Reconciling Sexism and Women’s Support for Republican Candidates: A Look at Gender,Class, and Whiteness in the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Races

Political Behavior - Much of the gender gap literature focuses on women’s greater average liberalism relative to men. This approach masks considerable heterogeneity in political identity and...     

Gambling, substance use, and other problem behaviors among youth: A test of general deviance models

Understanding the relationships between youthful gambling, substance use, and other problem behaviors is of interest to researchers studying deviance and to policymakers developing improved prevention strategies. This study used first-order and second-order factor models to test the hypothesis that gambling, alcohol misuse, other drug use, and delinquency were manifestations of a single general deviance construct. Respondents were seventeen to twenty-one year-old youth who were interviewed in two separate general population studies. Contrary to the hypothesis, the second-order model with a single deviance construct did not fit as well as a model specifying only correlations among all first-order factors. A single latent variable representing general deviant behavior did not explain deviance as well as distinct types of problem behaviors. This was true for overall samples and for gender-specific subgroups. Thus, while problem behaviors were related, there also must be uncorrelated antecedents predicting distinct types of youthful problem behaviors.     

Law's Allure and an Interbranch Perspective on Law and Politics

This essay views Gordon Silverstein's book Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics (2009) from the perspective of the burgeoning interbranch literature on law and courts, which seeks to place judicial decision making within the context of ongoing political and policy-making processes. It argues that Law's Allure reflects the strengths and weaknesses of this literature. On the plus side, it compellingly reinterprets the concept of legal precedent in political terms, showing how the content of judicial decisions serves as an iterative framing mechanism within and across various policy areas. On the downside, it struggles to provide a rigorous framework for analyzing the risks of the juridification of American politics. Despite any weaknesses, its attempt to map different pathways of legalistic court-based policy development in diverse settings represents a useful step for those interested in bringing the study of law and courts back into the core of analyzing American politics and policy making.     

Extricating the state: The move to competitive capture in post-communist Bulgaria

This article uses the Bulgarian case to analyse movement from a situation of what appeared to be a ‘Partial-Reform Equilibrium’ to an ‘Equilibrium of Competitive Capture’. In such a process, elections are important forces for change, but not because they bring reformist parties to power or lead to completed economic liberalisation. Instead, especially in the first several electoral cycles in a new democracy, they can bring to power new leaders who are not beholden to existing captors, but rather to other clients that would like to capture the state for their own interests. Over time, the country experiences a parade of captors, eventually leading to a system where no single group owns the state, but where it is still not insulated. Instead, several competing groups fight with each other to raid it for their own benefits.     

Making Way: Legal Mobilization,Organizational Response,and Wheelchair Access

Questions of how and why organizations respond to legal rights are analyzed in several sociolegal research traditions, including studies of legal mobilization, regulation, and neo‐institutionalist accounts of the diffusion of organizational structures. Using original qualitative and quantitative data, this article examines the responses of ten organizations to wheelchair access rights that are found in various provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and related state laws. We find that concepts from each of the research traditions are useful in understanding the sources of variance in response among the organizations in our sample. We focus on four key variables: legal mobilization, commitment, professionalization, and routinization. We contend that these variables offer a relatively parsimonious language for studying organizational responses to the law and for aggregating insights from competing approaches in the literature, both of which are essential to advancing our understanding of the conditions under which law changes society.