Female and Minority Judicial Nominees: President's Delight and Senators' Dismay?

Female and minority judicial nominations take longer and are less likely to be confirmed, yet presidents eagerly seek such nominations. I account for this puzzle by building a model in which senators face costs for opposing female and minority nominees. I predict that such nominations are more likely when the gridlock interval is large. Using appellate nominations from 1977 to 2004, I find that Republican presidents are more likely to pursue these nominations during periods of high gridlock. Furthermore, accounting for the gridlock interval erases the differences in confirmation duration and success between female/minority nominees and white male nominees.     

Presidents, Political Regimes, and Contentious Supreme Court Nominations: A Historical Institutional Model

Before the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, scholars consistently pointed to the presence of divided government as an underlying reason for conflict in the confirmation process for U.S. Supreme Court nominees. However, the importance of party unity and coalition-building appointments—each of which highlights the role of the president in the process—should not be underestimated in these confirmation battles. Moreover, an examination of the sixty twentieth-century nominations reveals that a presidency-focused political regimes model provides significant explanatory force for understanding when and what types of nominees are likely to face the most resistance in the Senate. It does so by incorporating Stephen Skowronek's analytical framework for understanding presidential authority to explain how and why different periods of political time affect presidential attempts to shape the U.S. Supreme Court through appointments. In turn, the model places recent conflict in the confirmation process in historical context.     

State‐Sponsored Homophobia and the Denial of the Right of Assembly in Central and Eastern Europe: The “Boomerang” and the “Ricochet” between European Organizations and Civil Society to Uphold Human Rights

State‐sponsored homophobia emerged in certain Central and Eastern European states in the past decade, with the denial of the right of assembly for gay pride marches. However, more recently there has been progress in the recognition of the fundamental democratic right of assembly. What accounts for this progress in fulfilling commitments enshrined in the European human rights treaties? This article proposes that the response of European organizations, in particular the Council of Europe and the European Union, as well as human rights nongovernmental organizations working in collaboration with local civil society organizations, have been critical to this progress. Previous literature has described a “boomerang” effect, in which aggrieved citizens use transnational activist networks to publicize human rights violations and put pressure on governments to fulfill their international legal commitments. To understand the functioning and effectiveness of the “boomerang” we introduce the concept of the “ricochet”—a process in which various institutions and civil society rapidly exchange information as well as political and legal argumentation. We posit that the ricochet is an integral process in the development of a European consensus on the human rights recognized by the European Court of Human Rights. Four cases have been selected for empirical analysis: Poland, Latvia, Serbia, and Russia. In analyzing the ricochet of information and argumentation between institutions and civil society, we find the consensus has been framed around the right of assembly, instead of the more contested area of human rights and sexual orientation.     

Retrospective Congressional Oversight and the Dynamics of Legislative Influence over the Bureaucracy

Research stresses that congressional committees increase their oversight of the bureaucracy during divided government. We extend this research by developing an explanation, rooted in a more dynamic view of policymaking, for why Congress would sometimes conduct vigorous oversight under unified control as well. In short, committees seem to engage in what we call “retrospective oversight” and take advantage of newly friendly executive administration to refocus existing policy made under a past opposition president. We assess our perspective using two separate sources of data on oversight hearings spanning more than 60 years and find support for our claims regarding retrospective oversight.     

“Bending” Evidence for a Cause: Scholar‐Advocacy Bias in Family Law

There are a number of salient public policy issues in the family law field that have invoked impassioned policy debates on a recurrent basis. In the absence of a body of research to address these critical concerns, advocates under the guise of social science scholarship have exacerbated the confusion and controversy by construing the scant available research evidence to justify their own ends, without regard to the relevance, quality, utility, and limitations of the studies. This is one of two articles on this problem that we have named “scholar‐advocacy bias.” In this article, we discuss the difference between truth in social science and truth in law. We identify common ways in which social science researchers and reviewers of research—wittingly or unwittingly—can become advocates for ideological positions and social policies at the expense of being balanced reporters of research evidence as illustrated by recent debates about overnight parenting of infants and toddlers. We also consider how adherence to established scientific principles and methods prevents the misuse of research in this way.     

