What's different about truants? A comparison study of eighth-graders

Differences and similarities between 25 eighth-grade truants and 25 nontruants-matched for age, grade, gender, and ethnicity-were explored on four dimensions: family variables, friendship patterns and interests, behavior and attitudes toward school, and cognitive factors including academic ability and achievement. The major differences were in school behavior, attitudes, academic ability, and achievement. The most frequent reasons given for truancy were boredom and dislike of school and teachers. Truancy was associated with highly disruptive classroom behavior. The salience of school variables suggests that truancy prevention and intervention strategies should include improved course content, teaching, and school climate. The necessity of having a comparison group is stressed in order to distinguish characteristics of normal adolescent development from those associated with maladjustment.Received Ph.D. from University of California, Davis. Current interests are early adolescents' development and school environment.     

Translating Justice: The International Organization of Constitutional Courts

What is the international organization of national constitutional courts? This article develops a theoretical framework to analyze this question and tests it empirically with original data of translated opinions. Justices of different nations form an emerging epistemic community, which is congealed due to common practices as well as to competition and selectiveness throughout the judicial career. Opinions translated into English as the lingua franca are pivotal for communication within this epistemic community. Through engaging in a transnational judicial dialogue, and particularly as far as this dialogue concerns legal citations, this community uses international law as a key guide to finding equilibrium solutions at national and international levels. Five sources of international law overwhelmingly dominate. In addition, we find evidence in the collegial game within the different courts for the existence of a transnational epistemic community of Supreme Court justices.     

Has the gender gap in voter turnout really disappeared?

According to conventional wisdom, the traditional gender gap in voting has disappeared or even reversed in most established democracies. Drawing on the existing literature on differences between the sexes in political engagement and on pioneering voter turnout theories, this article questions the conventional assumption and hypothesises that women still participate at a lower rate in less important elections. It systematically tests this hypothesis by exploring the impact of gender on voter turnout in different electoral arenas. The empirical analyses of two cross-national datasets (Making Electoral Democracy Work and the European Election Study) demonstrate that although there is generally no gender gap in first-order elections, women tend to vote less than men in second-order contests. This reflects lower levels of interest in politics among women and their lower levels of knowledge about politics when it comes to second-order elections.