Forensic Facial Comparison: Issues of Admissibility in the Development of Novel Analytical Technique

Much contemporary debate in forensic science concerns validity and admissibility of scientific evidence in court. In this paper, three current approaches to facial identification—image superimposition, photogrammetry, and morphological analysis—are considered with regard to criteria for scientific evidence in the United States, and England, and Wales. The aim of the paper is to assess the extent to which facial image comparison meets criteria of admissibility in these jurisdictions. The method used is a comparative evaluation of the methods of facial image comparison and their underlying premises against the range of admissibility criteria reported in court rulings and relevant judicial and scientific inquiries in the United States and the United Kingdom. While the techniques of facial image comparison are generally accepted within their practitioner communities, they are not tested, and their error rates are unknown. On that basis, the methods of facial image comparison would appear not to meet the anticipated standards. They are, nevertheless, admitted in court in the United States, and England, and Wales. This paper concludes that further research in science and law will be necessary to more definitively establish admissibility of facial image comparison evidence, as it will for other nascent and novel methods that are potentially influential in court proceedings.     

¿Por qué prevalece el estado de derecho? una aproximación comparada a las explicaciones centradas en la cultura de la legalidad

The objective of this paper is to analyze the relation between the concept of the Rule of Law and the culture of legality from a compared approach in order to establish the scope and limitations of explanations that are based in cultural factors. More specifically, we are interested in comparing the scope and limitations of culture-based explanations on why the Rule of Law prevails in certain countries: these explanations are centered in the construction of wide agreements between social actors and the control by civil society. Also we consider equally important the comparing of different definitions of culture of legality and the strategies and instruments that allow its construction. For this purpose we will center, specially, in the experiences of Hong Kong, Palermo and Bogotá.     

Economic performance and turnout at national and local elections

This paper analyzes the impact of economic performance on voter turnout. We estimate an economic turnout model in which local economic variables are included in quadratic form, so that non-linear effects can be taken into account. We use panel datasets covering municipalities, from 1979 to 2005, and cross-sections of parishes (freguesias) to analyze the determinants of turnout at Portuguese municipal and legislative elections. The empirical results indicate that the performance of the national economy is important only in legislative elections and that the regional and local unemployment rates tend to have non-linear relationships to turnout. The results obtained for Flemish municipalities also provide evidence in favor of a non-linear effect of unemployment on turnout.     

The Push and Pull of Ministerial Resignations in Germany, 1969–2005

When and why are cabinet ministers forced out of office? We argue that ministerial resignations cannot be understood as mechanistic consequences of serious personal or departmental errors as the classical responsibility hypothesis implies. Rather, they follow a systematic political logic. Cabinet ministers have to resign whenever the prime minister perceives the political costs of a minister staying in office to be higher than the benefits of keeping the status quo. We test this argument with resignation events in Germany in the period 1969 to 2005. Based on detailed data collection, we find 111 resignation events, i.e. serious public discussions about a cabinet minister's future, 14 of which ended in resignation. These data are analysed employing statistical as well as Qualitative Comparative Analysis based on Boolean algebra to detect patterns of ministerial resignations.     

On the Relationship between Violent Conflict and Wages in Colombia

We analyse how forced displacements caused by violent conflict are related to the wages of workers in Colombia. Using data from the Quality of Life Survey (2011–2014), we analyse the differences in wages between those forced by violence to move to other regions, and those who moved for other reasons. We apply Propensity Score Matching techniques to compare workers from the two groups, finding that forced displacement is related to decreases of between 10 and 29 per cent in the wages of males, and between 18 and 37 per cent in the wages of females, relative to their counterparts. Thus, forced displacements are related to poorer labour market outcomes in terms of wages.     

Distributive Politics and Regional Development: Assessing the Territorial Distribution of Turkey’s Public Investment

Turkey is often perceived as a country with low bureaucratic capacity and prone to political manipulation and ‘pork-barrel’. This article tests whether this is the case, by analysing the extent to which politics, rather than equity and efficiency criteria, have determined the geographical allocation of public investment across the 81 provinces of Turkey between 2005 and 2012. The results show that although the Turkish government has indeed channelled public expenditures to reward its core constituencies, socioeconomic factors remained the most relevant predictors of investment. Moreover, in contrast to official regional development policy principles, we uncover the concentration of public investment in areas with comparatively higher levels of development. We interpret this as the state bureaucracy’s intentional strategy of focussing on efficiency by concentrating resources on ‘the better off among the most in need’.     

Demobilization of Paramilitaries in Colombia: Transformation or Transition?

Historically, Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reinsertion (DDR) has provided a useful means to terminate conflicts. Since being catapulted to office in August 2002 with 53 percent of the vote of 46.45 percent of the voters, ¹ 1. IFES Election Guide, available at (http://www.electionguide.org/results.php?ID=1011). Colombian President Álvaro Uribe has vigorously pursued a demobilization program, both individual and collective. However, despite the fact that over 40,000 combatants have demobilized under these programs, evidence is growing that this latest round of Colombian DDR is merely transitioning, rather than terminating, violence in that Andean country.