Community,Authorities, and Support for Vigilantism: Experimental Evidence

Vigilante justice challenges the state’s monopoly over the use of violence and as such has come to the attention of a growing body of political scholars. However, still little is known about the circumstances that foster support for citizens circumventing the state to confront crime directly. I argue that citizens’ perceptions of a trusting community, on the one hand, and an untrustworthy law enforcement, on the other, jointly influence their support for this kind of behavior. I test these hypotheses using a lab-in-the-field experiment in Mexico, a case in which the expansion of vigilante organizations has posed a serious challenge to the state. I find that participants are more supportive of a vigilante action when those considering said action are described to be inserted within a trustworthy community. Furthermore, I find that this effect is moderated by the described trustworthiness of law enforcement. These results contribute to our understanding of the emergence of vigilantism, and how trust in authorities can moderate the normative expression of social capital.     

Maternalism,professionalism and industrial welfare supervisors in World War I Britain

Abstract

During World War I industrial welfare work was firmly established as an occupation, especially in munitions factories under the Ministry of Munitions. This article explores the significance of the fact that the majority of the welfare supervisors employed during the war were women. Welfare supervisors are one example of the ways in which middle-class women grasped career opportunities offered by the war. Much of their work epitomized contemporary concepts of ‘womanly' duties and was designed to protect women workers as mothers of the race. Women welfare supervisors were caught between the proto-welfare state's espousal of the ideology of maternalism, and their aspirations to professionalism. To claim the status of professionals meant, not only proving their abilities, but also conforming to masculine norms of efficiency, rationality, expertise, organisation and status. By the end of the war, women welfare supervisors who sought to stay in the field had built a strong central organisation which proclaimed industrial welfare work as a professional part of management. Women's entry into the managerial level through welfare work, consolidated after the war, challenged the patriarchal hierarchy and traditions of business and industry. Thus women welfare supervisors juggled the feminine and masculine definitions of their work, but increasingly stressed its masculine managerial dimensions to claim management status.     

The Pregnant Man and Criminal Law. Towards Generating a New European Approach

Criminal Law Forum - This article aims at promoting a new approach regarding criminal law and crimes that include a provision that relates to pregnancy. We thus try to set a starting point for...