Extreme Pessimists? Expected Socioeconomic Downward Mobility and the Political Attitudes of Young Adults

Political Behavior - In recent decades, and especially since the economic crisis, young people have been finding it more difficult to maintain or exceed the living standards of their parents. As a...     

The role of deception in P300 memory detection

Purpose. P300 memory detection test is a neuroscientific procedure to assess memories stored in the brain. P300 memory detection can and is currently applied to assess criminal suspects on recognition of critical crime information. Contrasting memory detection with lie detection, researchers have argued that P300 memory detection does not involve deception. We empirically investigated this argument by manipulating deception between groups. Methods. Thirty‐four community volunteers participated in a P300 memory detection test, answering either deceptively (deceptive condition) or truthfully (truth condition) to their own name. Results. P300 memory detection was significant in the truth condition, indicating that deceptive responding is not a prerequisite for valid P300 memory detection. However, there were clear indications that deceptive responding improved memory detection. Conclusions. Deception seems involved in the P300 memory detection test; and deceptive responding may add to test accuracy.     

Lying on the Road Before Being Run Over: Vehicular Manslaughter,Suicide, or Accident? Two Case Reports and Literature Review

We present two apparent hit-and-run cases where two women were run over. The vehicles involved were subsequently traced and their owners charged with manslaughter. Autopsy evidence, scientific investigation of the scene and circumstances of the deaths, technical inspection of the vehicles, and DNA analysis strongly suggested that both victims were lying on the road before the accident. Case 1 was a suicide. In Case 2, the victim had fallen to the ground following acute alcohol intoxication. Victimological analysis was pivotal in reconstructing the dynamics of the events. We suggest that a hit-and-run fatality should not be regarded as a manslaughter case until each piece of evidence has been carefully considered. We also propose an interdisciplinary method of reconstructing run over occurrences based on the following three steps: (i) identify whether there was a primary impact when the victim was in an upright position; (ii) identify victim drug/alcohol intoxication and/or presence of acute or chronic disease or injury, which may have contributed to the impact; and (iii) consider suicide intent.     

Getting Rid of Dichotomous Sex Estimations: Why Logistic Regression Should be Preferred Over Discriminant Function Analysis

Sex estimation is an important part of creating a biological profile for skeletal remains in forensics. The commonly used methods for developing sex estimation equations are discriminant function analysis (DFA) and logistic regression (LogR). LogR equations provide a probability of the predicted sex, while DFA relies on cutoff points to segregate males and females, resulting in a rigid dichotomization of the sexes. This is problematic because sexual dimorphism exists along a continuum and there can be considerable overlap in trait expression between the sexes. In this study, we used humeral measurements to compare the performance of DFA and LogR and found them to be very similar under multiple conditions. The overall cross-validated (leave-one-out) accuracy of DFA (75.76–95.14%) was slightly higher than LogR (75.76–93.82%) for simple and multiple variable equations, and also performed better under varying sample sizes (94.03% vs. 93.78%). Three of five DFA equations outperformed LogR under the B index, while all five LogR equations outperformed the DFA equations under the Q index. Both methods saw an improvement in overall accuracy (DFA: 86.74–95.79%; LogR: 86.74–95.76%) when individuals with a classification probability lower than 0.80 were excluded. Additionally, we propose a method for calculating additional cutoff points (PMarks) based on posterior probability values. In conclusion, we recommend using LogR over DFA due to the increased flexibility, robusticity, and benefits for future users of the statistical models; however, if DFA is preferred, use of the proposed PMarks facilitates future analysis while avoiding unnecessary dichotomization.     

Driving Factors behind Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq

With the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the phenomenon of foreign fighters became a significant security concern. Governments around the world have become preoccupied with the possibility of their citizens leaving for combat zones and then coming back with training and experience. While previously foreign fighters participated in such conflicts as Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya, today ISIS has attracted record numbers of individuals from various backgrounds. This article examines factors that might be connected with the outflow of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq. The analysis is based on 190 countries with 103 of them serving as countries of origin for 33,815 foreign fighters. Negative binomial regression is used to evaluate the connection of political, economic, demographic, and social factors to numbers of foreign fighters. The findings indicate that more foreign fighters come from countries with higher Human Development Index levels, unemployment rates, percentages of youth, population size, percentages of Muslim population, emigration levels, Internet penetration, and the presence of Al Qaeda cells. However, the findings further indicate that the effect of these variables is not uniform across majority Muslim and majority non-Muslim countries.     

