Domestic Violence and the Gendered Law of Self-Defence in France: The Case of Jacqueline Sauvage

Legal responses to battered women who kill have long animated scholarly debate and law reform activity. In September 2012 after 47 years of alleged abuse, Frenchwoman Jacqueline Sauvage fatally shot her abusive husband three times in the back. The subsequent contested trial, conviction for murder, unsuccessful appeal and later presidential pardon of Sauvage thrust the French law of self-defence into the spotlight. The Sauvage case raises important questions surrounding the adequacy of the French criminal law in this area, the ongoing proliferation of gendered stereotypes in law and the need for reform. In the wake of the Sauvage case, this article provides a timely analysis of the gendered law of self-defence in France. Drawing from an in-depth analysis of the judgments imposed in the Sauvage case, this article examines the adequacy of French legal responses to battered women who kill and ignites an argument for further law reform.     

Transnational delegation in global environmental governance: When do non‐state actors govern?

Non‐state actors – including firms, non‐governmental organizations, and networks – are now a permanent fixture in environmental politics. However, we know surprisingly little about when states choose to delegate to non‐state actors through multilateral treaties. This paper provides an historical picture, tracing patterns of delegation to non‐state agents in a random sample of multilateral environmental agreements from 1902 to 2002. I introduce a new unit of analysis – the policy function – to understand what non‐state actors actually do as agents. I find that analyses of delegation are sensitive to the unit of analysis; patterns of delegation at the treaty level are very different from those at the level of individual policy functions. While overall the decision to delegate to non‐state actors – what I term transnational delegation – is rare, it has grown over time. Complex treaties, those with secretariats, and those focused on the management of nature are more apt to delegate to non‐state actors. Non‐state agents fill a small, but growing role in multilateral environmental treaties.     

Adolescents’ Identity Formation: Linking the Narrative and the Dual-Cycle Approach

The narrative and dual-cycle approach conceptualize and operationalize adolescents’ identity formation in different ways. While the narrative approach focuses on the construction of an autobiographical life story, the dual-cycle approach focuses on the formation of identity commitments. Although these approaches have different emphases, they are conceptually complementary. Yet, their empirical links and distinctions have only scarcely been investigated. Empirical knowledge on these links in adolescence and across time has been especially lacking. In the present research, it was therefore examined whether key characteristics of adolescents’ narration (autobiographical reasoning and agency) were concurrently and prospectively related to engagement in the dual-cycle processes of commitment making, identification with commitment, exploration in breadth, exploration in depth, and ruminative exploration. The findings from a cross-sectional sample of 1,580 Dutch adolescents (M_age?=?14.7 years, 56% female) demonstrated that autobiographical reasoning was significantly positively associated with the commitment and more adaptive exploration processes (i.e., in breadth and in depth). In addition, agency was significantly positively associated with the commitment processes and exploration in depth. Yet, these associations between the narrative characteristics and dual-cycle processes were only weak. Subsequently, the findings from a two-year longitudinal subsample (n?=?242, M_age?=?14.7 years, 62% female) indicated that on average commitment strength remained stable but exploration increased across middle adolescence. A stronger increase in identification with commitment and adaptive exploration (i.e., in breadth and in depth) was predicted by a higher degree of agency in adolescents’ narratives. Overall, these findings indicate that both approaches to identity formation are associated, but the small size of these associations suggests that they predominantly capture unique aspects of identity formation. Both approaches could thus complement and inform each other.

     

Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Tags in Reducing Belief in False Stories on Social Media

Political Behavior - Social media has increasingly enabled “fake news” to circulate widely, most notably during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. These intentionally false...     

A Voice for the Injured

This article analyses the nature and effect of the campaign against the Family Court led by social commentator Bettina Arndt from 1995 to 2006, in the context of the men's rights agenda and the politics of anti-feminist backlash. It documents the changes to Australian family law and the workings of the Family Court under the Howard government, as a result of this campaign, in order to understand the politics of backlash in the context of Wendy Brown's States of Injury theory of 1995. In this analysis, the conservative men's rights agenda is understood as a reaction to structural and economic adjustments associated with neoliberal reforms, especially labour market regulation. But this context, of structural adjustment, is distorted in the rhetoric and focus of campaigns characterised by anti-feminist backlash, such as that directed at the Family Court in Australia. The example of Arndt and her championing of men's rights in this arena is presented as a means by which to compare the different experiences and traditions of feminism in Australia and America, and the associated politics of backlash in each nation, all of which have had a profound influence on Arndt's outlook and work.     

“In the Best Interests of the Child”: Mapping the (Re) Emergence of Pro‐Adoption Politics in Contemporary Australia

This article seeks to understand, in historical and international perspective, recent governmental initiatives that aim to reinstate adoption as a viable policy option for the care and placement of children in Australia, with reference to two recent reports of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Human and Family Services, Overseas Adoption in Australia: Report of the Inquiry into Adoption of Children from Overseas (2005), and The Winnable War on Drugs: The Impact of Illicit Drug Use on Families (2007) which raises adoption as a policy option for children of drug‐addicted parents. These reports appear to signal a discursive shift away from the anti‐adoption attitudes that have characterised the post‐1970s period in response to the Stolen Generations and other past adoption practices. It is argued that this change can be understood as having been pushed to the fore by the conservative family policy of the Howard era and further fostered by international trends in adoption policy.     

Analysis of Cluster-Randomized Experiments: A Comparison of Alternative Estimation Approaches

Lynn Vavreck UCLA, Department of Political Science, 4289 Bunche Hall Box 951472, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472 e-mail: lvavreck{at}ucla.edu (corresponding author) Analysts of cluster-randomized field experiments have an arrayof estimation techniques to choose from. Using Monte Carlo simulation,we evaluate the properties of point estimates and standard errors(SEs) generated by ordinary least squares (OLS) as applied toboth individual-level and cluster-level data. We also compareOLS to alternative random effects estimators, such as generalizedleast squares (GLS). Our simulations assess efficiency acrossa variety of scenarios involving varying sample sizes and numbersof clusters. Our results confirm that conventional OLS SEs areseverely biased downward and that, for all estimators, gainsin efficiency come mainly from increasing the number of clusters,not increasing the number of individuals within clusters. Wefind relatively minor differences across alternative estimationapproaches, but GLS seems to enjoy a slight edge in terms ofthe efficiency of its point estimates and the accuracy of itsSEs. We illustrate the application of alternative estimationapproaches using a clustered experiment in which Rock the VoteTV advertisements were used to encourage young voters in 85cable TV markets to vote in the 2004 presidential election. Authors' note: We thank Rock the Vote for permission to usetheir public service announcements in this field experiment.The authors are grateful to Alan Gerber for suggestions throughoutthe design phase of this project. We are also grateful to DanKotin and Margaret Coblentz, who worked with cable operators,distributed the advertisements, and assembled the data. We thankTerence Leong for his programming expertise. Replication materialsare available on the Political Analysis Web site.