The Effect of Requiring Private Employers to Extend Health Benefit Eligibility to Same‐Sex Partners of Employees: Evidence from California

Health disparities related to sexual orientation are well documented and may be due to unequal access to a partner's employer‐sponsored insurance (ESI). We provide the literature's first evaluation of legislation enacted by California in 2005 that required private employers within the state to treat employees in committed same‐sex relationships in the same way as employees in different‐sex marriages with respect to ESI. Our analysis uses data on sexual orientation, partnership, and health insurance from the 2001 to 2007 California Health Interview Surveys (CHIS). Prior to the reform, partnered gay men and lesbians were significantly less likely to have ESI in someone else's name than partnered heterosexuals. Pooling data from 2001 to 2007, we find that the reform had no effects on differences in insurance outcomes between gay and straight men. We find some evidence that the reform increased partnership, reduced full‐time employment, and increased health insurance coverage among lesbians relative to heterosexual women. The increases in insurance coverage for lesbians are consistent with a role for expanded dependent ESI, suggesting that such policies may reduce sexual orientation‐based insurance disparities among women.     

What price justice? On the evolving notion of ‘right to fair trial’ from Nuremberg to The Hague

Following the Second World War, evolving notions of human rights have been met by evolving understandings of rights that should be afforded the accused in judicial processes. The following considers this evolution in proceedings stretching from Nuremberg to The Hague, as a struggle between forces that have given birth to each successive stage in international criminal justice, as well as of forces that have grounded rights of defence as advancing the cause of justice itself. Indeed, while notions of ‘right to fair trial’ and ‘equality of arms’ suffer from conflicted understandings over what consists in justice, and from conflicting interests over what powers should be afforded parties in the judicial process, this article suggests that the primacy afforded rights of the accused reflects, most evidently in the International Criminal Court, the growing acceptance of liberal democratic notions that justice is most clearly founded not on the treatment of victims, but on the treatment afforded those who mistreat others.     

The Impact of International Perception on China’s Approach to Human Rights

East Asia - Given the tremendous amount of money that China has poured into events such as the 2008 Beijing Games and the 2010 Shanghai Expo and establishing Confucius Institutes throughout the...     

The other hidden hand: Soviet and Cuban intelligence in Allende’s Chile

The role of Soviet and Cuban covert activities in Allende’s Chile has not been given sufficient consideration. This paper outlines the significant actions that the KGB and the Cuban DGI undertook there, showing that both organizations played important roles in both operating directly against the CIA and by supporting local actors. The results of their efforts, however, may have been negative to Allende’s coalition by focusing on factional or ideological interests. A broad array of sources is brought together to shed light on this historical gap. The result is a new paradigm in which we can consider this dramatic period.     

Does Public Support Help Democracy Survive?

It is widely believed that democracy requires public support to survive. The empirical evidence for this hypothesis is weak, however, with existing tests resting on small cross-sectional samples and producing contradictory results. The underlying problem is that survey measures of support for democracy are fragmented across time, space, and different survey questions. In response, this article uses a Bayesian latent variable model to estimate a smooth country-year panel of democratic support for 135 countries and up to 29 years. The article then demonstrates a positive effect of support on subsequent democratic change, while adjusting for the possible confounding effects of prior levels of democracy and unobservable time-invariant factors. Support is, moreover, more robustly linked with the endurance of democracy than its emergence in the first place. As Lipset (1959) and Easton (1965) hypothesized over 50 years ago, public support does indeed help democracy survive.