Army administration tensions over Algeria's Centres de regroupement, 1954–1962

Thirty years after the end of the Algerian War of Independence the bulk of the contemporary military documentation has been released, after classification, and is available at the military archives of the Service Historique de l'Armée de Terre at Vincennes. This study re‐examines the French army's pacification policy and its strategy of regrouping the rural population into resettlement centres and re‐evaluates the role of the Sections Administratives Spécialisées (SAS) in administering this resettled population. The speed and scale of regrouping is reconfirmed from army statistical data. The significant critical inspections carried out by the quasi‐civilian Inspection Générale des Regroupements de la Population (IGRP) led to army‐civilian conflict as did the efforts of SAS units to turn this damaging military operation into a more positive rural renovation programme. By the end of the war both the IGRP and the SAS gave ground to military evaluations of the situation and disillusionment crept in as the resettlement programme came to an end. The newly available archival documentation also serves to substantiate the accuracy of Michel Cornaton's pioneering mid‐1960s research on Algeria's centres de regroupement which was carried out in the face of the then prevailing military secrecy.     

Informing Jurors of Their Nullification Power: A Route to a Just Verdict or Judicial Chaos?

The current studies sought to test whether explicitly informing jurors of their power to nullify the law does invite chaos, defined by jurists as undisciplined and biased juror judgment. A series of four studies examined juror biases predicated on defendant status, remorse, gender, national origin, penalty severity, and extenuating circumstances. None, however, were amplified by nullification instructions, providing little evidence that such instructions invite chaos with respect to the biases examined in these studies. To the contrary, several results suggested that nullification instructions simply encourage jurors to nullify when the strict application of the law would result in an unjust verdict. Limitations of the studies and public policy issues are discussed.     

Parties in Elections, Parties in Government, and Partisan Bias

Adam Meirowitz Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 e-mail: ameirowi{at}princeton.edu Thomas Romer Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 e-mail: romer{at}princeton.edu Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidatesin elections and when winning candidates choose among policyalternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions,incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choicesare substantively complex and analytically unwieldy, particularlyif modeled explicitly and considered in total, from citizenpreferences through government outcomes. To strike a balancebetween complexity and tractability, we modify standard spatialmodels of electoral competition and governmental policy-makingto study how components of partisanship—such as candidateplatform separation in elections, party ID-based voting, nationalpartisan tides, and party-disciplined behavior in the legislature—arerelated to policy outcomes. We define partisan bias as the distancebetween the following two points in a conventional choice space:the ideal point of the median voter in the median legislativedistrict and the policy outcome selected by the elected legislature.The study reveals that none of the party-in-electorate conditionsis capable of producing partisan bias independently. Specifiedcombinations of conditions, however, can significantly increasethe bias and/or the variance of policy outcomes, sometimes insubtle ways.     

Integrating ‘new polities’ into ‘old polities’: The Swiss party elite

This article offers a new approach to the important question of ‘New Polities’. After discussing various interpretations of the phenomenon, it proposes a conceptualisation on the basis of empirical data drawn from a study of the Swiss party élite. These data show that a New Politics dimension can effectively be measured, and that the ‘left‐right’ axis can be considered to represent an almost perfect synthesis between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ politics.