Power Politics, Diplomacy and Role Playing: Simulating the UN Security Council's Response to Terrorism

In the International Organizations classroom, students learn a lot about the nuts and bolts of international organizations in theory, but do not always have the opportunity to understand how international organizations work in practice. Understanding negotiations, diplomacy and interstate relations is essential in understanding the strengths of weaknesses of international organizations. To this end, the use of in-class simulations, where each student represents a different country, can be an effective tool in teaching students about international organizations and global governance. This article describes a simulation run in an International Organizations class in the Fall 2002 semester. It involved a fictitious serious terrorist attack in Singapore during a performance of "Kiddush for Naomi" performed by the Israel Habima Theatre Company. The article describes the goals of the simulation, the preparation the students undertook throughout the semester, the implementation of the simulation itself, and the post-simulation debriefing and assessment of the students and lessons learned for future in-class simulations.     

Specialization in juvenile careers: Markov results for a California cohort

In this paper, we examine the arrest careers through September 1985 of a highly active cohort of youth paroled by the California Youth Authority in the early 1980s. Our results are in some ways similar to and in other ways different from those reported by other researchers. We find that while adjacent transition matrices appear constant, the same cannot be said for nonadjacent matrices. We reject the first-order Markov hypothesis and find support for specialization in the statistical significance of the forward specialization coefficients. Our results also suggest that, in addition to transitions to the same type of offense, an oscillating pattern of offending is common for our subjects. We also compare the transition matrices of three racial/ethnic and four regional groups. These results indicate differences in the patterns of offending by the racial/ethnic groups in our sample and similar offense-transition behavior in three of the four regions that differs significantly from that of the fourth region.Points of view are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy of the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, or U.S. General Accounting Office.     

Stalking acknowledgement and reporting among college women experiencing intrusive behaviors: Implications for the emergence of a “classic stalking case”

Research confirms the risk of victimization faced by women who attend the nation's universities. While stalking began to receive heightened attention in the 1990s, relative to other types of victimization, research regarding college women's stalking experiences is in its infancy. In particular, relatively little is known about victim acknowledgement of stalking and the process whereby victims decide to report to police. Drawing upon data from 1,010 female university students, this study provided important advances in understanding stalking-related victimization for college women, highlighting the influences that fear, offender relationship, types of behaviors involved, and other victimization experiences have on victim acknowledgement and police reporting. Findings offered important advancements in defining a “classic stalking case.” This study had implications for university and public policymakers, educators, and police officers who could benefit from improved understanding of women's perceptions of stalking and their formal help-seeking behavior in response to stalking-related behavior.     

Displacing Marginalized Bodies: How Human Rights Discourses Function in the Law and in Communities

In this article, we examine disability and eugenics discourses and the ways they function in spaces where vulnerable persons have been historically excluded by the state and blamed for their own “immiseration.” We ask how queer theories of repudiation, abjection, and vulnerability lend insight into the ways that people with intellectual disabilities are discursively located outside normative discourses of home, care, and quality of life, and whether these discourses shifted to serve this vulnerable population when historically the very places in question repudiated them, infringed on their human rights, and questioned their sexuality. To address these questions, we focus on the recent and impending closures of Virginia’s Training Centers, residential institutions for persons with intellectual disabilities now scheduled for staggered closures before 2020.     

Behind a veil of secrecy: animal abuse,factory farms,and Ag-Gag legislation

Abstract

For years, animal rights organizations have sought to expose animal cruelty on America’s factory farms. With the meat and dairy industry inaccessible to the public, animal advocates rely on undercover investigators who gain access to farms by becoming employees. Working from the inside, these investigators become whistleblowers when they reveal animal cruelty unrelated to the already inhumane conditions of animal husbandry. An effective strategy that has exposed animal abuse as well as conditions threatening to public health, in recent years the agriculture industry has pressured legislatures to enact laws that criminalize photography at factory farms. Dubbed ‘Ag-Gag’ laws by critics, the emergence of legislation targeting animal rights advocates raises important questions relevant to animal welfare, animal rights activism, and freedom of speech. This paper exposes the failure of government institutions to protect animals on factory farms while simultaneously silencing what is currently the only available mechanism for Americans to learn about abuse on factory farms. It also explores the Constitutional implications of Ag-Gag laws. Not only are Ag-Gag laws presumptively unconstitutional, but with their enactment – animal welfare remains unchanged, the American consumer remains uninformed, and America’s factory farms are free to abuse animals behind a legal veil of secrecy.     

The Private Interests of Public Officials: Financial Regulation in the US Congress

Legislators' private financial holdings affect policy decisions. Due to financial self‐interest, we theorize that legislators whose personal investment portfolios include equities from firms affected by proposed policies vote for legislation that benefits those firms. We also theorize that legislators with greater personal exposure to equity investments support policies that benefit equities markets generally. We create a novel data set of legislators' personal stock investments and examine major congressional actions since the 1990s on financial deregulation and market intervention. US House members who own stocks in firms who benefit from financial deregulation vote for deregulation. House members with greater exposure to financial and automotive stocks support the financial and auto bailouts, respectively. General exposure to equities markets is also associated with support for key legislation boosting markets. The normative implications are significant, as legislators' private interests influence decisions in the public sphere.     

How to Cautiously Uncover the “Black Box” of Machine Learning Models for Legislative Scholars

Machine learning models, especially ensemble and tree-based approaches, offer great promise to legislative scholars. However, they are heavily underutilized outside of narrow applications to text and networks. We believe this is because they are difficult to interpret: while the models are extremely flexible, they have been criticized as “black box” techniques due to their difficulty in visualizing the effect of predictors on the outcome of interest. In order to make these models more useful for legislative scholars, we introduce a framework integrating machine learning models with traditional parametric approaches. We then review three interpretative plotting strategies that scholars can use to bring a substantive interpretation to their machine learning models. For each, we explain the plotting strategy, when to use it, and how to interpret it. We then put these plots in action by revisiting two recent articles from Legislative Studies Quarterly.     

Identifying Predictors for Children Witnessing Intimate Partner Violence

Research has shown that intimate partner violence (IPV) prevalence and severity is higher and IPV duration is longer among couples that have children. Women frequently report that their children are the reason why they stay, leave, or return to an IPV relationship. Our study used results from a two-wave telephone survey to determine what IPV-associated factors were significant predictors of respondents’ children witnessing IPV, as well as estimating prevalence of children’s exposure to violence. We found that an increase in respondents’ age was significantly associated with increased odds of a child being exposed to violence. We also found that children witnessing violence were almost twice as likely to have mothers who reported leaving abusers. We hypothesize that increasing age corresponds to improved confidence in help-seeking behaviors. Our findings represent an important first step for future research on understanding how children influence IPV victims’ decision-making in seeking out service providers for help.