From deuteronomy to deniability: A historical perlustration on white-collar crime

The history of social efforts to deal with offenses now categorized as white-collar crime shows a struggle for justice and equity with roots deep in the past. This paper uses a triad of English marketing offenses—forestalling, regrating, and engrossing—to epitomize the legal background of efforts to control the abuse of commercial power. The paper notes the spurious ancestry of the doctrine of caveat emptor, and offers explanations for the decline and the subsequent revival of crusades against the exploitation of consumers by business forces. Scholarly work on white-collar crime is placed in this historical context, followed by a general appraisal of the nature of changes over time—from the dire biblical prophecies in Deuteronomy to the bland explanations of “plausible deniability” during the recent Iran-Contra hearings before the U.S. Congress.     

Confronting Government After Welfare Reform: Moralists, Reformers, and Narratives of (Ir)responsibility at Administrative Fair Hearings

Almost 40 years ago, the Supreme Court, in the landmark case Goldberg v. Kelly (1970) , provided welfare participants with a potentially potent tool for challenging the government welfare bureaucracy by requiring pre-termination hearings before welfare benefits were discontinued or reduced. In 1996, with the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) , the rights talk of Kelly was officially replaced with the discourse of individual responsibility. Using observational data of administrative hearings and interviews with administrative law judges and appellants, this study explores how fair hearings have been affected by this official reconceptualization of rights. I find that hearings are not a panacea for challenging the more punitive aspects of welfare reform, but nor are they devoid of the possibility of justice. While hearings can replicate in style and substance the inequities, rigid adherence to rules, and moral judgments that characterize welfare relationships under the PRWORA, they can also be used as a mechanism for creating counternarratives to the dominant discourse about welfare. This study identifies two types of judges—moralist judges and reformer judges—and examines how their differing approaches determine which narrative emerges in the hearing room.     

Rules,Institutions, Transformations. Considerations on the “Evolution of Law” Paradigm

The article's main objective is to test the merits of the evolutionary paradigm as it has been applied first to social phenomena and then more specifically to the legal domain. In a preliminary move, a set of the available concepts of law is worked out. A discussion of the idea of evolution and of its use in the social sciences follows. Functionalism and systems theory are scrutinized, with a close eye to the new doctrine of “autopoiesis.” Once an institutional and normative concept of law is agreed upon, attempts to introduce an “evolutionary” paradigm are deemed—the article contends—to be unfruitful. The article concludes that, if law needs a metaphysics, it should be one which allows for change, transformation and the emergence of the radically new. A social universe without gaps, all possible forms of which are determined from the beginning, will end up as the opposite of what we are used to considering as the practice of law.     

When “Best Practices” Win,Employees Lose: Symbolic Compliance and Judicial Inference in Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Cases

This article provides a new account of employers' advantages over employees in federal employment discrimination cases. We analyze the effects of judicial deference, in which judges use institutionalized employment structures to infer nondiscrimination without scrutinizing those structures in any meaningful way. Using logistic regression to analyze a representative sample of judicial opinions in federal EEO cases during the first thirty‐five years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, we find that when judges uncritically use the presence of organizational structures to reason about whether discrimination occurred, employers are much more likely to prevail. This pattern is especially pronounced in opinions written by liberal judges. In light of these findings, we offer recommendations for judges, lawyers, and policy makers—including legal academics—who seek to improve the accuracy and efficacy of employment discrimination adjudications.     

Sore Loser Laws and Congressional Polarization

To enhance explanations for party polarization in the U.S. Congress, we focus on an unappreciated legal structure known as the sore loser law. By restricting candidates who lose partisan primaries from subsequently appearing on the general election ballot as independents or as nominees of other parties, these laws give greater control over ballot access to the party bases, thus producing more extreme major party nominees. Using several different measures of candidate and legislator ideology, we find that sore loser laws account for as much as a tenth of the ideological divide between the major parties.     

THE SIZE OF THE “CRIMINAL POPULATION”: THE PREVALENCE AND INCIDENCE OF ADULT ARREST*

The recent emphasis in criminological theory and research on “chronic offenders” assumes that involvement in crime is concentrated among a small group of offenders rather than being widespread in the population. To address this question, this study employs a longitudinal data base on criminal histories to estimate the prevalence of arrest—defined as the proportion of a population ever arrested—and the incidence of arrest—defined as the number of arrests incurred by those ever arrested—for an age cohort of young adults between the ages of 18 and 29. The results show that being arrested is a relatively common experience for young adults: nearly one-quarter of the entire cohort and one-third of the males in the cohort were arrested at least once. One of six males and two of five black males were arrested for an index offense. The data on incidence reveal the presence of a subset of “chronic offenders” who are responsible for a disproportionate number of arrests. However, defined in terms of three or more arrests for any offense, their numbers are smaller, but the data suggest it may be difficult to distinguish “chronic offenders” from “one-time” offenders because 60% do not recidivate. These findings suggest that the current preoccupation with chronic offenders may obscure the broader social structural factors that cause very large segments of the population to come into conflict with the law.     

