Die „Sonntagsfrage“, soziale Erwünschtheit und die AfD: Wie alternative Messmethoden der Politikwissenschaft weiterhelfen können

In Germany, the standard vote intention survey item has come under attack because it failed to correctly measure the vote share of the German party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD). We argue that alternative measurement techniques that aim to reduce social desirability bias are better suited for this task. We test three measurement techniques to forecast AfD vote share—a double list experiment, the crosswise-model randomized response technique, and the wisdom of crowds design—and compare their performance to the standard vote intention item. Our results indicate that the wisdom of crowds design is an easily implementable and promising addition to political scientists’ toolbox of survey items.     

A simple checklist,that is all it takes: a cluster randomized controlled field trial on improving the treatment of suspected terrorists by the police

Journal of Experimental Criminology - When it comes to interviewing suspected terrorists, global evidence points to harsh interrogation procedures, despite the likelihood of false positives. How...     

Probation absconders: A unique risk group?

While examination of probation violations is common in the literature, probationers who abscond from community supervision have rarely been examined. These violators are circumventing justice and may pose a serious risk to public safety. This article compares the characteristics of absconders to those of offenders who successfully completed probation and offenders revoked from probation because of other violations. Absconders and revoked probationers generally presented the least favorable risk profiles, but did not differ significantly from one another on probation conditions, “stakes in conformity,” or prior felonies—although revoked probationers had more misdemeanors and a younger age of onset for officially recorded crime. Combined with the violation behaviors of absconders while on probation, these similarities suggest a strong chance of being revoked to prison had absconders remained under supervision. Employment, recorded address changes, and lower supervision burden on offenders were among the best predictors of successfully completing probation versus absconding.     

Procedural justice,minorities, and religiosity

The current research explores six hypotheses derived from the well-known procedural justice-based model of legitimacy in two different religious groups in Israel, and adds to the model the effect of religiosity on the perceived legitimacy of rules and institutions of social control. Our results, based on data from a representative sample of 1,216 Israeli Jews and Arabs, provide general support for the hypotheses. We found that the social order is perceived as less legitimate by the Arab minority compared with the Jewish majority, and by highly religious members of the Jewish majority compared with those who are less religious.     

Risk and Trouble: Adam Smith on Profit and the Protagonists of Capitalism

To better account for deepening global inequalities, political theory could greatly enhance empirical and normative work by answering a fundamental question: What is profit? When engaging political‐economic questions, however, theorists often begin thinking from the concept of private property. This, I argue, has obscured the central role of profit as an organizing category for capitalist societies since the eighteenth century. Grounded in the dynamic and uncertain processes of production and accumulation, profit displaces the proprietary citizen and subject of natural rights and gives rise to new social protagonists, who lay claim to increasingly asymmetric rewards. In particular, the article calls attention to a dangerous contemporary sensibility, which sees profit as inherently unlimited. As a viable, robust alternative, it presents Adam Smith's idea of profit as a regular, uniform rate that acts as a productive constraint on business activity, shapes character, and safeguards against risk by widely distributing its costs.     

Overcoming the benchmark problem in estimating bias in traffic enforcement: the use of automatic traffic enforcement cameras

Objectives

The existence of bias in law enforcement can be difficult to verify or disprove, in part because of the difficulty of finding a benchmark—an objective estimate of actual offenses committed by the studied population—that can be compared with police enforcement. In the current study, we propose and test a method for examining bias in enforcement of speeding offenses.

Method

Using all speeding tickets issued in Israel in 2013–2015, we compare speeding tickets generated by stationary automatic traffic cameras, which provide an objective estimate of speed offenses, with speeding tickets issued manually by police officers, based on drivers’ ethnicity with further distribution by gender and age.

Results

Initial findings indicate that, overall, speeding tickets issued by police officers in Israel are not biased based on drivers’ ethnicity.

Conclusions

This study highlights the importance of distinguishing between overrepresentation and bias in law enforcement, which sometimes seem to be blurred in the literature.

     

A quasi-experiment testing a public participation process for designing and implementing an enforcement program among minorities

Journal of Experimental Criminology - The present study aimed at developing and empirically evaluating an innovative public participation process for designing and implementing a specially tailored...     

Introducing a dynamic framework to jointly address policy impacts on environmental and human health in a regional produce recovery and redistribution system

Regular consumption of fruits and vegetables is associated with a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and all‐cause mortality. Access to fresh produce is limited for individuals and families experiencing food insecurity. Emergency food programs, including food pantries, are important institutions for assuring access to nutritional foods for this population, including fresh produce. Produce availability at such institutions is on the rise thanks to donation, gleaning, food bank purchases, recovery programs multiscale policy interventions. These efforts also have coupled economic and environmental benefits for producers and retailers as surplus food is redirected from the waste stream, where it would otherwise produce greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. Although varied surplus produce recovery programs have been implemented around the country and the world, little modeling of potentially synergistic impacts has accompanied their implementation. Thus, there remains sparse understanding of system‐wide joint implications economically, environmentally, nutritionally, and epidemiologically. The goal of this paper is to offer a novel dynamic modeling framework capable of assessing environmental, nutritional, and health impacts of policies and programs in the food recovery and redistribution system. This unique framework serves as a scientific basis for implementing best management practices and policies to improve the sustainability of U.S. food systems.     

Transferring emotional capital as coerced discretion: Street‐level bureaucrats reconciling structural deficiencies

The discretion of street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) plays a key role in policy implementation. This study offers a new perspective on the meaning of discretion under social policy reforms, which created new structural deficiencies in the work of SLBs and have raised expectations of policy implementation without offering sufficient policy responses. Under such conditions, the discretion of SLBs should be understood as coerced, more so than as a positive element of freedom and choice. As such, SLBs are forced to employ informal practices and provide alternative resources for their clients. Findings indicate a transference of emotional resources from SLBs to clients, aimed at achieving policy outcomes of economically independent citizens, paradoxically accompanied by an awareness of powerful barriers to such conversion. The study contributes both to the understanding of discretion in policy implementation, in the context of an expanding public service gap, and to theories of emotion manifestation in public administration.