Value orientations,life transitions,and desistance: Assessing competing perspectives

Laub and Sampson (2003) and Paternoster and Bushway (2009) offered opposing explanations of desistance from crime. Yet, extant research has failed to test the key theoretical differences that distinguish these perspectives: 1) the temporal ordering of internal changes in identity/values and life transitions and 2) the impact of values/life transitions on offending conditional on key predictors from the opposing theory (e.g., whether marriage contributes to desistance among individuals who already hold prosocial values). We assess competing claims using data from the Pathways to Desistance. We find that within-person changes in prosocial value orientations are significantly related to within-person changes in one's likelihood of entering into serious romantic relationships and becoming employed. Conversely, life transitions are unrelated to changes in one's values. The results derived from fixed-effects Poisson models indicate high or increasing prosocial value orientations help explain offending patterns among those who enter into serious romantic relationships/get employed and help explain changes in offending among those who do not experience structural “turning points.” Marriage/cohabitation is unrelated to within-person changes in offending, whereas the impact of employment has an inconsistent relationship. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.     

SNP Miniplexes for Individual Identification of Random‐Bred Domestic Cats

Phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of the cat can be obtained from single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) analyses of fur. This study developed miniplexes using SNPs with high discriminating power for random‐bred domestic cats, focusing on individual and phenotypic identification. Seventy‐eight SNPs were investigated using a multiplex PCR followed by a fluorescently labeled single base extension (SBE) technique (SNaPshot^®). The SNP miniplexes were evaluated for reliability, reproducibility, sensitivity, species specificity, detection limitations, and assignment accuracy. Six SNPplexes were developed containing 39 intergenic SNPs and 26 phenotypic SNPs, including a sex identification marker, ZFXY. The combined random match probability (cRMP) was 6.58 × 10^?19 across all Western cat populations and the likelihood ratio was 1.52 × 10¹⁸. These SNPplexes can distinguish individual cats and their phenotypic traits, which could provide insight into crime reconstructions. A SNP database of 237 cats from 13 worldwide populations is now available for forensic applications.     

改革开放前党对工业化与“三农”问题关系的认识及启示

如何正确处理工业化与"三农"问题的关系,这是经济落后、传统农业居优势的中国经济建设面临的重大问题.毛泽东等中国共产党人在新中国启动工业化初期,聚焦于工业化与农业现代化的关系、工业化道路与"三农"的关系、城市工业化与农村工业化的关系等方面,获得了不少创新性的认识成果.从新中国工业化发展60年的历史长跨度审视,改革开放前党对工业化与"三农"问题关系的探索,虽然有其历史局限性,但独特的探索视角和取得的初步成果仍有重要的现实价值,改革开放前后的探索有着继承和发展的内在联系,改革开放前积累的经验教训也为改革开放后的继续探索提供了许多有益的借鉴和启示.     

Selfish and Cooperative Voting: Can the Majority Restrain Themselves?

At every scale from small committees to national elections, voters face tradeoffs between self-interest and the common good. We report three experiments in which participants vote for policies with real payoffs at stake. We manipulate self-interest by randomly assigning participants to two groups in society with different policy payoffs. Participants in the majority group are confronted by a simple choice between a policy that is better for themselves or a policy that is best for society. Overall, we find a clear effect of self-interest: Participants are more likely to choose the policy that earns them more money, compared to participants in the other group, even when the policy is detrimental to the common good. Simultaneously, we observe considerable levels of cooperative voting among participants in the majority, ranging from 47% to 79% across different payoff regimes. Finally, participants were not more cooperative when voting compared to when they chose between the same policies with a lottery or leader institution, departing from the hypothesis that voting institutions promote cooperative motives. We discuss implications for multiple literatures about voting behavior.