“Deliberative Disagreement” in U.S. Health Policy Committee Hearings

The exchange of rationales among debate participants is necessary for legitimacy in a deliberative democracy. I show that witnesses in congressional committee hearings tend to use falsifiable rationales when they encounter moderate levels of disagreement and shift to nonfalsifiable rationales when they encounter extreme disagreement. I use data from a coding of hearings testimony on the Medicare program, held between 1990 and 2003, as well as from a survey of participating witnesses measuring their perceptions of disagreement at the hearing. The results identify conditions that enhance falsifiable discourse and help to establish the empirical grounding deliberative democratic theory.     

International Human Rights Law, Global Economic Reforms, and Child Survival and Development Rights Outcomes

Are recent trends in international law supporting child rights and promoting neoliberal economic reforms complementary or contradictory? To answer this question, we identify the component parts of child rights mobilization, recent global economic reforms, and child rights outcomes to theorize the particular relationships among them. Focusing on child survival and development rights in 99 poor and middle‐income countries from 1983 to 2001, we find that countries' acquiescence to established international law concerning economic rights influences the successful implementation of most of these rights, while the ratification of child rights treaties does not show an effect during the period studied. National links to child rights nongovernmental organizations are also associated with improved child rights outcomes, as is being selected to receive a loan from the World Bank (for reducing child labor and increasing immunizations). We find weak support for the hypothesis that the implementation of loan conditionalities is more deleterious for rights that are costlier to implement. We also find that achieving the goal of neoliberal economic reforms—trade openness—results in less successful implementation of most child rights outcomes considered. Finally, in a related analysis, we find that the ratification of child rights treaties, as well as the adoption and implementation of structural adjustment agreements, enhances the presence of child‐related organizations within countries.     

Police culture,individualism, and community policing: Evidence from two police departments

According to the conventional wisdom, the police culture consists of a set of values, attitudes, and norms that are widely shared among officers, who find in the culture a way to cope with the strains of their working environment. Some research implies that the conventional wisdom is overdrawn, and recent research has begun to question it more directly. Changes in the composition (i.e., the race, sex, and education) of police personnel, as well as philosophical and organizational changes associated with community policing, could be expected to further fragment police culture and to shift the distribution of police attitudes. Here we examine variation in outlooks that, according to conventional wisdom, are part of the police culture, using survey data collected in two police departments. We also examine the relationships between these outlooks and characteristics of officers—sex, race, education, length of service, community-policing training, and community-policing specialist assignment—that are associated with the changes in policing. We find that officers' outlooks do not conform to the pattern that we would expect on the basis of conventional wisdom. We also find that the variation in officers' occupational attitudes is not patterned to a great extent by their characteristics. We conclude with directions for future research on police attitudes.     

Matching Judicial Supervision to Clients' Risk Status in Drug Court

This article reports outcomes from a program of experimental research evaluating the risk principle in drug courts. Prior studies revealed that participants who were high risk and had (a) antisocial personality disorder or (b) a prior history of drug abuse treatment performed better in drug court when scheduled to attend biweekly judicial status hearings in court. In contrast, participants who were low risk performed equivalently regardless of the court hearings schedule. This study prospectively matches drug court clients to the optimal schedule of court hearings based on an assessment of their risk status and compares outcomes to clients randomly assigned to the standard hearings schedule. Results confirmed that participants who were high risk and matched to biweekly hearings had better during-treatment outcomes than participants assigned to status hearings as usual. These findings provide confirmation of the risk principle in drug courts and yield practical information for enhancing the efficacy and cost-efficiency of drug courts.     

Making social media an instrument of democracy

In recent years, the responsibility of social media platforms towards their users and society at large has become a major political issue. However, the regulatory responses to the crisis of social media are still mostly considered unsatisfactory, as demonstrated by the widespread criticism of the German Network Enforcement Act of 2017. This article compares the current constitutional discourse on social media regulation with the debates that accompanied the last major transformation of the media landscape: the rise of broadcasting. While we certainly do not find a roadmap for social media regulation in the past, the key concept of the broadcasting discourse—the idea of media as a sphere of ‘institutional freedom’—can be applied to the challenges of today and can be used to strengthen the democratic function of social media.     

