The Role of EU Internal Policies in Implementing Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Options to Achieve Kyoto Targets

This paper reviews the role of internal European Union (EU) policies and measures in implementing the target for greenhouse gas mitigation in the Kyoto Protocol. It starts with a discussion of the EU Burden Sharing Agreement, which distributes the target between Member States. This leads to a review of the appropriate level of implementation of policies, i.e. at the EU level or Member State level. There is a role for the flexible mechanisms of the Protocol, particularly emission permit trading, in complementing Member State policies at the EU level. The implementation is to be done against the background of three major factors which may have an important bearing on the policies: the probable long-term requirement of substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions a changing structure of energy markets, following liberalisation of the gas and electricity markets EU enlargement to include economies in transition with the potential for further substantial reductions in emissions.The paper concludes with a discussion of ancillary benefits of the policies that may be substantial and a summary of the position as regards the "unfinished business" of the Protocol to be discussed at the Conference of the Parties in the Hague in November 2000.     

The impact of extralegal factors on perceived credibility of child victims of sexual assault

ABSTRACT

The study examined the impact of victim age, victim gender, and perpetrator gender, across five domains of witness credibility: accuracy, believability, competency, reliability and truthfulness. The study also investigated which of these sub-constructs is the best predictor of guilt. 231 adult lay-people completed a survey measuring perceived credibility. Victim age emerged as having the most consistent effect, with the 5- and 10-year-old victims rated as more credible than the 15-year-old victim. Despite their legal incapacity to consent to sex, 15-year-old victims appear to be viewed as ‘quasi-adults’. Victims were rated as more accurate and truthful when the defendant was male compared to when the defendant was female. This may be due to the availability heuristic, as cases involving female defendants are less common. A significant main effect for victim gender was found for the competency sub-construct, such that males were rated as more competent than females. This result suggests that gendered attitudes and stereotypes may begin in childhood and extend to complainants of sexual assault. Main effects for accuracy and truthfulness, were qualified by three-way interaction effects. The five-factor model of perceived credibility accounted for 42% of variance in guilt perceptions, with truthfulness emerging as the strongest predictor of guilt.     

To Participate or Not to Participate: The Link Between Survey Participation, Electoral Participation, and Political Interest

Survey participation, electoral participation, and politicalinterest have been given wide attention in the research literature,but no one so far has combined these three variables in onemodel. Taking the social isolation-hypothesis as our startingpoint, we developed a model with one factor, social involvement,as the common factor underlying these three types of participation.We reviewed the literature and concluded that we had to includea second underlying factor: attachment to society. Using a newdata set, gathered on the occasion of the 1998 Dutch nationalelections and including validated voter turnout measures, wewere able to test the model. After making some adaptions, wefound a model with a satisfactory fit. The results show that,by including social involvement and attachment to society asmediating variables, we can reach much higher levels of explainedvariances of survey and electoral participation than we canwith traditional models. The results also add to our understandingof the relationship between survey and electoral participationand political interest.