Candidate Qualities through a Partisan Lens: A Theory of Trait Ownership

Using Petrocik's (1996) theory of issue ownership as a point of departure, I develop and test a theory of "trait ownership" that provides an explanation for the origins of candidate trait perceptions and illustrates an important way that candidates affect voters. Specifically, I argue for a direct connection between the issues owned by a political party and evaluations of the personal attributes of its candidates. As a result, the American public views Republicans as stronger leaders and more moral, while Democrats hold advantages on compassion and empathy. I also draw on "expectations gap" arguments from psychology and political science to demonstrate how a candidate may gain an electoral advantage by successfully "trespassing" on his opponent's trait territory. National Election Studies data from the 1980–2004 presidential elections are used to demonstrate the existence, durability, and effects of trait ownership in contemporary American political campaigns.     

Human and insect mitochondrial DNA analysis from maggots

During the course of our forensic investigations, we have encountered situations where it would have been useful to have evidence, other than direct contact between the two, for concluding that a carrion-fly maggot developed on a particular human victim. If a maggot collected during a death investigation did not develop on the victim, then its age is not relevant to estimating the postmortem interval. In this study we demonstrate that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence data can be obtained from the dissected gut of a maggot that had fed on human tissue. These data can be used to identify both the human corpse upon which the maggot had been feeding and the species of the maggot itself.     

The Participatory Effects of Redistricting

While the effects of legal and institutional arrangements on political participation are well documented, little attention has been given to the potential participatory effects of one of the United States' most important electoral laws: constitutionally mandated reapportionment. By severing the ties between constituents and their incumbents, we argue, redistricting raises information costs, leading to increased levels of nonvoting in U.S. House contests. Survey data from the 1992 American National Election Studies show that redrawn citizens are half as likely to know their incumbent's name as citizens who remain in a familiar incumbent's district and, consequently, significantly more likely to roll off, or abstain from voting in the House election after having cast a presidential vote. We also show that participation rates in the 2002–2006 House elections in Texas—each of which followed a redistricting—match these patterns, with roll-off increasing 3% to 8% in portions of the state that were redrawn, controlling for other factors. The findings demonstrate that scholars and policy makers ought to be concerned with the extent to which the redrawing of congressional lines affects citizens' exercise of political voice.     

Writing between the Lines: Examining Unprompted Handwritten Student Comments on a Campus Climate Survey

ABSTRACT

This study used data from an in-person paper-and-pencil climate survey administered to students in a random sample of classes at a four-year southeastern university. Respondents (N = 248) left unsolicited qualitative comments on the survey (N = 540). Grounded theory was used to determine if themes existed among them. Questions on school safety, rape myths, and resource knowledge prompted the most unsolicited comments (n = 111). Comments centered on clarification or opinions. Given the survey was adapted from a prior climate survey, unsolicited comments highlight areas of clarification and improvement for future iterations of climate surveys. Implications for campus safety are discussed.     

Counterpublic and counterprivate: Zoe Leonard,David Wojnarowicz,and the political aesthetics of intimacy

In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the “counterprivate” relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation.     

Abusive Men’s Indirect Control of Their Partner During the Process of Separation

The current study evaluates the impact of prior controlling behavior and physical abuse on indirect abuse during the process of separation. The sample includes women in the New York City family court system from 2002 to 2005 who had at least one child with the male she was obtaining an order of protection against. Stepwise logistic regression was used to determine the impact of prior physical abuse and controlling behavior on if the abusive partner told lies to the children, kept the children longer or contacted the woman’s family or friends over the follow-up period. Women experienced a decline in the occurrence of physical abuse but did not experience the same decline in controlling behaviors over the follow-up period. Level of education and employment status of the couple may be more appropriate predictors of later indirect abuse over the process of separation than prior physical abuse and controlling behavior.     

Police Witness Identification Images: A Geometric Morphometric Analysis*

Abstract: Research into witness identification images typically occurs within the laboratory and involves subjective likeness and recognizability judgments. This study analyzed whether actual witness identification images systematically alter the facial shapes of the suspects described. The shape analysis tool, geometric morphometrics, was applied to 46 homologous facial landmarks displayed on 50 witness identification images and their corresponding arrest photographs, using principal component analysis and multivariate regressions. The results indicate that compared with arrest photographs, witness identification images systematically depict suspects with lowered and medially located eyebrows (p = <0.000001). This was found to occur independently of the Police Artist, and did not occur with composites produced under laboratory conditions. There are several possible explanations for this finding, including any, or all, of the following: The suspect was frowning at the time of the incident, the witness had negative feelings toward the suspect, this is an effect of unfamiliar face processing, the suspect displayed fear at the time of their arrest photograph.     

The Intersection of Redistricting,Race, and Participation

The drawing of congressional district lines can significantly reduce political participation in U.S. House elections, according to recent work. But such studies have failed to explain which citizens’ voting rates are most susceptible to the dislocating effects of redistricting and whether the findings are generalizable to a variety of political contexts. Building on this nascent literature and work on black political participation, we show that redistricting's negative effects on participation—measured by voter roll‐off in U.S. House elections—are generally strongest among African Americans, but that black voters can be mobilized when they are redrawn into a black representative's congressional district. Our findings, based on data from 11 postredistricting elections in five states from 1992 through 2006, both expand the empirical scope of previous work and suggest that redistricting plays a previously hidden role in affecting black participation in congressional contests.     

Out of Time: The Moral Temporality of Sex, Crime and Taboo

This paper discusses the relationship between law and morality. Morality does not necessarily coincide with the law, but it contributes to it. An act may be legal but nevertheless considered to be immoral in a particular society. For example, the use of pornography may be considered by many to be immoral. Nevertheless, the sale and distribution of non-violent, non-child related, sexually explicit material is legal (or regulated) in many jurisdictions. Many laws are informed by, and even created by, morality. This paper examines the historical influence of morality on the law and on society in general. It aims to develop a theoretical framework for examining legal moralism and the social construction of morality and crime as well as the relationship between sex, desire and taboo. Here, we refer to the moral temporality of sex and taboo, which examines the way in which moral judgments about sex and what is considered taboo change over time, and the kinds of justifications that are employed in support of changing moralities. It unpacks the way in which abstract and highly tenuous concepts such as “desire”, “art” and “entertainment” may be “out of time” with morality, and how morality shapes laws over time, fabricating justifications from within socially constructed communities of practice. This theoretical framework maps the way in which these concepts have become temporally dominated by heteronormative structures such as the family, marriage, reproduction, and longevity. It is argued that the logic of these structures is inexorably tied to the heterosexual life-path, charting individual lives and relationships through explicit phases of childhood, adolescence and adulthood that, in the twenty-first century, delimit the boundaries of taboo surrounding sex more than any other time in history.