Capital and the state system: a class act

This paper is set up as a critique of Alex Callinicos's Callinicos, Alex. 2007. Does capitalism need the state system?. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20(4): 533–549. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar] contribution, ‘Does capitalism need the state system?’ It challenges his understanding of the relationship between capitalism and the state system and the theory of imperialism, before presenting an alternative view that conceives the connection between capitalism and the state system as embodied in the formation of a transnational capitalist class holding power in an English-speaking, liberal Atlantic core or ‘heartland’, facing a series of ‘contender states’, which developed under state auspices. This constellation has to be analysed in its own right by applying the method of historical materialism to it, rather than confining that method to the analysis of capital and then bringing in state-centric International Relations. Today, the rise of China as the new contender illustrates how the combined process has evolved. The response to China comes from the larger constellation of the West and not just from the United States: the capitalist class acts to ensure the sovereignty of capital in the process.     

The Intergenerational Transmission of Violent Offending

The current study examines the intergenerational transmission and concentration of violent offending using conviction data of 3,440 persons from three consecutive generations from the Dutch Transfive study. Violent offending is more concentrated within nuclear families than non-violent offending, and the intergenerational transmission of violent offending is stronger than the intergenerational transmission of non-violent offending. Due to the low prevalence of violent offending by women, only transmission from father to son is studied. Paternal violent offending before the birth of the son does not increase the son’s risk to become violent, while paternal violent offending during the son’s childhood and adolescence does. These results suggest that exposure to paternal violence plays an important role in the intergenerational transmission of violent offending.     

The plundering of Zambian resources by Frederick Chiluba and his friends: A case study of the interaction between national politics and the international drive towards good governance

This article analyses the accusations that have emerged since2001 of predatory behaviour during the presidency of FrederickT. Chiluba (1991–2001). It advocates a detailed analysisof the practices that have come to light in order to move beyonda generalized interpretation of the persistence of predatoryelites in Africa. Three specific themes appear. First, thereis a danger of oversimplification of these conflicts as betweenthe international community and national governments. The politicalstruggles tend to be more complicated than generally presented,and international involvement meshes with local political struggles.Second, predatory behaviour or corruption is a social processthat is embedded in wider national and international networks.It is therefore difficult to locate culpability exactly in clearlydesignated protagonists. Third, there is a danger of imputingan economic and political rationality to this behaviour whichmay best be designated as theft. The overall theme of the articleis that there are important national cultural influences inthe way these predatory practices are dealt with. These areobfuscated by a blander critique identifying partial reformthat leaves predatory elites untouched.     

Justice and Feelings: Toward a New Era in Justice Research

In this special issue, the relationship between feelings and justice and its consequences are highlighted. Five articles discuss the role that affect, feelings, and emotions play in justice processes across a variety of social settings. In the present introductory article, the position of past and present justice research in relationship to these topics is briefly reviewed. In addition, reasons are outlined to show why a focus on these issues may be pivotal for a better understanding of social justice and how this may pave the way for a new, more process-oriented era in social justice research, focusing more on “hot” cognitive aspects as they pertain to social justice concerns.     

The Moral Superiority Effect: Self Versus Other Differences in Satisfaction with Being Overpaid

This paper focuses on how people think about their own and other's reactions to being overpaid. Two experiments investigate the discrepancy between people's own satisfaction and their perception of other's satisfaction with overpayment. The results of both experiments support our hypothesis that people think others are more satisfied with being overpaid than they are themselves. Our results are consistent with the idea that people think others are more influenced by egoism-based considerations whereas they themselves are more influenced by considerations of right and wrong. In other words, people show a moral superiority effect. In the general discussion, we argue why it is less likely to find moral superiority effects on people's reactions to being equally paid and underpaid, and we relate our findings to the literature of self-serving biases.     

Specifying the information effect: reference points and procedural justifications affect legal attitudes in four survey experiments

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Providing detailed information about sentencing reduces punitive attitudes of laymen (the information effect). We assess whether this extends to modest...     

On Justice Knowledge Activation: Evidence for Spontaneous Activation of Social Justice Inferences

This article focuses on how people infer the justness of events they encounter. Earlier justice research typically asked participants explicitly for their justice judgments. More recent research provided evidence for the possibility of spontaneous judgment inferences. The present research extends this study in three important ways: it provides strong evidence that (1) spontaneous social justice inferences can occur in multiple research paradigms, (2) these inferences constitute a process separate from spontaneous general evaluation of valence, and (3) spontaneous justice inferences covary with individual differences in sensitivity to justice. We provide evidence for these three conclusions by means of important implicit measurement research paradigms that we specifically tailored to study justice inferences: the probe recognition paradigm and the grid-relearning paradigm. We discuss the implications of our findings for both the literatures on justice and spontaneous inferences.     

A Self-Activation Hypothesis of Affective Reactions to Fair and Unfair Events: Evidence for Supraliminal and Subliminal Processes

Building and extending on justice theories and work on self-regulation, the current paper proposes a self-activation hypothesis of affective reactions to fair and unfair events, stating that in circumstances in which people’s selves are activated, stronger affective reactions to fair and unfair events are more likely, compared to circumstances in which people’s selves are not or less strongly activated. Findings of two experiments indeed show that simply activating the self (supraliminally or even subliminally) amplifies affective reactions to fair and unfair procedures (Experiment 1) and fair and unfair outcomes (Experiment 2). These findings thus reveal the important role of activation of the self for understanding fairness reactions. In the discussion, we note the relevance of our self-activation hypothesis for insights into different accounts formulated in the justice domain.     

A Self-Regulation Hypothesis of Coping with an Unjust World: Ego-Depletion and Self-Affirmation as Underlying Aspects of Blaming of Innocent Victims

People have a need to Belief in a Just World (BJW) in which people get what they deserve. When people are confronted with an event which threatens this BJW (e.g. when they witness a girl falling victim to rape), people try to maintain their existing beliefs, for example, by blaming the innocent victim for her ill fate. We argue that this defensive process of blaming innocent victims in essence stems from self-regulatory failure. In accordance with this line of reasoning, our first experiment shows that when self-regulatory resources were depleted (i.e. in the case of high ego-depletion) before BJW threatening information describing an innocent victim of a rape crime, the effect of BJW threat on victim blaming amplified. Study 2 shows that when self-regulation was facilitated by means of self-affirmation after the BJW threatening information, the effect of BJW threat on victim blaming vanished. Taken together, our findings suggest that coping with BJW threats involve self-regulatory processes leading to more or less defensive reactions (like blaming innocent victims). When people’s self-regulatory resources are depleted, they react more negatively to innocent victims when they constitute a stronger threat to the BJW. Facilitating self-regulation, by means of self-affirmation, enables people to cope with BJW threatening information, thereby inhibiting the urge to blame innocent victims.