“Legality with a Vengeance”: Reclaiming Distribution for Sociolegal Studies

The law and society community has argued for decades for an expansive understanding of what counts as “law.” But a content analysis of articles published in the Law & Society Review from its 1966 founding to the present finds that since the 1970s, the law and society community has focused its attention on laws in which the state regulates behavior, and largely ignored laws in which the state distributes resources, goods, and services. Why did socio‐legal scholars avoid studying how laws determine access to such things as health, wealth, housing, education, and food? We find that socio‐legal scholarship has always used “law on the books” as a starting point for analyses (often to identify departures in “law in action”) without ever offering a programmatic vision for how law might ameliorate economic inequality. As a result, when social welfare laws on the books began disappearing, socio‐legal scholarship drifted away from studying law's role in creating, sustaining, and reinforcing economic inequality. We argue that socio‐legal scholarship offers a wide range of analytical tools that could make important contributions to our understanding of social welfare provision.     

The Muslim Brotherhood and the Emerging ‘Shia Crescent’

To form a more prudent foreign policy toward the Muslim Brotherhood, we must understand it not only as a domestic actor, but also as a major regional player. In fact, the Brotherhood has a complex relationship with Iran and the Shias, which blurs the lines of the so-called Shia Crescent. This article addresses the Muslim Brotherhood's foreign/regional policy by analyzing its attitude toward the Shias and Iran, thus placing it within the context of the emerging regional order. Addressing the complex relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Shias/Iran will help to clarify the regional fallout were the Brotherhood to gain control of a major Sunni Arab state. This is a vital issue for policy makers who are considering the U.S. position vis-à-vis the Brotherhood.     

Why candidate divergence should be expected to be just as great (or even greater) in competitive seats as in non-competitive ones

Basic Downsian theory predicts candidate convergence toward the views of the median voter in two-candidate elections. Common journalistic wisdom, moreover, leads us to expect these centripetal pressures to be strongest when elections are expected to be close. Yet, the available evidence from the US Congress disconfirms this prediction. To explain this counterintuitive result, we develop a spatial model that allows us to understand the complex interactions of political competition, partisan loyalties, and incentives for voter turnout that can lead office-seeking candidates, especially candidates in close elections, to emphasize policy appeals to their voter base rather than courting the median voter.     

Increasing irrationality? The equilibrium relationship between electoral and legislative party system size, 1950–2005

Institutional theories of party system size tell us that voters and parties should anticipate the mechanical effects of electoral systems and adjust their behaviour accordingly. If these expectations hold true, then the size of the party system at the electoral and legislative levels should maintain a long-run equilibrium relationship, as the number of parties receiving votes is adjusted in response to the number of parties in the legislature. I estimate a series of error-correction models to examine this expectation in 16 Western democracies from 1950 to 2005. Party system size at the electoral level does exhibit a general, equilibrium relationship with party system size in the legislature. However, this relationship has recently disappeared in single-member-district systems. This growing disparity between party system size at the electoral and legislative levels signals important changes in the nature of electoral representation.     

Police Information Technology: Assessing the Effects of Computerization on Urban Police Functions

Municipal police agencies are major users of information technology, and much remains to be learned about the effects of computerization on police operations. This article examines computerization in 188 municipal police agencies in 1993 in cities with populations of 100,000 or more. Relationships among computer hardware, police-file computerization, and police functions are examined. Cities are categorized as low, medium, and high levels of computerization to uncover differences in expenditures and police-officer allocation. Personal computers and mainframes supported file computerization of management and administration, throughput, and crime evidence. Management and administration files influenced computerization of police functions, particularly for management and crime solutions. Highly computerized cities reported larger shares of employees in technical positions, spent more per capita, and reported fewer officers per capita than cities with lower computerization levels. These relationships held after controlling for independent influences such as density, fiscal capacity, crime levels, and population.     