Market Instruments for a Sustainable Economy: Environmental Fiscal Policy and Manifest Divergences

The introduction of environmental taxation policies had reached most European countries by the late 1990s. The pricing of activities considered harmful to the environment has given rise to the design of various economic instruments, such as environmental taxes, aimed at promoting environmental responsibility and at enabling the Kyoto Protocol targets to be met, and at the same time generating a marked increase in tax revenues. The aim of this article is to examine whether convergence in environmental taxation has taken place among 27 EU countries, doing so by analyzing time series and applying unit root tests. Our findings show there has been no such convergence, overall, despite the existence of groups of countries with common patterns of behavior.     

The politics of contract allocation in the World Bank

Scholarship on informal politics in multilateral aid organizations investigates all stages of the allocation process - from project identification to aid disbursement and project evaluation. Yet, one area remains almost entirely overlooked in the literature - allocation of aid-financed contracts. This article aims to address the shortcoming of the existing research and develops a theory of contract allocation in a prominent multilateral aid organization – the World Bank. The theoretical argument explores the relationship between formal procurement arrangements and recipients’ control over contract allocation, and the role of this relationship in explaining patterns of contract allocation. My empirical analyses using data on the World Bank’s contracts provide evidence of recipients’ ability to allocate contracts in favor of domestic companies, as well as bilateral aid donors.     

Protecting the state: Russian repressive tactics in the North Caucasus*

Since the end of the second Chechen campaign, the North Caucasus counterinsurgency has experienced the shift from military involvement toward prevalence of law enforcement instruments. This paper discusses the composition of repressive tactics that the Russian state developed as a result of the two decades long evolution of a counter strategy designed to eliminate illegal armed groups operating in the North Caucasus. It is focused on the late stages of conflict (2007–2014) when the violence that had spread across the region started in the early 2000s had symbolically culminated in 2007 with the proclamation of the Caucasian Emirate. This paper advances a reconceptualization of the Russian counterinsurgency by devising an analysis of indiscriminate and discriminate repressive tactics. It demonstrates that security agencies incorporated more selective uses of violence into their tactics, thereby reducing the number of indiscriminate violent actions to an insignificant level. Moreover, along with selective violence, security institutions reinforced their effort by conducting preventive work such as the detection of secret caches of weapons, seizures, and arrests. Findings regarding the current composition of repressive tactics are illustrated by means of new disaggregated media-based data that were especially collected and analyzed to form the basis of this research.     

Correlates of Identity Configurations: Three Studies with Adolescent and Emerging Adult Cohorts

Adolescence and emerging adulthood are two core developmental periods in which individuals can develop a meaningful identity across domains. However, there is a lack of studies exploring correlates of different identity configurations. The purpose of this article was to fill this gap in examining correlates of configurations characterized by identity stability or instability in both ideological and relational domains or identity stability in one domain and instability in the other domain. Three studies were presented. In the first study, we investigated links between identity configurations and internalizing problem behaviors in early and middle adolescents (N=1,891; M (age) =14; 55% female); in the second study, we focused on associations between identity configurations and identity functions in late adolescents and early emerging adults (N=1,085; M (age) =19; 63% female); in the third study, we investigated relationships between identity configurations, sense of coherence, and basic psychological need satisfaction in emerging adults (N=489; M (age) =21; 71% female). Overall, findings highlighted that participants experiencing a condition of identity stability in both domains reported a better profile than their peers displaying a condition of instability in both realms. Further, individuals with identity stability only in one domain reported intermediate scores and the effect provided by each domain varied according to the correlate examined and the age group taken into account. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

How Vulnerable are Arab Countries to Global Food Price Shocks?

Abstract

We estimate pass-through effects of international food price movements into domestic food prices for 18 countries in the Middle East and North Africa, using threshold regressions. International price movements transmit to various degrees into domestic prices. Transmission is mostly asymmetric, pushing domestic price levels up as increases in international food prices are typically passed through, but declines are rarely transmitted. This situation is indicative of policy and market distortions, notably the presence of food subsidies in the context of fiscal constraints. Hence, both international prices and their volatility matter for domestic inflation, yet domestic factors also play a role.