Support for behavioral nudges versus alternative policy instruments and their perceived fairness and efficacy

An extensive debate has emerged in recent years about the relative merits of behavioral policy instruments (nudges) aimed at changing individual behavior without coercion. In this article, we examine public support for non-deliberative nudges and deliberative nudges and compare them to attitudes toward top-down regulation and free choice/libertarian options. We also examine whether support for both types of nudges is associated with perceptions of fairness and efficacy. We test these expectations with a survey experiment with 1706 UK adult respondents (representative of the population on age, gender, and location) in two policy areas (retirement savings and carbon offsets for airline passengers). We find higher levels of public support for both nudge policy options compared to top-down regulation. Support for nudges is associated with the perceived fairness of nudges more than their efficacy.     

Simply a Matter of Being Male? Nurses’ Employment Outcomes in the Norwegian Labour Market

The gendered segregation of the labour market is well documented: men tend to be employed in more prestigious and powerful jobs compared with women, even within female-dominated occupations. The research that describes the male privilege in nursing rarely problematizes, however, that these men belong to the majority ethnic population. Qualitative studies from the US and Norway show that men of minority ethnic origin experience discriminatory practices from supervisors and colleagues that can have a negative impact on their career mobility. An important insight from those studies is that it is not only gender that shapes careers, but the particular intersection of gender and ethnicity. But to what extent are the employment outcomes of ethnic minority and majority male nurses characterized by similarities or dissimilarities? The current article uses individual-level administrative data to investigate and compare employment outcomes among ethnic minority and majority male nurses in Norway. More precisely, we investigate the likelihood of being employed in long-term care, psychiatric care, and somatic hospitals. Our empirical approach is to estimate employment outcomes by gender, ethnicity, and their interaction. Based on this, we can determine whether it is primarily gender, ethnicity, or gender and ethnicity in combination that predict any intra-occupational segregation of minority and majority ethnic male nurses. The results show that minority ethnic men are over-represented in long-term care and under-represented in hospitals compared with majority ethnic men, whereas both men of minority and majority ethnic origin are over-represented in psychiatric care. We conclude that employment in health care organizations considered more congruent with “masculinity” is most pronounced among male nurses of majority ethnic origin. The results also reveal an emerging pattern of intra-occupational segregation with a clustering of minority ethnic nurses in long-term care, and this tendency is particularly pronounced among male nurses.     

Moderators and Mediators of Framing Effects in Political Marketing: Implications for Political Brand Management

Due to its important practical implications, there has been a growing number of studies on framing conducted by scholars from various research domains. There has been, however, no paper that would provide a comprehensive overview of various moderators and mediators of the effect. The aim of this paper is to address this research gap, concentrating on psychological moderators and mediators of framing characteristic for political marketing. The paper consists of three parts. In the first part, the concepts of framing, priming and agenda-setting as well as the similarities and differences between them are presented in order to resolve common terminological inconsistencies. In the second, we discuss the moderating role of such variables as knowledge, trust in media and values on framing effect. In the third section, psychological mechanisms that underlie framing and priming are reviewed. Here, cognitive mediators such as accessibility and applicability effects are presented, followed by the discussion of the moderating and mediating role of emotions in framing effects, with special attention given to positive-negative asymmetry observed in the evaluation of political candidates and events. Finally, implication for political brand management are discussed. Our findings can be relevant for politicians, specialists dealing in political brand image and scholars studying framing effects.     

Communicating Dissent in Judicial Opinions: A Comparative,Genre-Based Analysis

To date, there has been surprisingly little research on separate opinions in legal linguistics literature. Scarce attention has been paid to the linguistic and communicative aspects of how judges frame their disagreements. This paper serves as one of the early attempts to examine the institution of votum separatum, or separate opinion, from a comparative, cross-language perspective using a linguistic methodology. The evidence indicates a clear similarity in terms of how separate opinions are integrated within the respective macrostructures of the US SC opinions and the Constitutional Tribunal judgments. This study demonstrates how judges tend to employ highly formulaic expressions to signal their disagreement despite the absence of clear guidelines to communicate such stances. The analysis of their frequent phraseology demonstrates that declaring votum separatum and providing its justification are two different acts, not only legally but also linguistically, especially in terms of their formulaicity. The Polish and American justifications differ in the degree to which the frequent phraseology reveals peculiarities of judicial argumentation in addition to the presence of strong evaluative concerns.

