Crime Victims’ Perceptions of Police Behavior,Legitimacy, and Cooperation: A Review of the Literature

According to Tyler’s theoretical framework, police officers can motivate cooperation among citizens during direct interactions by using fair procedures and by showing how the police perform their job in combating crime. By conducting a systematic literature review, prior research was examined to see whether perceptions of procedural justice and police performance result in higher levels of perceived legitimacy of the police institution, and in turn whether this perceived legitimacy stimulates cooperative behavior among crime victims specifically. Results of the 15 included studies indicate that partial support for the applicability of this framework on crime victims was found. However, none of the included studies tested all relationships within the framework simultaneously among crime victims; they typically focused only on one of the interrelationships between the frameworks’ key concepts. Implications for future research and police practice are discussed.     

“Journalism ideology” and its influence on the producers of Radio Sonder Grense radio current affairs

In the same way that people can have a political or a personal ideology, their professional identities and how they practise a craft or an occupation may be influenced by what can be labelled as a “professional ideology”. Through conducting interviews with the producers of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) Afrikaans radio programmes Monitor, Spektrum and Naweek-Aktueel, this article reports on research which showed that there is indeed such a thing as a “journalism ideology”. The interviews focused on how “internal influences” – such as a journalist's background and training, newsroom routines – and “external influences” – such as the audience – influenced the decisions they made in choosing news stories and producing content. This “journalism ideology” influences the producers and in turn the news content of these current affairs programmes that are listened to daily by almost two million listeners. The conclusion drawn from the study is that, although the participants’ “journalism ideology” largely determines the news stories for their programmes, structural forces, newsroom routines and organisational constraints often dictate their actions. Finally, although all the participants saw themselves as “watchdogs of democracy”, internal pressures within the SABC could endanger that role.     

Political Parties and Minority Governance in Hybrid Political Orders: Reflections from Lebanon’s Palestinian Settlements and Kosovo’s Serbian Enclaves

This article analyses how minority populations govern and are governed in South Lebanon’s informal Palestinian settlements and the Serbian enclave in North Kosovo. Drawing on literature about hybrid political orders, it is argued that in both settings political parties play a linchpin role in local governance. Based on this finding, three key functions of political parties in the governance of minority populations in hybrid political orders are identified: representation, provision and brokerage. Understanding the interdependencies and trade-offs between these different roles contributes to remedying the analytical blind spot regarding the nature, positions and roles of political parties in hybrid political orders.     

Creativity in local government: Definition and determinants

In current thinking about public service improvement, civil servant creativity plays an important role. Using the results of 43 semi‐structured interviews, we assessed the degree to which our theoretical knowledge about creativity—based primarily on business research—matches the insights of managers in local government. Respondents considered employee creativity to be important, but—in contrast to the literature—understood creativity as the act of trying out new things to better deal with specific problems at hand instead of developing new ideas potentially applicable to a wider context. As such, respondents did not see creativity as the main precondition for innovation. In line with the literature, there is little consistency across respondents about individual‐ and context‐level determinants of creativity. Lastly, respondents put forward several factors that have received little attention in the literature but are particularly relevant in understanding differences in work‐related creativity in the context of local government.     

The Party Paradox: a Comment Nicolas van de Walle (Cornell) February 20, 2018

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes several stylized facts and implications concerning intra-party violence developed in the other articles of this special issue on intra-party violence in African electoral systems. It then turns more specifically to the implications of intra-party violence for democratic consolidation in the region, and argues that paradoxically, though parties are centrally important to democratic politics, the degree to which they are internally inclusive and participatory may not have much importance, or may indeed undermine democracy. Though they are perhaps the key actor on the path to a consolidated democracy, they tend to work best when they themselves are not internally democratic.     

Thinking alike: two pathways to leadership-candidate opinion congruence

This paper seeks to explain why party candidates and their party leadership have congruent policy positions or not. Despite its importance as a way through which parties are able to behave as a unitary actor, this congruence has never been studied as a dependent variable. We seek to fill this void in the literature. Our results suggest that leadership-candidate congruence comes about through two mechanisms: selection and learning. With selection, the party leadership aims to get those candidates elected whose policy preferences are congruent with the party line. Learning occurs through the process of socialization in which candidates assume the views of the party they work and candidate for as their own under. This happens under the pressure of cognitive dissonance. If a candidate learns about the position of the leadership and notices that they are incongruent, they may feel discomfort and change their opinion to be congruent with the party.     

In the Shadow of the Ombudsman: Civil Society and the Struggle for an Independent Human Rights Institution in St Petersburg,Russia

Abstract

National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) have become hallmarks of good governance and democracy. Although many countries have an NHRI, it remains unclear how they operate on the regional level in political systems where democracy malfunctions and human rights are under pressure. Drawing on interviews, this essay examines how Russian nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) established a shadow Ombudsman—the Human Rights Council (HRC)—to protest against the appointment of an Ombudsman in St Petersburg and put pressure on authorities to inaugurate a new and independent Ombudsman. Although we would expect relations between the Ombudsman and NGOs to deteriorate when civil society is under pressure, this essay finds that political repression and the persona of the current Ombudsman, Alexander Shishlov, have brought civil society and the Ombudsman closer together.     

Gender models: changing representations and intersecting roles in Dutch and Italian fashion magazines, 1982–2011

This article presents a comparative content analysis of gender representation in fashion magazines in Italy and the Netherlands. Updating Goffman’s classic study of Gender Advertisements, we study the intersections of gender, professional role, country and time in media representation. Thus, we combine and confront quantitative content analysis with insights from critical gender studies on polysemy and intersectionality. Analyzing a sample of 5840 images from mainstream, commercial and high fashion magazines published in 1982, 1996 and 2011, we find that gender representation strongly intersects with time, place, and notably: professional role. Models, who represent the specific ‘aesthetic capital’ of the fashion field, are portrayed in highly specific ways. Over time, gender differences in representation become stronger in Italy, while in the Netherlands male and female representation converges towards conventionally ‘feminine’ styles. In both countries, we find increasing prominence of (North-American) Goffmanian gender conventions and a new ‘withdrawn’ gendered style emerging in the early 2000s. This new style employs new signs and conventions to denote gender and professional status: it separates men from women, and models from non-models. Our analysis shows, first, that gender representation does not directly reflect gender inequality. Second, it demonstrates the impact of globalization on gender representation. Third, it highlights the polysemy and cultural specificity of visual signs: gender difference can be ‘ritualized’ and ‘stylized’ in various ways. These diverse gendered conventions intersect with other characteristics, and may convey diverse, and changing messages about the relation between gender and sexuality, power, aesthetics and (visual) pleasure.