Escala de Abuso Economico: Validating the Scale of Economic Abuse-12 (SEA-12) in Spanish

Journal of Family Violence - Language is a key consideration in the development of culturally-responsive interventions for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), and this includes not only...     

Cyberattacks at the Grass Roots: American Local Governments and the Need for High Levels of Cybersecurity

This article examines data from the first‐ever nationwide survey of cybersecurity among American local governments. The data show that these governments are under constant or near‐constant cyberattack, yet, on average, they practice cybersecurity poorly. While nearly half reported experiencing cyberattacks at least daily, one‐third said that they did not know whether they were under attack, and nearly two‐thirds said that they did not know whether their information systems had been breached. Serious barriers to their practice of cybersecurity include a lack of cybersecurity preparedness within these governments and a lack of adequate funding for it. The authors make recommendations to local governments to improve their cybersecurity practice and to scholars for additional research into local government cybersecurity, an area that, to date, has largely been neglected by researchers from the social sciences and computer science.     

Regulation and poverty: an empirical examination of the relationship between the incidence of federal regulation and the occurrence of poverty across the US states

Public Choice - We estimate the impact of federal regulations on poverty rates in the 50 US states using the recently created Federal Regulation and State Enterprise (FRASE) index, which is an...     

The Influence of News Media on Political Elites: Investigating Strategic Responsiveness in Congress

News media play a central role in democratic politics, yet we know little about how media affect the behavior of policy makers. To understand the conditions under which news media influence political elites, we advance a theory of strategic responsiveness, which contends that elected representatives are more likely to heed their constituents' preferences when voters are attentive. Accordingly, news media's influence on legislative behavior should be most apparent near elections and dependent on the partisan composition of the constituency. We capitalize on the incremental rollout of the conservative Fox News Channel in the late 1990s to evaluate our theoretical predictions. Fox News caused both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to increase support for the Republican Party position on divisive votes, but only in the waning months of the election cycle and among those members who represent districts with a sizable portion of Republican voters.     

Ethnicizing citizenship,questioning membership. Explaining the decreasing family migration rights of citizens in Europe

Citizenship does not equal belonging. In this paper, we investigate how the disjunction between the ‘imagined community’ and the formal citizenry impacts on citizens’ rights. In particular, we analyse decision-making on the family migration rights of citizens in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that in these three countries, notwithstanding their different migration and citizenship regimes, the reduction of citizens’ family migration rights is based on the same discursive mechanism: the ‘membership’ of citizens of migrant origin who marry a partner from abroad is called into question. As they are excluded from membership of the imagined community, their entitlement to family migration rights is decreased. Ethnic conceptions of national community, intersecting with gender and class, play a crucial role in shaping the rights attached to citizenship in Europe today.