Justice Beliefs in School: Distinguishing Ultimate and Immanent Justice

This paper combines two recent developments in just world research: the conception of belief in a just world (BJW) as a resource for coping and well-being in everyday life, and the distinction between two different facets of BJW, namely belief in immanent justice (BIJ) and belief in ultimate justice (BUJ). Moreover, these two aspects are adapted to the school context and educational psychology. Scales for measuring ultimate and immanent justice in schools were developed within a German pilot reform project with a sample of 1274 pupils. The two facets could be distinguished by means of factor analysis. The reliability of the two scales is satisfactory, and their validity is confirmed by their differential correlational patterns. Results show that not every form of BJW automatically functions as a coping resource. In fact, only BUJ is able to protect pupils' mental well-being, whereas immanent justice can actually jeopardize well-being. Similarly, BUJ is associated with the perception of solidarity and learning enjoyment in class, whereas BIJ is more closely associated with the experience of rivalry and competition in class. Finally, the socialization of the two justice beliefs is considered. The cross-sectional data provide some evidence to suggest that friendly and supportive parenting styles can promote BUJ, whereas strict parenting styles may further BIJ. More longitudinal research is needed to obtain further insights into these phenomena.     

Brothers’ Keepers?

Relying on rarely analyzed public opinion data from the 1930s and early 1940s, we take issue with the notion popular in contemporary liberal circles that the New Deal era represented a period of expansive commitment to the security and well-being of the poor and politically disenfranchised. At least where the public is concerned—as opposed to the progressive policy makers in the Roosevelt administration—the jobless were regarded with suspicion, immigrants should be forced to “go home,” women belong in the kitchen not on the shop floor. The harsher the economic conditions (by state), the more conservative were the public attitudes. Hence New Deal legislative victories accrued despite rather than because of public support.

Assessing the psychological and mechanical impact of electoral rules: A quasi-experiment

The paper assesses the influence of electoral rules on vote choice and election outcomes using a quasi-experiment conducted during a recent Canadian provincial election. Respondents were invited to vote under three voting systems (first past the post, alternative voting and proportional representation) and to answer a short questionnaire. We examine how the distribution of votes and seats is affected, and we ascertain how much of the total difference is due to psychological and mechanical effects. We find that a PR system would have increased legislative fractionalization by the equivalent of one effective party and that the mechanical effect is much more important than the psychological effect. As for AV, its mechanical and psychological effects act in opposite directions.     

Constructing “The Same Rights With the Same Names”: The Impact of Spanish Norm Diffusion on Marriage Equality in Argentina

This article argues that Spain has been the driving external force in the advancement of LGBT rights in Latin America, from marriage in Argentina to the regional recognition of “sexual diversity rights” as human rights. Acting as “norm entrepreneurs,” Spanish activists and organizations, relying on development aid, have promoted their perspectives through two approaches: strategic consulting and resource transfer. Their diffusion is illustrated primarily by the Argentine case. There, activists underwritten by Spanish resources have borrowed Spanish strategies to achieve “the same rights with the same names.” Besides broadening our understanding of the struggle for LGBT equality in Latin America, this article deepens the explanation of norm diffusion, focusing on emergence. In this stage, specific individuals and organizations deliberately select appropriate “targets” for and moments of intervention. But norm “receptors” must also be ready for action.     

The formation of party preferences: Testing the proximity and directional models

Abstract. We review the methodological debate between defenders of the proximity and directional models. We propose what we believe to be a rigorous and fair test of the two models, using the 1997 Canadian Election Study. The analysis is based on responses to questions in which the various issue positions are explicitly spelled out. We rely on individual perceptions of party positions because it is individual perceptions that matter in the formation of party preferences but we control for projection effects through a multivariate model that incorporates, in addition to indicators of distance and direction, socio–demographic characteristics, party identification, and leader ratings. We also take into account whether a party is perceived to be extreme. The empirical evidence vindicates the proximity model.     

Tussle for space: The politics of mock-compliance with global financial standards in developing countries

As efforts to harmonize policies globally intensify, developing countries increasingly face pressures to adopt international standards. Yet, we know little about the circumstances under which developing countries manage to circumvent such pressures, or about their strategies to maintain policy space. We explore under which conditions developing countries are willing and able to sustain mock-compliance, a situation where countries comply on paper but not in practice. Using country comparisons of Angola's, Nigeria's, Tanzania's, and Vietnam's engagement with the Basel banking standards, we show how three factors combine to produce sustained mock-compliance: high costs of outright non-compliance due to outward-orientated banking sectors; high political costs of substantive compliance; and state control over profitable markets. Our article contributes to theory-building in the literature on compliance and structural power as well as to broader debates about developing countries' policy autonomy in their engagement with global financial norms.     

Recall of unpleasant emotion using memory-enhancing principles

Abstract

Two experiments are presented to examine the issue of memory for past emotions. Participants rated their emotional reactions on the occasion of watching a film, and in a subsequent session, they were asked to recall and rate the emotion as experienced when viewing it. In the first experiment, participants underestimated unpleasant emotion at recall, but their recall was improved with the presentation of a visual cue pertaining to the emotion-inducing film event. In the second experiment, participants were assisted in probing perceptual aspects of the event by means of memory-enhancing instructions underlying the Cognitive Interview. These participants consistently recalled emotional intensity, as compared to participants in the unassisted recall condition who underestimated prior emotion. This research suggests that ratings of prior emotion are easily influenced by features of the retrieval context, and that consistent recall may be achieved by memory-enhancing principles of the Cognitive Interview.