Not everyone strongly supports the death penalty: Assessing weakly-held attitudes about capital punishment

Polls exploring attitudes toward the death penalty typically impose a simple, dichotomous response structure: respondents are asked whether or not they support or oppose capital punishment. This polling strategy deprives respondents of expressing an indication of the strength of their opinions. When asked whether they support (or oppose) the death penalty “strongly” or “not strongly,” significant proportions of respondents select the latter category. This suggests that many proponents and opponents of the death penalty have weakly-held views regarding the issue. These respondents are of great interest because they are the individuals most likely to change their views. This article analyzes responses to two national surveys in order to explore the variables that differentiate respondents with strongly-held and weakly-held views. A theoretical account is offered to explain why some people have weakly-held views on this critical social issue.     

Why Victims of Intimate Partner Violence Withdraw Protection Orders

While reasons for returning to abusive partners have received considerable attention in research on intimate partner violence, few studies have examined the reasons why victims fail to follow through with the protection order process, regardless of whether or not they return to their abusive partners. Fifty-five women who were in the process of withdrawing a protection order against a male intimate partner were surveyed in the present analysis. Recognizing that reasons given for withdrawing a protection order often follow common themes, individual responses were organized into several “domains,” or groupings of such reasons. The most commonly cited domain involved a “concrete change” on behalf of the victim or defendant, which made the protection order less necessary in the victim’s view. This was closely followed by the domain addressing emotional attachment to the abuser. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.     

Millionaires and the public in Czech politics

This article relies on a unique survey of Czech millionaires and the general public to probe the nature and extent of the differences in opinions between these two groups and their correspondence with public policy. Its main finding is that millionaires are substantially more right-wing than the public on economic issues and somewhat more internationalist on foreign affairs, though a number of areas of agreement can be found as well, particularly assessments of the problems facing the country. Most surprisingly, the opinions of the public appear more likely to correspond with policy than those of millionaires. These findings have important implications for the rise of populism and the quality of democracy in the Czech Republic.     

The biopolitics of China’s “war on terror” and the exclusion of the Uyghurs

This article provides an overview of People’s Republic of China (PRC) counter-terrorism policies targeting Uyghurs since 2001 when the state first asserted that it faced a terrorist threat from this population. In reviewing these policies and their impact, it suggests that the state has gradually isolated and excluded Uyghurs from PRC society. Drawing on the writings of Michael Foucault, it articulates this gradual exclusion of Uyghurs as an expression of biopolitics where the Uyghur people as a whole have come to symbolize an almost biological threat to society that must be quarantined through surveillance, punishment, and detention. Rather than suggesting that these impacts of China’s “war on terror” coincide with the intent of state policy, the article argues that they are inevitable outcomes of labeling a given ethnic population as a terrorist threat in the age of the Global War on Terror.