Reducing the Hindsight Bias Utilizing Attorney Closing Arguments

In the legal system, jurors are asked to render a decision after the event in question has already occurred and the final outcome, typically negative, is known. This after-the-fact structure of the legal system makes jurors susceptible to a human judgment phenomenon known as hindsight bias. This study focused on reducing hindsight bias in a courtroom context by incorporating a debiasing strategy within the defense's closing argument. Subjects viewed one of three videotaped versions of plaintiff and defense closing arguments in a commercial litigation case (i.e., foresight condition, hindsight condition, and hindsight debiasing condition). Results indicate that the hindsight debiasing strategy was effective in reducing subject-juror hindsight bias.     

BELT AND ROAD UNITES CHINA AND LATIN AMERICA

The Belt and Road Initiative, proposed in 2013 by Chinese President Xi Jinping, improves cooperation among its participants in terms of both economic and cultural? devel-opment. Latin American countries started to join the initiative in 2017, and as of 2019, 19 of them signed related memoranda of understand-ing with China.     

Paid military service at the intersection of militarism,nationalism, capitalism,and (hetero)patriarchy: escaping without leaving ‘manhood’

The variety of the political standpoints of governments that have initiated exempted military service for several times in Turkey is a sign of a general agreement on its legitimacy. However, Turkey is a country where conscientious objection is almost a taboo. I try to decipher the assumptions behind what is (il)legitimate, and their manifestations in the sociopolitical life from a gender perspective informed by the feminist theory. I argue that what lies behind these is the interconnection between militarism, nationalism, patriarchy, and capitalism. I show how they reciprocally support each other through a critical discourse analysis of the debate on legitimacy of paid military service and illegitimacy of conscientious objection. I conclude that the nature of these debates leads to a reproduction of the hegemonic definitions of manhood and womanhood, together with the reproduction of the masculinization of the political sphere at the expense of the exclusion of and discrimination against other identities.     

Portuguese Democratisation 40 Years on: Its Meaning and Enduring Legacies

Abstract

On the fortieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, it is pertinent to ask how Portuguese citizens understand their transition to democracy. In this article, some of the main findings concerning the meanings and legacies of 25 April 1974 are presented, drawing on the findings of two surveys focusing on Portuguese attitudes towards 25 April and fielded in 2004 and 2014, respectively, to a representative sample of the Portuguese population. Here we focus on the degree to which the transition is viewed positively and its social and economic legacies. In the final sections, the main findings of the articles in this special issue are discussed through a presentation of the main questions they answer and the new ones they raise.     

Conditional Cash Transfer Programs and Electoral Accountability: Evidence from Latin America

Do conditional cash transfer programs reduce voters' incentives to hold their government accountable for its performance? Studies show that these programs generate considerable electoral returns for the governments responsible for them. One important and unexplored question is whether these popular programs have also changed the landscape of accountability in Latin America. Survey data from 16 Latin American countries that have adopted CCT programs do not offer support for the claim that such programs have a detrimental effect on electoral accountability for corruption and for the economy. Only in countries where CCT programs do not follow strict rules do beneficiaries attribute relatively less weight to the government's economic performance, but this effect is marginal. These findings fill an important gap in the literature and offer reassuring evidence that cash transfers can alleviate poverty while preserving voters' incentives to exercise electoral accountability in crucial areas of government performance.     

Effects of the NICHD Protocol Training on Child Investigative Interview Quality in Korean Police Officers

This study was conducted to determine, by comparing pre- and post-training interview of 18 Korean police officers, whether training in use of the NICHD Protocol improved the quality of investigative interviews of allegedly abused child victims. Results showed that Korean police officers more often followed the Protocol structure -they introduced themselves, explained the ground rules, and conducted episodic memory training-after they had been trained. Moreover, police officers used approximately three times as many desirable prompts (such as invitations and facilitators) and fewer suggestive prompts in interviews conducted after as opposed to before the training. Invitations elicited approximately four to seven times more details on average than the least productive prompts. These results confirmed that the NICHD Protocol is effective when used to interview alleged child abuse victims in East Asia.     

The institutionalisation of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the institutional development of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies (BCD) from 1826 to the present. Legislature careers, the internal organisation of the BCD, the current system for filling positions within the committees and electoral rules are the objects of this study. The process of development of the BCD should be understood in light of the dynamics of the Brazilian political system, which has undergone significant ruptures of regime, and also in light of the nearly permanent fragility of the democracy, especially of its representative components. It is an institution with legislature career patterns that vary through time, but always point towards opportunities out of the BCD, a stable, hierarchical and complex mode of organisation that currently values parties as distributors of opportunities. It is, above all, an institution that is subject to external influences from other parts of the political system, which diminish its autonomy and self-determination, as shown by the example of the rule for the adjudication of terms. With its 190 years, the BCD has evolved along with Brazilian democracy and today, although boasting a great structure and large resources, it still needs to establish itself as a decisive and permanent actor in driving public policies and communication (parties and government projects) with voters.