IMAGES OF GOD AND PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: DOES A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH A LOVING GOD MATTER?*

This study argues that the nature and intensity of a person's relationship with God creates a transposable cognitive schema that shapes people's views toward public policies such as executing convicted murderers. In this context, we investigate whether Americans who report having a close personal relationship with a loving God are less likely to support the death penalty. We hypothesize that such a relationship tempers the tendency to see punitiveness as an appropriate response to human failings. Individuals who hold a loving God image are more likely to believe that God responds to those who have “failed” or “sinned” by demonstrating unconditional love, forgiveness, and mercy. Accordingly, support for capital punishment is problematic because it contradicts the image of a merciful, forgiving deity; God's purpose—and admonition to believers—is to demonstrate compassion toward those who have trespassed against others. We test these possibilities using the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS). Controlling for a range of religious factors and other known predictors of death penalty attitudes, the results show that Americans with a personal relationship with a loving God are less likely to support capital punishment for convicted murderers.     

DEVELOPING STATE AUDIT IN BRITAIN

This paper discusses the development of the British state audit system exercised by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and the National Audit Office (NAO). It briefly describes the concerns which led to a campaign for reforming our audit arrangements and to the passing of the National Audit Act in 1983 and considers ways in which that Act could be used to increase the effectiveness of parliamentary and public accountability of central government in the light of new developments in the management of departments.     

STRAIN, PERSONALITY TRAITS, AND DELINQUENCY: EXTENDING GENERAL STRAIN THEORY

Although Agnew's (1992) general strain theory (GST) has secured a fair degree of support since its introduction, researchers have had trouble explaining why some individuals are more likely than others to react to strain with delinquency. This study uses data from the National Survey of Children to address this issue. Drawing on Agnew (1997) and the psychological research on personality traits, it is predicted that juveniles high in negative emotionality and low in constraint will be more likely to react to strain with delinquency. Data support this prediction.     

CLOSE‐UPS AND THE SCALE OF ECOLOGY: LAND USES AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL CONTEXT AND CRIME

Whereas one line of recent neighborhood research has placed an emphasis on zooming into smaller units of analysis such as street blocks, another line of research has suggested that even the meso‐area of neighborhoods is too narrow and that the area surrounding the neighborhood is also important. Thus, there is a need to examine the scale at which the social ecology impacts crime. We use data from seven cities from around the year 2000 to test our research questions using multilevel negative binomial regression models (N = 73,010 blocks and 8,231 block groups). Our results suggest that although many neighborhood factors seem to operate on the microscale of blocks, others seem to have a much broader impact. In addition, we find that racially and ethnically homogenous blocks within heterogeneous block groups have the most crime. Our findings also show the strongest results for a multitude of land‐use measures and that these measures sharpen some of the associations from social characteristics. Thus, we find that accounting for multiple scales simultaneously is important in ecological studies of crime.