Variability in Citizens’ Reactions to Different Types of Negative Campaigns

Do negative advertisements lower voters’ evaluations of the targeted candidate? We theorize that there is much to be gained by examining the variance in the content and tone of negative campaign messages and the variance in voters’ sensitivity to negative political rhetoric. We employ data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to investigate the impact of negative campaigning in U.S. Senate campaigns. We sampled 1,045 respondents in 21 of the 28 U.S. Senate races featuring a majority party incumbent and challenger. In addition to the survey data, we collected contextual data regarding the political advertisements aired during the campaigns and the news coverage of these campaigns in state newspapers. The evidence suggests that the impact of negative information is multifaceted, and under some circumstances, substantial. We find that uncivil and relevant negative messages are the most powerful, especially for people with less tolerance for negative political rhetoric.     

Contracting for Indigenous Health Care: Towards Mutual Accountability

In Australia and other industrialised countries, governments contract with the non‐government sector for the provision of primary health care to indigenous peoples. Australian governments have developed policies and funding programs to support this health sector, but the current arrangements are unduly complex and fragmented. The results of our study show that the complex contractual environment for Aboriginal Community‐Controlled Health Services (ACCHSs) and their funders is an unintended but inevitable result of a quasi‐classical approach to contracts applied by multiple funders. The analysis in this article highlights potential policy and program changes that could improve the effectiveness of funding and accountability arrangements, based on the use of an alliance contracting model, better performance indicators and greater clarity in the relative roles of national and jurisdictional governments.     

Bordering solidarities: migrant activism and the politics of movement and camps at Calais

The proliferation of more restrictive border controls governing global mobility provides important sites of crystallization through which differentiated and stratified rights to movement are produced, negotiated, and reimagined. One such form, the detention of migrants, is often understood through a logic of exception as the exclusion of unwanted migrants from the borders of the political community. Critical scholarship on detention informed by an autonomous migration perspective suggests a more nuanced reading of detention as the differential inclusion of migrants through positions of precariousness, transformations of legal statuses and subjectivities, and control over the direction and temporality of migratory flows. Building on this trajectory, this paper argues that the very meaning of the camp also needs to be brought into the analysis of a politics of migration and of control. For spaces of detention are sites of contestation that can be used by migrants (and those in solidarity with them) as resources to navigate border controls, reimagine political community and subjectivities and through which migrants engage in practices of citizenship. Reflecting on the destruction of the migrant camps in and around Calais, the paper examines three different images of the camp space known as ‘the jungle’ and draws attention to camp spaces as social and political spaces, in which the struggles to define them are an integral part of what is at stake in the struggle between a politics of control and a politics of migration.     

Trust in a Time of Increasing Diversity: On the Relationship between Ethnic Heterogeneity and Social Trust in Denmark from 1979 until Today

This article examines the impact of ethnic diversity in Danish municipalities on citizens' social trust over the last three decades. During this period, Danish society has grown increasingly ethnically diverse, and this begs the question whether this has influenced trust in others negatively. Existing evidence from the Anglo‐Saxon countries would suggest that this is the case, whereas evidence from the European continent mainly suggests that no link exists between ethnic diversity and social trust. The empirical analysis uses individual‐level data on social trust from several surveys in Denmark in the period from 1979 to 2009 coupled with diversity at the municipality level. Individual‐level measures of trust over time enable estimation of the impact of changes in ethnic diversity within municipalities on social trust and, it is argued, thereby a more precise estimate of the effect of ethnic diversity on trust. The results suggest that social trust is negatively affected by ethnic diversity. The article concludes by discussing this result and suggest avenues for further research.     

Differentiating cause-of-death terminology for deaths coded as sudden infant death syndrome, accidental suffocation, and unknown cause: an investigation using US death certificates, 2003-2004

We compared written text on infant death certificates for deaths coded as sudden infant death syndrome (R95), unknown cause (R99), and accidental suffocation (W75). Using US mortality files supplemented with the death certifiers' written text for all infant deaths with International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 assigned codes R95, R99, and W75, we formed cause-of-death subcategories from common themes identified from the written text. Among all infant deaths in 2003-2004, the underlying cause of death was listed as R99 for 2128 deaths, R95 for 4408 deaths, and W75 for 931 deaths. Among the postneonatal deaths, the differences in subcategories varied between assigned ICD-10 codes: for R99-coded deaths, 45.8% were categorized as "Unknown" and 48.6% as "Pending"; for R95-coded deaths, 67.7% were categorized as "sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)"; and for W75-coded deaths, 76.4% were categorized as "Suffocation." Examination of the written text on the death certificates demonstrates variability in the assigned ICD-10 codes which could have an important effect on the estimates of SIDS cases in the United States.     

(1S,2S)-1-Methylamino-1-phenyl-2-chloropropane: Route specific marker impurity of methamphetamine synthesized from ephedrine via chloroephedrine

Identification of route specific marker impurities of (S)-(+)-methamphetamine can provide us with very useful information for (S)-(+)-methamphetamine abuse criminal investigation. (1S,2S)-(+)-Chloropseudoephedrine and (1R,2S)-(-)-chloroephedrine are well known impurities of (S)-(+)-methamphetamine synthesized by metal catalyzed hydrogenation of (1R,2S)-(-)-ephedrine or (1S,2S)-(+)-pseudoephedrine. In this report (1S,2S)-1-methylamino-1-phenyl-2-chloropropane is identified as a route specific marker impurity from metal catalyzed hydrogenation method for the synthesis of (1R,2S)-(-)-ephedrine or (1S,2S)-(+)-pseudoephedrine via its chloro-derivative. (1S,2S)-1-Methylamino-1-phenyl-2-chloropropane is a ring-opening compound of cis-1,2-dimethyl-3-phenylaziridine by reacting with HCl in high temperature condition of GC inlet.     

The effectiveness of reintegrative shaming and restorative justice conferences: focusing on juvenile offenders' perceptions in Australian reintegrative shaming experiments

This article examines the effectiveness of diversionary restorative justice (RJ) conferences through the eyes of juvenile offenders. In Australia, Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE) are based on Braithwaite's theory of reintegrative shaming. Previous studies, although showing that RISE reported high levels of victim satisfaction and positive changes in the attitudes of offenders, also demonstrated that it has different outcomes for juvenile offenders depending on the type of offense with which they were charged. However, the effectiveness of RISE in terms of the offenders' perceptions has not been addressed, and the impact of the offenders' perceptions about RISE still remains under investigation. Using Australian data from RISE between 1995 and 1999, this article examines juvenile offenders' perceptions on preventing reoffending, repaying the victim and society, and the degree of repentance. The data were taken from interviews with juvenile offenders to measure their perceptions after the court or RISE processing. A comparison of standard court processing effects and RISE on juvenile offending, including property crime, shoplifting, and violent offenses, was undertaken. The results from this study were somewhat inconsistent with previous research. In this study, there was no significant relationship between RJ conference and the offenders' own perceptions on the prevention of future offending. However, it was found that there were treatment effects on repaying the victim, repaying society, and the degree of feeling repentance, and that younger offenders wanted to repay the victim/society and feel repentance.