     

First practical applications of eye temperature measurements for estimation of the time of death in casework. Report of three cases

This paper presents first three successive cases of death where at scene measurements of the internal eyeball temperature soon after death allowed to precisely estimate the times of deaths based on this data (33.1°C, 32.2°C and 29.5°C, respectively), which were later confirmed during the police investigation. Simultaneously the rectal temperatures in all three cases were measured and appeared to be between 36.3 and 36.8°C-reflecting a living individual's body temperature. Thanks to a significantly faster postmortem decrease of the eye temperature and a residual or nonexistent plateau effect affecting the eye, using the formula developed in previous comprehensive studies in pigs, the time of death in real cases could be estimated with good precision: 1 h 33 min, 2 h 24 min and 3 h 17 min since death respectively. The actual TOD established during investigation appeared to be: between 1 h 30 min and 1 h 50 min in case 1; 1 h 55 min in case 2 and between 2 h 55 min and 3 h 05 min in case 3. Such precise estimation, mainly due to the plateau effect lasting up to a few hours, could not have been done based only on rectal temperature, commonly measured in forensic practice.     

Referring Phrases with Deictic Indication and the Issue of Comprehensibility of Texts of Normative Acts: The Case of Polish Codes

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The paper focuses on a specific type of referring legal provisions, in which the referring...     

The Politics of Foreign Direct Investment in Authoritarian Regimes

While political scientists find that democracy reduces political risk, little scholarship analyzes how authoritarian regimes attract foreign direct investment (FDI). This article argues that while authoritarian countries are generally risky, this risk can be minimized when authoritarian regimes are constrained from both “above” and “below.” Signing international investment treaties are critical for authoritarian countries to signal a commitment to FDI-friendly policies. However, only authoritarian signatories that allow some degree of public deliberation in their policymaking are then constrained from deviating from the policies of the international investment treaties. Panel statistical regressions and a case analysis support the hypothesis.     

A stem-family society without the stem-family ideology? The case of eighteenth-century Poland1

This paper mobilizes historical census microdata and quantitative methods to answer a seemingly qualitative question of whether the stem-family organization, profoundly described in sociological and anthropological literature, existed in historical western Poland. The paper’s narrative takes a threefold argumentation format, each step relying on different methodologies. First, using household registers data and basic tools of historical demography we come to the point where a conjectural hypothesis of stem-family prevalence in the territories in question seems to be necessarily rejected. However, the vivid prevalence of the stem family is brought back to the fore in the second step, when empirical data are combined with more sophisticated statistical tools (computer microsimulation of kin sets). Finally, the latter observation is problematized in light of the historical contextual information, which altogether makes the incidence of stem-family organization in the region unthinkable given the existing socio-cultural and political-economic framework. We close with a contemplation of the limits of quantitative approaches to concerns over historical family systems, and with a discussion of the extent to which – given this apparent conundrum – our findings may illuminate existing models of historical family systems.     

Cold War Kitchen: Americanization,technology, and European users,by Ruth Oldenziel & Karin Zachmann

Abstract

This article concerns women who crossed a frontier both literally, by travelling to Paris – the art centre of the world in about 1900 – and symbolically, by training to be artists in ways which were not open to earlier generations. Paris provided a cosmopolitan environment and the article includes references to women of several nationalities, but gives particular prominence to Scottish women artists as a doubly marginalised group. By considering both their relation to academic training and to the avant-garde, it seeks to explain the comparative obscurity of these first-generation artists and suggests that they often became professionals, but without making the breakthrough to fame.