A psycho‐political profile of party activists and left‐wing and right‐wing extremists

Previous studies comparing ideological groups have been restricted to tests of between‐group differences in the means of relevant political psychological variables, thereby neglecting group differences in the variances, meanings and nomological networks of the tested variables. A first exploratory study used data from the European Social Survey (N = 7,314) comparing groups of political party members on the basis of their scores on a self‐placement left–right scale. The second study (N = 69) constituted an in‐depth test for the presence of differences between samples of political activists of moderate parties, communists, anarchists and right‐wing extremists. The results revealed that there is a fair amount of heterogeneity within left‐wing and right‐wing extremists, indicating a substantial amount of within‐group variance of social attitudes, values and prejudice. Moreover, the extremist ideologies are best approached as distinct ideologies that cannot be reduced to extreme versions of moderate ideology, and differences in the meanings and nomological networks of the various extremist ideologies were also obtained. It is erroneous to consider members of extremist groups as being ‘all alike’. The findings obtained from samples of political moderates are not a particularly solid basis for theories about extremism.     

“EXPERIENCE OF THE EXPECTED?” RACE AND ETHNICITY DIFFERENCES IN THE EFFECTS OF POLICE CONTACT ON YOUTH*

Proponents of police reform have called for changes in the way police interact with citizens, particularly with people of color. The rationale, in part, is that when people have more favorable perceptions of their police encounters, they view the police as more just and are more willing to cooperate and comply with the law. To assess whether perceptions of police‐initiated encounters shape law‐related outcomes, we examine how satisfaction with treatment during prior police contact affects procedural injustice, reporting intentions, norms supporting the use of violence, and delinquency. We also explore whether these relationships vary among Blacks, Whites, and Latinos. Our results indicate that youth who have been stopped or arrested fare worse than their counterparts with no police‐initiated contact; however, the potentially negative ramifications of these encounters on all outcomes except violence norms are generally mitigated when youth are satisfied with their treatment. The effects of contact are mostly invariant across racial/ethnic groups when a robust set of control variables are included. We conclude that changing the perceptions of youth regarding how they are treated by the police may mitigate some of the harms of being stopped or arrested, but we caution that these perceptions are shaped by factors aside from police behavior during encounters.     

Prosecuting Juveniles as Adults

In Minnesota, the 1980 legislature statutorily defined a class of juvenile offenders presumed on the basis of age, alleged offense, and record of prior felony offenses to be unfit for treatment in the juvenile court. In this article we evaluate the effect of Minnesota's revised waiver statute by comparing cases in which waiver proceedings were initiated and in which transfer occurred for two time periods, before and after adoption of the legislatively defined presumptive criteria. Our findings suggest that the objective criteria adopted by the Minnesota legislature are not, in themselves, an adequate means for selecting juveniles for transfer to adult court. The criteria identify many juveniles whose records on close examination do not appear to be very serious and fail to identify many juveniles whose records are characterized by violent, frequent, and persistent delinquent activity.     

Toward a theoretical explanation of premature cabinet termination

Abstract. We propose a rational choice model of premature cabinet termination involving considerations of expected gain in terms of electoral payoffs, policy payoffs, or portfolio payoffs. This approach, which distinguishes contextual variables that will generally affect the nature of cost-benefit calculations made by political actors from the factors that are most likely to have a direct impact on a particular decision to precipitate a cabinet crisis, leads us to several testable hypotheses. We provide a first illustrative test of our predictions with data from the Netherlands.     

Macroeconomic performance,political trust and the Great Recession: A multilevel analysis of the effects of within‐country fluctuations in macroeconomic performance on political trust in 15 EU countries, 1999–2011

Recent cross‐national comparative studies have found no effect of countries’ macroeconomic performances on trust in national political institutions, once political explanations (most notably corruption) are taken into account. Although political trust is not determined by the comparison of national economic performance to other countries, it is argued in this article that it is affected by comparisons to their own past performance. In a multilevel, fixed effects analysis of Eurobarometer data (21 waves in 15 European Union Member States between 1999 and 2011) the extent to which within‐country variations in economic performance affect political trust longitudinally is tested. Three major conclusions are reached. First, within‐country, longitudinal changes in performance (growth, deficits, unemployment and inflation) affect political trust. Second, the impact of macroeconomic performance is stronger among the lower educated. Third, even in times of economic duress, budgetary deficits tend to undermine political trust.