The discursive construction of intervention: selves,democratic legacies,and Responsibility to Protect in French discourse on Libya

This article analyses French executives' and lawmakers' legitimisations of the intervention in Libya with the aim of understanding the discursive construction of intervention. It investigates the arguments in favour of intervention and the oppositions they were confronted with. To these arguments belong a re-evaluated democratic legacy of France, an identification with the Libyan people, and a debate on Responsibility to Protect and the rule of law in world politics, which have a broader relevance for French actorness abroad. The article applies the Essex School discourse theory and techniques from Interpretive Policy Analysis on executive speeches and parliamentary documents for structuring the debate and for estimating the strength of ideas in their interdiscursive configuration. An ideal-typical explanation of the legitimisation of intervention and of the choice of one policy over another is made. The article argues that going to war in Libya equated to a question of cultural appropriateness.     

Responses to Financial Crises: An Evolutionary Perspective

As the world currently faces the ever-deepening sub-prime crisis, we are reminded that the process of globalisation can cause significant disruptions in global markets and political systems. This article focuses on the evolution of financial crisis responses to gain a better understanding of the dynamics affecting current responses. By using a focused comparison of case studies it argues that the development of crisis response and the dominance of the current multilateral actors is a result of an evolutionary process. This process privileges learning and innovation within a complex political economic system. The crises of each era, born of many of the same problems, generate a variety of responding actors, a few of which are adopted. These actors help to address the immediate problems and even work well for a while. Eventually, they are overwhelmed by the tendency of financial interactions to grow. Another set of crises generates another round of actors and mechanisms. As time goes on, crisis response requires more formal institutions that can deal with more complex systems. The article concludes that response actors are becoming more public, multilateral and global in scope. Understanding this pattern of response should help to shed light on the potential for reform of the financial architecture and help to explain the dominance of multilateralism as a crisis response.     

Total and Marginal Cost Analysis for a High School Based Bystander Intervention

Costs of providing the Green Dot bystander-based intervention, shown to be effective in the reduction of sexual violence among Kentucky high school students, were estimated based on data from a large cluster-randomized clinical trial. Rape Crisis Center Educators were trained to provide Green Dot curriculum to students. Implementing Green Dot in schools (N = 13) randomized to the intervention, over five years, cost $1.6 M and included start-up ($58 K) and ongoing implementation ($1.55 M). Costs for adding a school ($25,510) were calculated based on the final year, where no start-up costs were incurred. Knowing the $25,510 cost estimate for adding Green Dot may be particularly useful for high school administrators or school boards when they were making economic decisions based on strong evidence of program effectiveness to reduce violence.     

Are Peripapillary Intrascleral Hemorrhages Pathognomonic for Abusive Head Trauma?*

Abstract: The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect, Section on Ophthalmology, acknowledges that searching for retinal hemorrhages (RHs) in infants only in cases of suspected of abuse creates selection bias. However, they also recommend that postmortem eye removal might not be indicated “in children who have clearly died from witnessed severe accidental head trauma or otherwise readily diagnosed systemic medical conditions.” Although infrequently described in the child abuse literature, peripapillary intrascleral hemorrhages (bleeding in the sclera at the optic nerve insertion)—putatively from severe repetitive acceleration/deceleration forces with or without blunt head trauma—have been considered essentially pathognomonic for abusive head trauma (shaken baby syndrome). We present two neonates who sustained accidental, severe in utero head injuries and had associated extensive RHs and optic nerve sheath hemorrhages with peripapillary intrascleral hemorrhages detected at autopsy. Neither neonate had a documented clinical fundal examination in the intensive care unit.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Familias con Voz</Emphasis>: Community Survey Results from an Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Prevention Project with Migrant Workers

The Migrant Clinicians Network’s Familias con Voz (Families with a Voice) project aims to train migrant men and women to become intimate partner violence (IPV) peer educators in their communities. In preparation for implementing educational activities, a community survey was conducted with 298 participants in three Texas border counties. Verbal abuse, such as name calling, was the most frequent type of violence reported. Men perceived anger as a cause of partner violence significantly more than women. Only 22% of respondents reported knowing of a shelter they could turn to for help. Surprisingly, a majority of participants cited “seeking help from the police” when asked about ways to decrease partner violence. Survey results offer insight into developing effective intervention programs by capturing the intended audiences’ beliefs and attitudes. Additionally, survey results reveal possible strategies for how to tackle IPV in U.S.-Mexico border migrant farmworker communities.

The effect of political sophistication and party identification on voter–party congruence. A comparative analysis of 30 countries

Partisanship and cognitive mobilization are generally seen as independent and counter-balancing influences on vote choice. While the former is typically regarded as a shortcut, reducing the need for close ideological congruence with one’s preferred party, the latter is associated with increasing levels of political sophistication and the importance of ideological proximity in voter decision-making. This paper tests the strength of these arguments in comparative perspective using data from Wave 3 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). Our results show that in general higher levels of political sophistication are associated with higher levels of voter–party ideological congruence and that a strong party identification reduces this proximity. For voters with both high levels of sophistication and strong partisanship, however, congruence remains high. In a second step we examine whether these relationships are affected by the complexity of the party environment. Our findings show that party system size has no effect on levels of ideological congruence at the individual level, and this holds for different levels of voter sophistication. We conclude that for the most part voter sophistication and party identification are best seen as counter-weights in determining vote choice.