BARS,BLOCKS, AND CRIMES REVISITED: LINKING THE THEORY OF ROUTINE ACTIVITIES TO THE EMPIRICISM OF “HOT SPOTS”*

Anticipating recent developments in routine activities theory, Roncek and Bell (1981) found that bars and taverns had detrimental effects on crime on residential city blocks in Cleveland for 1970. We replicate and extend their work by examining the effects of recreational liquor establishments (i.e., taverns and cocktail lounges) on crime from 1979 to 1981 on Cleveland's residential city blocks. The number of such businesses on residential city blocks has positive and statistically significant effects on the amount of crime. The effects on crime are compounded when the businesses are located in areas with physical characteristics that are associated with more anonymity and lower guardianship. Our results reaffirm the value of new developments in routine activities theory that now stress the importance of facilities. They also extend recent work attempting to identify and analyze “hot spots” of crime.     

Shaping the path to inventive activity: the role of past experience in R&D alliances

In this paper, we investigate a recurrent organizational event—R&D strategic alliances—and analyze its multidimensional effect on inventive activity; in particular, we examine the quality of the inventive process outcome. In so doing, we address the still-unresolved issue of the impact of past experience in explaining performance differences between firms in the realm of alliance inventiveness. Our results offer new insights concerning the crucial drivers of invention quality and technological breakthroughs. As expected, results suggest that—in the area of R&D—alliances formed by experienced partners are more likely to produce inventions that effectively synthesize technological knowledge from more diverse domains. In fact, experienced alliance partners are more likely to generate useful inventions with a greater innovative impact on others’ subsequent inventions—knowledge that can be built upon. Surprisingly, results are indeterminate with regard to whether innovation via R&D alliance increases invention’s degree of applicability across diverse scientific and technological fields that might cite its patent.     

REASSESSING TRENDS IN BLACK VIOLENT CRIME, 1980–2008: SORTING OUT THE “HISPANIC EFFECT” IN UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS ARRESTS,NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY OFFENDER ESTIMATES,AND U.S. PRISONER COUNTS*

Recent studies suggest a decline in the relative Black effect on violent crime in recent decades and interpret this decline as resulting from greater upward mobility among African Americans during the past several decades. However, other assessments of racial stratification in American society suggest at least as much durability as change in Black social mobility since the 1980s. Our goal is to assess how patterns of racial disparity in violent crime and incarceration have changed from 1980 to 2008. We argue that prior studies showing a shrinking Black share of violent crime might be in error because of reliance on White and Black national crime statistics that are confounded with Hispanic offenders, whose numbers have been increasing rapidly and whose violence rates are higher than that of Whites but lower than that of Blacks. Using 1980–2008 California and New York arrest data to adjust for this “Hispanic effect” in national Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data, we assess whether the observed national decline in racial disparities in violent crime is an artifact of the growth in Hispanic populations and offenders. Results suggest that little overall change has occurred in the Black share of violent offending in both UCR and NCVS estimates during the last 30 years. In addition, racial imbalances in arrest versus incarceration levels across the index violent crimes are both small and comparably sized across the study period. We conclude by discussing the consistency of these findings with trends in economic and social integration of Blacks in American society during the past 50 years.     

Primetime Dispute Resolution: Reality TV Mediation Shows in China's “Harmonious Society”

Through a case study of reality TV mediation shows, this article joins the debate about the recent promotion of formal and informal mediation by the Chinese government, what some scholars have called a “turn against law” (Minzner 2011). We identify three converging reasons for the sudden popularity of mediation shows on Chinese primetime television: (1) the desire of TV producers to commercially exploit interpersonal conflicts without fanning the flames of social instability; (2) the demands of official censors for TV programming promoting a “harmonious society”; and (3) the requirement for courts and other government institutions to publicly demonstrate their support for mediation as the most “appropriate” method for resolving interpersonal and neighborhood disputes. Cases drawn from two top‐rated mediation shows demonstrate how they privilege morality and “human feeling” (ganqing) over narrow application of the law. Such shows could be viewed merely as a form of propaganda, what Nader has called a “harmony ideology”—an attempt by the government to suppress the legitimate expression of social conflict. Yet while recognizing that further political, social, and legal reforms are necessary to address the root causes of social conflict in China, we conclude that TV mediation shows can help to educate viewers about the benefits and drawbacks of mediation for resolving certain narrow kinds of domestic and neighborhood disputes.