(In)Visibility and the Display of Gendered Desire: Masculinity in Mainstream Soft‐ and Hardcore Pornography

This article discusses different features of heterosexual soft‐ and hardcore pornography from the perspective of heterosexual masculinity and (in)visibility. It examines the embodiment of sexuality through the female body in lads' softcore magazines and the position of the phallus and the male body in some hardcore magazines and films. The article takes its startingpoint from notions of the problematic relationship between the depiction of the male body and desire, arguing that different visual techniques are used in sexual settings in order to maintain the status of the male (primarily white) body and the penis as being particular and distinct from other bodies.     

Like father,like son? Power and influence across two Gnassingbé presidencies in Togo

In personalized authoritarian systems, the death of a leader poses a serious challenge to regime survival. Togo, however, belongs to a small number of countries in which regime collapse has been avoided by the transfer of power to the deceased ruler’s son. But can the son simply pick up where the father left off? Combining a theoretically guided single case study with statistical network analysis, this article argues that hereditary succession involves both changes and continuities. While Gnassingbé Eyadema’s rule rested on repression, patronage, and a bizarre leadership cult, his son Faure Gnassingbé has partly adapted and reformulated these strategies. The quantitative part of the article is based on a novel data set that contains information on the biographical characteristics and interaction patterns of the deputies in the Togolese parliament. Using exponential random graph models (ERGMs), the article shows that people who have held important positions in the past or belong to the president’s ethnic group still play a significant role in the regime elite. The article not only presents detailed insights on a so far under-researched country, but also contributes to the wider literature by showing how mixed-method designs can further our understanding of authoritarian regimes.     

Water privatization,hegemony and civil society: What Motivates Individuals to Protest About Water Privatization?

The article takes the case of protest against water privatization in Ireland to show that protestors with high levels of instrumental motivation as opposed to ideological motivation are more likely to protest. In order to explain this we uniquely combine Klandermans’ social psychology of protest with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. By bridging these two bodies of theory, we provide an interdisciplinary account of the reason why protestors serve to uphold the exact power structures they intend to challenge. We argue that for water movements to be successful they must focus equally on both their instrumental and ideological motivations to ensure that power structures are confronted. This would enable movements to devise a coherent counter-hegemonic discourse, which is essential to contest the dominant global hegemony of water marketization.     

Soziale Herkunft, politische Sozialisation und Wählen im Lebensverlauf

In this paper the influence of social origin as well as both the political communication and the religious education in the family on the voting behaviour in the life course have been investigated. Furthermore, we investigate the intergenerational transmission of parental party identification and the duration of its impact on the children’s voting patterns. For the empirical analyses, retrospective longitudinal data are employed. The empirical results confirm the significant impact of the social origin, the religious education, and the parental party identification on voting. However, their impact decreases in the later stages of the life cycle. Furthermore, the intergenerational reproduction of parental party identification has decreased significantly over consecutive generations.     

Confinement as a two‐stage turning point: Do changes in identity or social structure predict subsequent changes in criminal activity?*

Scholars frequently characterize incarceration as a possible turning point in criminal activity. This implies a two‐stage process: 1) change in life‐course mechanisms around confinement and reentry result in 2) subsequent change in criminal activity relative to preconfinement. Following this model, we examine change in criminal activity, criminal identity, and social/structural challenges using data from the Prison Project, a cohort of adult males with short‐term confinement in the Netherlands in 2010–2011. Results of a novel test for within‐individual change in arrests from preconfinement to post‐reentry show that most individuals are stable—yet there is a substantial group who go down meaningfully and a much smaller group who go up. Even though changes in criminal identity from the intervening period do not predict these change groups, increases in social/structural challenges predict those who go up in criminal activity. We build from prior work on desistance and reentry, contrasting our findings and highlighting the unique insight gained from, as well as challenges of, measuring individual change within our two‐stage turning point model. Although life‐course mechanisms often correspond with changes in criminal activity concurrently, identifying individual changes that are predictors of subsequent shifts in criminal offending remains elusive.     

The Reliability of Chronological Age Determination by Means of Mandibular Third Molar Development in Subjects in Croatia*

Abstract: The aim of this study was to determine the development of the mandibular third molar and its relation to chronological age. The evaluated material consisted of 979 orthopantomograms of patients of Croatian Caucasian origin aged between 5.7 and 14.6 years. Third molar developmental stages were evaluated according to the stages proposed by Nolla. The frequencies of different stages of mineralization and the mean value of the mineralization of the mandibular third molars with regard to age, gender, and size of the mandible were determined and the coefficient of correlation determined between the age of the subject and the stage of development of the mandibular molars. Statistically significant correlation was determined between mineralization of the mandibular third molar and chronological age of the subjects (boys, mandibular left third molar r = 0.779, right third molar r = 0.793; girls, mandibular left third molar r = 0.746, right third molar r = 0.725). It can be concluded that the accuracy of age estimation based on Nolla’s method is applicable for Croatian children.