions, I conducted ethnographic field work in Príncipe shortly after the raids, interviewing residents, activists, and officials and observing the community at length. The community I experienced did not match the neighborhood I had read about. This article, the first ethnographic study of Ceuta to focus on radicalization, challenges conventional understandings of Príncipe Alfonso and highlights the value of ethnographic field work in terrorism studies.     

THE INFORMATION AGE: IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. AGRICULTURE

The U.S. agricultural system is on the verge of a technological revolution that will involve biotechnology and computer-based information technology. As the U.S. economy is being transformed through the growing computerelectronics industry, agricultural applications of computer technology, which include the microcomputer and videotex information retrieval networks, are becoming established agricultural inputs. The emergence of agriculture into the Information Age promises to have significant impacts on the economic and social welfare of the farmer as well as rural banking and postal systems, and agrimarketing and agriinput firms. A development which will shape the impact of information technology is the growing trend toward privatizing information which could result in agricultural information being transformed into a purchased agricultural input. This promises to undermine many public agricultural service activities. The penetration of information technology in agriculture along with the privatization of agricultural information has the potential of accelerating the forces which are consolidating farms and changing the face of agriculture.     

Variability in Citizens’ Reactions to Different Types of Negative Campaigns

Do negative advertisements lower voters’ evaluations of the targeted candidate? We theorize that there is much to be gained by examining the variance in the content and tone of negative campaign messages and the variance in voters’ sensitivity to negative political rhetoric. We employ data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to investigate the impact of negative campaigning in U.S. Senate campaigns. We sampled 1,045 respondents in 21 of the 28 U.S. Senate races featuring a majority party incumbent and challenger. In addition to the survey data, we collected contextual data regarding the political advertisements aired during the campaigns and the news coverage of these campaigns in state newspapers. The evidence suggests that the impact of negative information is multifaceted, and under some circumstances, substantial. We find that uncivil and relevant negative messages are the most powerful, especially for people with less tolerance for negative political rhetoric.