Responsibility, Luck, and the 'Equality of What?' Debate

Ronald Dworkin's recently published book, Sovereign Virtue (hereafter SV), appeals to arguments that are popular within, and ideas that are fundamental to, liberal egalitarianism. These arguments and ideas need to be distinguished and unpacked. The purpose of this paper is partly to do this and to cast doubt on the adequacy of various moves made by Dworkin. In addition, and more importantly I argue that the analysis of the 'equality of what?' debate reveals a tension at the heart of contemporary liberal egalitarianism between the Kantian aspiration to eliminate luck and the contemporary aspiration to do political philosophy without metaphysics.     

Validation of a short aggression inventory for law enforcement

This study cross-validates a short aggression inventory using a sample of 250 law enforcement professionals. The instrument under investigation is the 12-question modified version of the Buss-Perry Aggression Scale (Buss & Perry, 1992). Statistical and external validation methods were used to ascertain the appropriateness of this scale's use with law enforcement professionals. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that both the firstorder, four-factor model, {ie12-1}, GFI=.94, NFI=.84, NNFI=.88, and CFI=.91, and the second-order model with a single, global Aggression “super” factor, {ie12-2}, GFI=.94, NFI=.84, NNFI=.89, and CFI=.91, provided a reasonable goodness-of-fit to the data. Subscales of this instrument correlated meaningfully with departmental measures of citizen complaints for physical and verbal aggression by officers, as well as the number of shooting incidents in which the officers were involved. The need for a short measure of aggression is discussed and applications in law enforcement are offered.     

Prizes and Parasites: Incentive Models for Addressing Chagas Disease

Recent advances in immunology have provided a foundation of knowledge to understand many of the intricacies involved in manipulating the human response to fight parasitic infections, and a great deal has been learned from malaria vaccine efforts regarding strategies for developing parasite vaccines. There has been some encouraging progress in the development of a Chagas vaccine in animal models. A prize fund for Chagas could be instrumental in ensuring that these efforts are translated into products that benefit patients.     

Impermanent Apologies: on the Dynamics of Timing and Public Knowledge in Political Apology

Political apologies are commonly imagined as gestures of finality and closure: capstone moments that summate public knowledge. One manifestation of these assumptions is the position that apologies should be timed to come only after appropriate investigation into the wrongdoing has been completed. This article takes a different view, for two reasons. First, even apologies that seem based on robust knowledge can come to seem incomplete or inadequate in the light of subsequent learning and knowledge. Second, because apologies are complexly embedded in longer-term processes of activism and response, they can contribute to their own unravelling by encouraging further consideration and inquiry. We develop these arguments by considering two Canadian cases that illustrate these dynamics: apologies that addressed, respectively, the wartime internment of Japanese Canadians and the policy of forcing Indigenous children to attend residential schools.     

Ideological Congruence and Electoral Institutions

Although the literature examining the relationship between ideological congruence and electoral rules is quite large, relatively little attention has been paid to how congruence should be conceptualized. As we demonstrate, empirical results regarding ideological congruence can depend on exactly how scholars conceptualize and measure it. In addition to clarifying various aspects of how scholars currently conceptualize congruence, we introduce a new conceptualization and measure of congruence that captures a long tradition in democratic theory emphasizing the ideal of having a legislature that accurately reflects the preferences of the citizenry as a whole. Our new measure is the direct counterpart for congruence of the vote-seat disproportionality measures so heavily used in comparative studies of representation. Using particularly appropriate data from the  Comparative Study of Electoral Systems,  we find that governments in proportional democracies are not substantively more congruent than those in majoritarian democracies. Proportional democracies are, however, characterized by more representative legislatures.     

A Comparative Study of Resource Nationalism in Russia and Kazakhstan 2004–2008

In neighbouring countries like Russia and Kazakhstan, resource nationalism that may look similar to outside observers has a different character and is driven by different circumstances in each state. To assess the underlying nature of state-centric models of resource-led development in the two post-Soviet states, we contrast recent state interventions into their respective resource sectors. In Russia, heightened state involvement in the resource sectors, including oil and gas pipeline networks, is characterised mainly by political goals, whereas Kazakhstan's resource nationalism is primarily motivated by economic goals. More specifically, Russia leverages its energy sector to achieve geopolitical objectives and domestic political stability. By contrast, Kazakhstan seeks widely dispersed economic development.     

Toward a quantitative typology of burglars: a latent profile analysis of career offenders

Burglary is a serious, costly, and prevalent crime but prior typologies of burglars are mostly speculative and based on qualitative data. Using a sample of 456 adult career criminals, the current study used latent profile analysis to construct a methodologically rigorous quantitative typology. Four classes of burglars emerged: young versatile, vagrant, drug-oriented, and sexual predators. All groups demonstrated significant involvement in varied forms of crime, but the sexual predator group was the most violent and had the most serious criminal careers. Connections to the criminal career literature are offered and suggestions for further empirical study of offender typologies are discussed.