Changes in the Location of the Median Voter in theU.S. House of Representatives, 1963–1996

We consider the degree of ideological polarizationwithin and between the parties in the U.S. House ofRepresentatives for the period 1963–1996, using theGroseclose, Levitt and Snyder (1996) adjustment method for ADA and ACU scores to ensure over timecomparability of roll call voting data. We focusespecially on the median House member, since webelieve that change in the median offers a bettermeasure of the impact of the change in party controlthan does changes in the mean roll-call votingscore. Our data analysis makes two general points. First andforemost, when we looked at the change in the locationof the House median voter, we found a dramatic changeafter the Republicans gained a majority in the House in1994. After the Republicans became a majority in theHouse, the ADA median in the House in 1995–1996 was at24, far closer to the Republican median of 4 than tothe Democratic median of 83. The shift in medianfrom 1993–1994 to 1994–1995 involved a change of over 25points in one election – far and away the greatestsingle shift in ideology of the modern era. Incontrast, the mean changed only 1 point overthis same period. Second, for the three decades weinvestigated, we found three historical epochs vis a visthe relative locations of the ADA (or ACU) floormedian and the ADA (or ACU) floor mean in the U.S.House of Representatives – two inflection points in1983 and 1994 which are related to trends in regionalrealignment.     

Assimilation and contrast effects in voter projections of party locations: Evidence from Norway, France, and the USA

In the standard Downsian model, voters are assumed to choose parties based on the extent of ideological proximity between the voter's own position and that of the party. Yet it is also well known that there are rationalization and projection effects such that voters tend to misestimate the policy platforms of candidates or parties to which they are sympathetic by overstating the correspondence between those positions and the voter's own preferences (see, e.g., Markus & Converse 1979; Granberg & Brent 1980; Granberg & Holmberg 1988; Merrill & Grofman 1999). Here we follow insights in the psychological literature on persuasion (Sherif & Hovland 1961; Parducci & Marshall 1962) by distinguishing between assimilation and contrast effects. Assimilation refers to shortening the perceived ideological distance between oneself and parties one favors; contrast refers to exaggerating the distance to parties for which one does not intend to vote. Using survey data on voter self–placements and party placements on ideological scales for the seven major Norwegian parties, five major French parties, and two major American parties we show that both assimilation and contrast effects are present in each country to a considerable degree.We also investigate the possible effects of randomness in party placement and scale interpretation – effects that can easily be confounded with assimilation but not so easily with contrast.     

Democratic engagement in the digital age: youth,social media and participatory politics in Kenya

As the communication world becomes more complex and participatory, social networking sites (SNSs) have emerged as a platform with the potential to invigorate democracy and political engagement. However, the value of SNSs in politics remains contested among researchers. The study reported on in this article was based on a survey of 600 university students, aged between18 and 35, to examine the relationship between social media use and political engagement among the youth in Kenya. The study focused on the extent to which SNSs facilitate consumption of political information and the role of SNSs in influencing political interest, knowledge and behaviour among the youth. The study found that reliance on SNSs is positively associated with political participation; however, this influence is limited, and though useful, it does not radically transform political engagement. Therefore, the capacity of SNSs to shape opinion and influence political preferences is limited but internet based political activities like posting and distributing campaign information and consumption of political content have a bearing on political participation. The study concluded that while SNSs do not seem to have a major direct impact on political choices among users, politicians and other campaign actors cannot ignore the opportunity provided by these platforms in the voter mobilisation process.     

Platforms for institutional change: assessing the potential of livelihood enhancement groups as community entry points in Zambia

To address the livelihood problems faced by the poor and vulnerable in Northern Province of Zambia, a novel collective action approach called livelihoods enhancement groups (LEGs) was used as a platform for facilitating research on development initiatives to generate change. Using focus group discussions and key informant interviews, this article assesses the potential of using the LEGs approach in generating change. The livelihood changes observed arose with the LEG as a platform through which different knowledge nodes interacted. Livelihood areas that LEGs affected included crop production, livestock production, nutrition, and access to credit.     

Pathological counterinsurgency: the failure of imposing legitimacy in El Salvador,Afghanistan, and Iraq

Many voices in the US policy community have suggested that El Salvador provided a model for US counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on the unsound contention that elections increased government legitimacy and effectiveness. The same flawed assessments were present in counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan – unfounded assumptions that elections would increase legitimacy and improve institutional performance and human rights records lead to inaccurate analysis and bad strategy. Indeed, the US experience calls into question the ability of even a great power to impose legitimacy on a partner in order to wage counterinsurgency. Assuming that elections will advance such legitimacy is a dangerous pathology.