NIBRS Data Available for Secondary Analysis

The NIBRS data program currently being implemented by the FBI and local lawenforcement agencies has by now produced sufficient data for archiving anddistribution. Although not representative of crime in the United States, existing NIBRS data can be used to investigate the nature of crimesknown to the police compared to the traditional UCR data. The Bureau ofJustice Statistics has requested the National Archive of Criminal JusticeData to store and make NIBRS data available to interested users. The datafrom 1996 will shortly be available from the NACJD web site. The 1996 datacontain almost 6.5 million records and the FBI's full file includes about 361 Mbytes of data. The data have been disaggregated from the FBI's complex single file into 11 segment levels or record types. This makes theindividual record types easier and faster to analyze than using the fullfile, which more closely resembles a relational database than a hierarchicalfile. However, splitting apart the record types requires that specialprocedures be used to merge files of different record types, which would benecessary if a user were interested in analyzing variables appearing in morethan one record type (e.g., comparing offender and victim ages). These procedures are described, and a test comparing the time to run a simple frequencycount using the full file against the merged files shows that using themerged files is considerably more efficient. Also discussed are some futuredevelopments to facilitate the analysis of NIBRS data.     

Institutionalizing Peace: Power Sharing and Post-Civil War Conflict Management

This article examines how power-sharing institutions might best be designed to stabilize the transition to enduring peace among former adversaries following the negotiated settlement of civil wars. We identify four different forms of power sharing based on whether the intent of the policy is to share or divide power among rivals along its political, territorial, military, or economic dimension. Employing the statistical methodology of survival analysis to examine the 38 civil wars resolved via the process of negotiations between 1945 and 1998, we find that the more dimensions of power sharing among former combatants specified in a peace agreement the higher is the likelihood that peace will endure. We suggest that this relationship obtains because of the unique capacity of power-sharing institutions to foster a sense of security among former enemies and encourage conditions conducive to a self-enforcing peace.     

Compliance and Non-compliance with International Human Rights Standards: Overplaying the Cultural

This paper interrogates a ‘positive’ view of culture’s (potential) role in widening compliance with international human rights standards, which (1) concentrates on the ‘cultural’ bases of conflict over rights and, in consequence, (2) focuses primarily on cultural interpretation as a means of achieving greater respect for rights norms. The thrust of the paper is that the relationship between culture and human rights norms is much more complex than this positive perspective implies and, this being so, that some of its claims about the potential benefits of cultural interpretation for widening rights compliance are hard to sustain. I substantiate this argument by exploring five challenges to this approach.     

Assessing and Explaining the Diverging Trajectories of Territorial Parties and Politics in Italy and Spain (2008‐2018)

Until the mid‐2000s, territorial politics played a considerable role in both Italy and Spain. Two regionalist parties, among others, clearly contributed to this: Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC) and the Northern League. Yet evidence shows that the two parties, while starting from relatively similar positions, have followed diverging trajectories, particularly after the financial (and then economic) crisis that hit their respective countries. CDC pushed its pro‐autonomy stances to the extreme and eventually ended up supporting Catalan independence. On the other hand, the League dropped its regionalist agenda and even became a state‐wide party. By comparing these two cases, this article aims to shed light on the mechanisms that lead to the radicalisation or moderation (and even abandonment) of regionalist parties’ territorial demands. These opposite movements have broader implications, since they have been accompanied by increasing polarisation of territorial politics in Spain and the de‐politicisation of this issue in Italy.     

A Latent Factor Approach to Belief in a Just World and its Association with Well-Being

Social Justice Research - Drawing on justice motive theory (Lerner et al. in Berkowitz and Walster (eds) Advances in experimental social psychology. Academic Press, New York, 1976), in the present...     

Dehumanizing representations of women: the shaping of hostile sexist attitudes through animalistic metaphors*

Women are frequently depicted as non-human objects or animals. While female animalization has typically been conceptualized in the psychological literature as communicating a unitary perception of women, linguistic research suggests that there are at least two distinct animalizing linguistic metaphors for women that depict women at opposite ends of a sex-based power differential: ‘women-are-predators’ and ‘women-are-prey’. Are these linguistic metaphors able to shape sexist attitudes towards women? US Male and female undergraduates read an article, which concerned women voters in an election year, containing language that described women as predatory, prey-like, or in a humanized manner (baseline). They then reported their ambivalent sexist attitudes towards women in general. Consistent with both metaphors’ emphasis on sex-based power differentials, both male and female participants, who read about predatory women, exhibited greater agreement with hostile sexist attitudes than participants who read about prey-like women. This study suggests that the continued transmission of animalizing metaphors for women may help perpetuate prejudicial beliefs about appropriate roles for women in society. Media communicators might learn to identify and eliminate the use of the animalizing terms in their own work.     

Facebook,Contestation and Poor People’s Politics: Spanning the Urban–Rural Divide in Cambodia?

Rural internet use, although still limited, is growing, raising the question of how rural people are using social media politically. As a vehicle of communication that permits the rapid transmission of information, images and text across space and connections between dispersed networks of individuals, does technological advance in rural areas presage significant political transformations? This article investigates this question in the light of a poor result for the Cambodian People’s Party in the 2013 elections, and the subsequent banning of the main opposition party, before the 2018 elections. Expanding internet use in rural areas has linked relatively quiescent rural Cambodians for the first time to networks of information about militant urban movements of the poor. Rural Cambodians are responding to this opportunity through strategies of quiet encroachment in cyberspace. This has had real effects on the nature of the relationship between the dominant party and the rural population and suggests the declining utility of the election-winning strategy used by the party since 1993. However, the extent of this virtual information revolution is limited, since neither the urban nor rural poor are mapping out new online political strategies, agendas or identities that can push Cambodia’s sclerotic politics in new directions.     

Generating global health governance through BRICS summitry

While global plurilateral summit institutions (PSIs) of the world's most powerful countries have long generated effective global health governance, the most recent summits of the Group of Eight (G8) and the Group of 20 (G20) have largely abandoned their earlier concern with health, especially outside its specialized food and nutrition link. However, since its start in 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia, the annual summit of Brazil, Russia, India, China and now South Africa (BRICS), a new PSI arising has substantially addressed health and started to lead in some ways. The BRICS summit-level health governance has been reinforced by the advent of a BRICS health ministers' forum, other health-related ministerial institutions (notably for agriculture and trade) and official and multi-stakeholder bodies. This article provides the first direct, disciplined empirical analysis of how and why the BRICS summit system has governed global health, based on the models developed for and applied to G8, G20 and United Nations summit governance.