Pathological counterinsurgency: the failure of imposing legitimacy in El Salvador,Afghanistan, and Iraq

Many voices in the US policy community have suggested that El Salvador provided a model for US counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on the unsound contention that elections increased government legitimacy and effectiveness. The same flawed assessments were present in counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan – unfounded assumptions that elections would increase legitimacy and improve institutional performance and human rights records lead to inaccurate analysis and bad strategy. Indeed, the US experience calls into question the ability of even a great power to impose legitimacy on a partner in order to wage counterinsurgency. Assuming that elections will advance such legitimacy is a dangerous pathology.     

Talk is not cheap: Policy agendas,information processing,and the unusually proportional nature of European Central Bank communications policy responses

This article unveils the policy agenda of the European Central Bank (ECB) Governing Council as found in the speeches that Governing Council Members gave between 1999 and 2018. Using a dynamic topic‐modeling approached based on non‐negative matrix factorization, we demonstrate how the issues discussed by ECB Governing Council members have evolved over time, and how the general punctuation hypothesis (Jones, B. D. & Baumgartner, F. R. (2005). The politics of attention: How government prioritizes problems. University of Chicago Press) sheds light on what drives this process. We find that unlike policy outputs from many other policymaking systems, ECB communications evolve in a proportional manner. We attribute this finding to the information‐processing capacities of the bank. Our findings speak to the literatures on central bank communications, the evolution of policy agendas, and the application of topic models to speech texts.     

‘Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems’ the independence echo: the rise of the constitutional question in Scottish election manifestos and voter behaviour

ABSTRACT

Since the formation of the Scottish Parliament, the idea of Scottish independence increased in salience and popularity among Scottish voters to such an extent that it now constitutes the country’s defining political cleavage. Given that Scottish politics is increasingly organized around this constitutional question, support for either side of the debate among voters and elites drives political engagement, election turnout and public attitudes to other major issues. Although much popular and academic work has sought to explain the rise of support for independence, few scholars have explored changes in elite behaviour or its consequences for public opinion. From an elite-driven perspective, the increased salience of independence may be but an echo of elite and partisan attention. Developing hypotheses from this approach, we predict that voters identifying with parties developed stronger views on independence following increased attention in parties’ campaigns. We examine these hypotheses by performing computer assisted, unsupervised content analysis of Scottish Parties’ election manifestos. We then use estimates from a structural topic model to predict change in voter support for independence from the British Election Study. The theory and results suggest that increasing salience on alternative dimensions of politics likely closely relates to elite-driven choices in their election campaigns.     

Parental Criminality, Family Violence and Intergenerational Transmission of Crime Within a Birth Cohort

Previous studies documented that crime is heavily concentrated in families. However, many studies relied on relatively small samples, often males and information on criminal involvement was self-reported. The present study investigates: (1) the prevalence of arrests in three generations; (2) the concentration of offenders and arrests within families; (3) the relationships between arrests among the relatives; (4) the relationship between arrests and family violence. A complete cohort of the families in which a child was born in a Dutch city was selected, and the arrests of all known family members (siblings, parents and grandparents) were investigated. Results showed that 7.2 % of the mothers and 18 % of the fathers had been arrested. The likelihood of parental arrests was related to the likelihood of grandparental arrests. There was clear evidence for assortative mating: when the mother was arrested, the likelihood that the father was arrested was increased with a factor five. Maternal arrests were also related to arrests of her parents-in-law. Arrests are heavily concentrated within families, 7.8 % of the families account for 52.3 % of the suspects. Arrests in family members constitute a major risk factor for poor developmental outcomes, such as criminal behavior. At the time of birth, it is possible to use information on arrests to select children who are at relatively high risk for the target of prevention efforts.Implications for prevention policies are discussed.     

Book review

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward A Recognition of Androgyny, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.