Hannah Arendt's Moral Ontology: Comments on David Luban's Arendt on the Crime of Crimes

David Luban identifies a tension between Arendt's conception of ethnic identification in a context of persecution and her conception of humanity. That tension pertains to the reality—or realities—that Arendt addresses: the moral reality of her Bildung that appears throughout her work, and is centered on the “dignity of man,” on the one hand, and the divisive, “political” reality that she was forced to face when “attacked as a Jew,” on the other. By implicitly accepting that in a context of persecution one cannot escape the framing relevance of the “political” —an idea that is also present in her imaginary condemnation speech of Eichmann—Arendt betrays a fundamental theme of her work: “forgiveness” and the inherent possibility of a “new beginning.”     

Triangulation of Salient Studies to Date on Trust-Building in Mediation

Many studies have empirically demonstrated the importance of trust-building between mediators and parties to a dispute. We wrote this article in response to a call by Stephen Goldberg and Margaret Shaw for studies conducted in North America to be triangulated in other countries where mediation is taking off as an alternative tool in the resolution of disputes. Our objective was to test theories on the factors that increase trust-building in mediation. With this in mind, the study conducted by Jean Poitras in Montreal (Canada) was triangulated in the Balearic Islands (Spain) and an analysis was made of the similarities and differences between both studies using different methods.     

When,How and Why Are Junior Coalition Parties Able to Affect a Government's Foreign Policy? A Study of Swedish Coalition Governments 2006–2014

Junior partners in a coalition government are torn between an eagerness to profile themselves, and to show loyalty to the coalition. We investigate when, how and why junior coalition parties affect foreign policy and profile themselves despite demands for national unity. We study two Swedish centre‐right governments in 2006–2010 and 2010–2014. The parties' foreign policy positions in election manifestos are compared to the foreign policy positions presented in the joint Alliance manifesto and yearly government declarations. An explorative analysis of possible explanations for junior parties' influence is based on elite interviews. The results indicate that junior coalition parties might influence the foreign policy in symbolic value related issues, but less so in issues with real policy implications. Our analysis reveals the importance of the leading member of the coalition and how junior parties converge over time towards the position of the senior coalition member.     

Personality disorders and criminal responsibility in the Spanish supreme court

The aim of this study is to determine how personality disorders (PDs) are viewed in relation to criminal responsibility (CR) within the jurisprudence of the Spanish Supreme Court. All sentences with PD from 2000 to 2006 were included. The most frequently occurring PDs are cluster B and nonspecific disorders, alongside another Axis I disorder. The Spanish Supreme Court admitted appeals on 50%, and sentencing criteria were changed in 25% of the cases. The most frequent outcome was in the first instance a minor reduction in CR and second full CR being upheld. The borderline PD and the comorbidity between a PD and an Axis I disorder are the variables associated with the decrease in CR. The assessment of CR in PD should be undertaken using the diagnosis as a base taking into account other elements, such as the type of PD, its seriousness, comorbidity, and relationship with the criminal behavior on trial.     

Social ecology, individual risk, and recidivism: A multilevel examination of main and moderating influences

Purpose

Despite a longstanding tradition in criminology to consider the impact of neighborhood context on crime-related outcomes, criminologists have largely ignored the influence of social ecology on recidivism until recently. The purpose of the present study was to examine the main and moderating influences of social ecology on recidivism.

Materials and Methods

The present study used hierarchical nonlinear modeling to estimate the effects of concentrated disadvantage, immigrant concentration, and residential stability on recidivism for a sample of offenders released from custody/supervision in 2006 and nested within Iowa counties. We controlled for individual-level risk for recidivism using the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R), a validated risk assessment instrument. We also examined whether the relationship between LSI-R score and recidivism varied across counties, and if so, whether this variation can be explained by social structural characteristics.

Results

Results indicate that residential stability was the only contextual variable significantly related to recidivism. The relationship between individual-level risk and recidivism did not vary across contexts.

Conclusions

The findings suggest that the social structural context has limited influence on recidivism, while the LSI-R is a robust predictor of recidivism across contexts. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, practice, and future research.