Parents,Peers, Perceived Risk of Harm,and the Neighborhood: Contextualizing Key Influences on Adolescent Substance Use

Recent research has affirmed the need to examine contextual influences on adolescent substance use in a multilevel framework. This study examined the role of neighborhood opportunities for substance use in promoting adolescent substance use. Data came from two components of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods: the Longitudinal Cohort Study, consisting of interviews with youth and their primary caregivers across three waves of data with an average span of 4.5 years; and a Community Survey of neighborhood residents. Analysis used an Item-Response Theory-based statistical approach on 6556 substance use item responses from 1639 youth (49.0 % female) within 80 neighborhoods to assess the extent to which neighborhood opportunities for substance use had direct and indirect effects on adolescent substance use. Neither direct nor mediated effects of neighborhood opportunities for substance use on adolescent substance use were detected. But, analyses revealed moderating effects such that higher levels of neighborhood opportunities for substance use: (1) amplified the detrimental effects of parental substance use and peer substance use on youth substance use; and (2) attenuated the protective effect of adolescents’ perceived harm of substance use on adolescent substance use. The results suggest that the ways in which neighborhood characteristics impact adolescent behavior are nuanced. Rather than impact individual-level outcomes directly, neighborhood context may be particularly relevant by conditioning the effects of salient individual-level risk and protective factors for substance use.     

The limits of market power in shaping international regulatory cooperation: path dependence and loss avoidance in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations

What factors shape the ability of the United States to negotiate international regulatory cooperation? This paper discusses three theoretical approaches that help to explain the potential for regulatory change – market power, historical institutionalism, and loss avoidance – and applies them to the negotiation of regulatory issues in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It seeks to understand why the regulatory disciplines in some TPP chapters were more rigorous than those in other chapters. Focusing on case-studies of the chapters on state-owned enterprises and regulatory coherence, the paper argues that the market power of the United States is more likely to secure stronger regulatory disciplines when there is: (1) a strong loss avoidance coalition in the USA pushing for change, and (2) a weakly institutionalized regulatory framework among parties in a given issue area that makes path dependence less important.     

Fighting to close the School of the Americas: Unintended consequences of successful activism

This article examines the structural and institutional changes that have occurred since the controversial United States School of the Americas (SOA) closed and its successor, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), opened in 2001. Placing these changes within a constructivist framework, the article uses the school as a case study to argue that human rights norm diffusion has both increased the amount of human rights in the curriculum and put the school in a much stronger institutional position than it had been. Human rights activists had successfully prompted change, but did not achieve their goal of closing the school. This article contributes to the literature by demonstrating how ideas about human rights can have important and lasting effects, but not always in ways that are either predictable or desirable for the political activists who spark them.     

Do White In-group Processes Matter,Too? White Racial Identity and Support for Black Political Candidates

Scholars find that negative evaluations of Blacks lead Whites to vote against Black political candidates. However, can an in-group psychological process have the same effect? We consider White racial identity to be a strong candidate for such a process. We argue that the mere presence of a Black candidate cues the identity, reducing support for these candidates among Whites. We test this hypothesis on vote choice in seven instances. Five of them involve simple vote choice models: the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections, and three elections in 2010: The Massachusetts Gubernatorial election, Black candidates for the US House, and Black candidates for the US Senate. The other two are tests of the notion that White racial identity reduced President Obama’s approval, thus reducing support for all Democratic Congressional candidates in the 2010 Midterm and 2012 Congressional elections. We find support for these notions in all seven cases, across these seven elections, using four different survey research datasets, and four different measures of White identity. Comparisons with other presidential elections show that White identity did not significantly affect mono-racial elections. Furthermore, we find the White identity and racial resentment results to be very similar in terms of their robustness and apparent effect sizes. This indicates in-group evaluations, and those that focus on out-groups, operate independently of one another.     

Can Political Participation Prevent Crime? Results from a Field Experiment About Citizenship,Participation, and Criminality

Democratic theory and prior empirical work support the view that political participation, by promoting social integration and pro-social attitudes, reduces one’s propensity for anti-social behavior, such as committing crimes. Previous investigations examine observational data, which are vulnerable to bias if omitted factors affect both propensity to participate and risk of criminality or their reports. A field experiment encouraging 552,525 subjects aged 18–20 to register and vote confirms previous observational findings of the negative association between participation and subsequent criminality. However, comparing randomly formed treatment and control groups reveals that the intervention increased participation but did not reduce subsequent criminality. Our results suggest that while participation is correlated with criminality, it exerts no causal effect on subsequent criminal behavior.     

Confidentiality and Privilege for Family and Child Protection Mediation: A Roadmap for Navigating the Innovation,Inconsistency and Confusion

This article will identify the inconsistency and confusion in mediation regarding the definition of mediation, the role of the mediator, and the difference between mediation confidentiality and privilege. Further, it will discuss the confusion and inconsistency in the protection of mediation communication, specifically regarding the definition of mediation communication, the time frame for protected communication, waiver of the protections and exceptions to protected mediation communication. It will provide a roadmap and fact pattern for determining whether mediation communications are protected and if so, the protection they are afforded. Lastly, it will offer recommendations so parties, professionals and the courts may better understand and reap the benefits of mediation.     

Housing prices and wealth inequality in Western Europe

Abstract

Comparative political economy (CPE) has robustly examined the political and institutional determinants of income inequality. However, the study of wealth, which is more unequally distributed than income, has been largely understudied within CPE. Using new data from the World Income Database (WID), this article examines how economic, political and institutional dynamics shape wealth-to-income ratios within Western European and OECD countries. It is found that the political and institutional determinants that affect income inequality have no short- or long-run effects on the wealth-to-income ratio. Rather, the rise in wealth-to-income ratios is driven by rising housing prices, as well as price changes in other financial assets, not home ownership or national saving rates. The article concludes by examining how the changing dynamics of housing prices and wealth inequality will increasingly shape intergenerational – and associated class-based – political conflict in Western Europe.     

Do Means of Program Delivery and Distributional Consequences Affect Policy Support? Experimental Evidence About the Sources of Citizens’ Policy Opinions

Political Behavior - Recent scholarship argues that citizens’ support for specific government programs in the United States is affected by the means through which benefits are delivered as...