Exaggerating good governance: Regime type and score inflation among executive survey informants

Researchers and policymakers often rely on executive surveys to understand and promote good governance. In doing so, they assume that the evaluations provided by these well‐informed respondents are not systematically influenced by regime type. However, regime‐embedded executives often have a personal stake in the survey outcomes, incentivizing them to exaggerate good governance. This paper compares World Economic Forum Executive Opinion Survey responses to corollary measures of key governance concepts in democracies, anocracies, and autocracies. It finds evidence of significant score inflation among executives in closed regimes. The individual‐level mechanisms are explored in one autocracy by comparing responses from regime‐embedded informants based at firms headquartered within the country with those managing businesses headquartered abroad. These micro‐level data likewise reveal evidence of widespread inflation, particularly on items related to governance. Finally, a closer look at Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index demonstrates the broader impact Executive Opinion Survey inflation for measuring governance within closed regimes.     

Pushing the Dead into the Next Reproductive Frontier: Post Mortem Gamete Retrieval under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act

In re Matter of Daniel Thomas Christy authorized post mortem gamete retrieval under the most recent revision of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act. This article recommends that the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws explicitly address the issue of post mortem gamete retrieval for reproductive purposes; that legislators specify whether their states will follow the Christy ruling; and that ethics committees and consultants prepare for the questions about human identity and self determination that post mortem gamete retrieval raises.     

Inviting Scientific Discourse on Traumatic Dissociation: Progress Made and Obstacles to Further Resolution

Psychological Injury and Law - This paper emerged from a five-part exchange on trauma-related dissociation in forensic contexts between the authors and Merckelbach and colleagues (2017–2019)....     

Communicating Party Labels and Names on Twitter During the 2016 Presidential Invisible Primary and Primary Campaigns

This study investigated the use of party and ideological labels and candidate names in major party candidate tweets (N?=?94,310) during the 2016 presidential preprimary and primary campaigns to understand the extent to which candidates focused on intraparty and interparty themes as a part of their marketing strategies. The results show that the candidates and their campaigns did not engage in heavy partisan labeling to cultivate their social media identities. Outsider candidates were not more likely to use party or ideological labels in their tweets than insider candidates were. The candidates focused on self-advocacy in their tweets.     

Labiaplasty,Race and the Colonial Imagination

This article seeks to interrogate the cultural meaning of cosmetic labiaplasty surgery (CLS) in the Western context through a historical examination of the symbolic function of the labia in relation to the construction of racial difference in early colonial race science discourse. It seeks to think through CLS as materially invested in a transnational masculinist imperial encounter with indigenous women from the Cape of Good Hope, who were identified in the race sciences of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries as ‘Hottentots’ (and sometimes ‘Bushwomen’). We suggest that the production of desire in contemporary CLS practice and discourse has its roots in colonial anthropological Western representations of black female sexuality. The fear of abnormality so strikingly invoked in the medical literature and contemporary accounts of women's desire for CLS appears as a displacement of racial abjection onto the genitals and a production of the female body as the border object upon which the desire for whiteness is transcribed. We identify two interlocking features of this production of white desire: the rejection of the animal body and the correction of sexual deviancy, both of which are articulated through race, specifically the racialised ‘Hottentot’ bodies conjured up by the white, colonial imagination.     

Correction to: Dog-Whistle Politics: Multivocal Communication and Religious Appeals

Political Behavior - The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake.