Attributions of Negative Partner Behavior by Men Who Physically Abuse Their Partners

This study investigated the association between family violence and the attributions made for negative partner behaviors in an Australian context. Three groups of men were classified as physically violent (in counseling), non-physically violent (in counseling), and non-physically violent (in the community). The Relationship Attribution Measure was used to assess the attributional dependent variables of locus, stability, globality, intent, motivation, and blame. Significant differences between violent and nonviolent men on each of the attributional dimensions were found. Physically violent men were more likely than non-physically violent men (counseling) to attribute the negative behavior of their partners to unchangeable, intentional rather than unintentional, selfishly motivated, and blameworthy causes. However, these differences disappeared when marital satisfaction was controlled. The implications of this work for domestic violence intervention programs are discussed, along with a number of methodological issues and directions for future research.     

Families falling apart

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the senior United States Senator from New York. He is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy of the Committee on Finance, and of the Subcommittee on Water Resources, Transportation, and Infrastructure of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. He is also a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Senate Arms Control Observer Group. He is the author or editor of 14 books, including Beyond the Melting Pot(with Nathan Glazer) and his most recent work, Came the Revolution: Argument in the Reagan Era.     

Do state balanced budget requirements matter? Testing two explanatory frameworks

Balanced budget requirements (BBRs) affect all aspects of financial operations. Previous studies relied on characterizations that highlight a constitutional-statutory distinction. Hou and Smith (Public Budgeting & Finance 26(3):22–45, 2006) instead propose a political-technical construct. This article uses probit estimation, six measures of balance, and long panels to test which framework offers more explanatory power. The findings suggest that BBRs matter to varying degrees. Technical requirements exert bigger effects than political ones, the effects are more obvious on narrower than broader measures of balance and in the later phases of the budget cycle, and the political-technical construct offers more explanatory power than the constitutional-statutory distinction.     

A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science

The increasing availability of digitized text presents enormous opportunities for social scientists. Yet hand coding many blogs, speeches, government records, newspapers, or other sources of unstructured text is infeasible. Although computer scientists have methods for automated content analysis, most are optimized to classify individual documents, whereas social scientists instead want generalizations about the population of documents, such as the proportion in a given category. Unfortunately, even a method with a high percent of individual documents correctly classified can be hugely biased when estimating category proportions. By directly optimizing for this social science goal, we develop a method that gives approximately unbiased estimates of category proportions even when the optimal classifier performs poorly. We illustrate with diverse data sets, including the daily expressed opinions of thousands of people about the U.S. presidency. We also make available software that implements our methods and large corpora of text for further analysis.     

The World Wide Web and the U.S. Political News Market

We propose a framework for understanding how the Internet has affected the U.S. political news market. The framework is driven by the lower cost of production for online news and consumers' tendency to seek out media that conform to their own beliefs. The framework predicts that consumers of Internet news sources should hold more extreme political views and be interested in more diverse political issues than those who solely consume mainstream television news. We test these predictions using two large datasets with questions about news exposure and political views. Generally speaking, we find that consumers of generally left‐of‐center (right‐of‐center) cable news sources who combine their cable news viewing with online sources are more liberal (conservative) than those who do not. We also find that those who use online news content are more likely than those who consume only television news content to be interested in niche political issues.     

Political Competition and Ethnic Identification in Africa

This article draws on data from over 35,000 respondents in 22 public opinion surveys in 10 countries and finds strong evidence that ethnic identities in Africa are strengthened by exposure to political competition. In particular, for every month closer their country is to a competitive presidential election, survey respondents are 1.8 percentage points more likely to identify in ethnic terms. Using an innovative multinomial logit empirical methodology, we find that these shifts are accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the salience of occupational and class identities. Our findings lend support to situational theories of social identification and are consistent with the view that ethnic identities matter in Africa for instrumental reasons: because they are useful in the competition for political power.     

Who gains from apparentments under D’Hondt?

Apparentments – or coalitions of several electoral lists – are a widely neglected aspect of the study of proportional electoral systems. This paper proposes a formal model that explains the benefits political parties derive from apparentments, based on their alliance strategies and relative size. In doing so, it reveals that apparentments are most beneficial for highly fractionalised political blocs. However, it also emerges that large parties stand to gain much more from apparentments than small parties do. Because of this, small parties are likely to join in apparentments with other small parties, excluding large parties where possible. These arguments are tested empirically, using a new dataset from the Swiss national parliamentary elections covering a period from 1995 to 2007.     

In Defense of Dwelling in Great Minds

It seems like a small and perhaps shrinking minority of economists know reverence of individual figures. Most economists seem to be without heroes, and sometimes disparage reverence as cultish idolatry. Here I collect from Michael Polanyi’s The Study of Man (1959) a few passages that eloquently suggest that “we need reverence to perceive greatness, even as we need a telescope to observe spiral nebulae.” The selection is made in the defense of seeking out and communing with great minds.     

The Privatisation of Prisoner Transfer Services in Western Australia. What Can we Learn from the Ward Case?

In 2008, Aboriginal elder Mr Ward died of heat stroke while being transported in the back of a prison van operated by private security company GSL (now G4S). This article will address the role accountability mechanisms can play in improving correctional and custodial services and whether existing oversight frameworks can provide a proper supervision and quality control of private security operators. It will focus on the key reports issued by Western Australia's Inspector of Custodial Services, the independent office to oversee the prisoner transfer system. Another central source of information will be an examination of the report and recommendations handed down by the Western Australian Coroner Alastair Hope in June 2009. The Hope Report details the numerous failings of the system which led to the Ward tragedy. Both GSL and the Western Australian state government had breached a duty of care to Mr Ward. Further, it remains highly problematical having a range of oversight bodies if elected government is able to simply ignore the subsequent advice. Parliament must therefore remain a central part of the system of political accountability.