     

Threat,emboldenment, or both? The effects of political power on violent hate crimes*

How do expressions of support or opposition by the U.S. federal government, influence violent hate crimes against specific racial and ethnic minorities? In this article, we test two hypotheses derived from Blalock's (1967) conceptualization of intergroup power contests. The political threat hypothesis predicts that positive government attention toward specific groups would lead to more hateful violence directed against them. The emboldenment hypothesis predicts that negative government attention toward specific groups would also lead to more hateful violence directed against them. Using combined data on U.S. government actions and federal hate crime statistics from 1992 through 2012, vector autoregression models provide support for both hypotheses, depending on the protected group involved. We conclude that during this period, African Americans were more vulnerable to hate crimes motivated by political threat, and Latinx persons were more vulnerable to hate crimes motivated by emboldenment.     

Trade and investment: Introduction to the special issue

This special issue focuses on a variety of political-economy questions on trade and investment and is guided by a shared understanding that trade and investment processes can no longer be studied in isolation from each other. Three articles provide new insights into the study of the design of preferential trade agreements and effects thereof, two of which focus on the politically salient issues of non-trade concerns. A third one investigates which export sectors win from improved market access opportunities, in order words, how gains from trade are distributed. Two articles study the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system. One contribution is unpacking the role of the most important and influential firms and investors in affecting US behavior in WTO disputes, a second contribution studies how leadership changes in democracies and autocracies have different effects on dispute behavior. Finally, the special issue includes a new study on how the shadow economies in developing states are affected by the integration into the world economy (trade and investment) and by policy programs of the International Monetary Fund.     

村寨经济体系下和谐劳动关系的政策构建与操作实务 —— 以贵州乡村地区为例

基于战略劳动关系管理的理论框架与构建和谐劳动关系的价值导向,聚焦以中国贵州乡村地区(特别是民族村寨地区)本地产业发展中所呈现的劳动关系问题。在"村寨经济"这一全新的产业分析框架下,提出村寨经济劳动关系中的传统价值因素。这些传统价值因素不仅使村寨经济劳动关系不同于经典劳动关系,也不同于农民工、农村用工的概念范畴,即便与以非标准与灵活就业为特点的、互联网共享经济时代下的新用工理念也并不契合,而需要一套全新的分析框架与实务规范。研究结合贵州乡村地区企业案例,认为村寨经济企业要发展必须尊重并容纳这些传统价值因素,并据此提出在村寨经济的发展中构建和谐劳动关系的政策建议与操作实务。     

‘Too Many’

The statement that Australia has ‘too many abortions’ often circulates with intensity in times of increased worry over the vulnerability of white demographic and sociocultural dominance in Australia. Contrasting two such periods—the 1970s (with 1979 as the apex point) and the mid-2000s (2002–2008)—this article will show that, in times of national crisis, debates over abortion can become a site where politicians, journalists and other influential social commentators displace and assuage anxieties regarding the size and constitution of Australia's future population. The statement that Australia has ‘too many abortions’ carries the imperative for white women to reproduce the nation. This demand is made perceptible through a history of maternal citizenship for white women, which reverberates in the present, and the articulation of the desire to eradicate abortion (amongst white women) alongside other key biopolitical technologies—the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty and the exclusion of non-white immigrants from the nation. The figure of the aborting woman thus stands alongside other bodies perceived as threats to white sociocultural hegemony in Australia and one of its key institutions—the white, hetero-family. In the 1970s, such figures included the communist, the divorcee and the (non-white) immigrant, and in the 2000s, the lesbian mother, the single mother and the boatperson. The association of aborting women with other threats to the security of white sociocultural hegemony in Australia produces her as an object of fear for the nation, re-affirming the goal of white reproduction as a national duty and social good.     

Civic Education,Political Discussion,and the Social Transmission of Democratic Knowledge and Values in a New Democracy: Kenya 2002

How does civic education affect the development of democratic political culture in new democracies? Using a unique three‐wave panel data set from Kenya spanning the transitional democratic election of 2002, we posit a two‐step process of the social transmission of democratic knowledge, norms, and values. Civic education first affected the knowledge, values, and participatory inclinations of individuals directly exposed to the Kenyan National Civic Education Programme (NCEP). These individuals became opinion leaders, communicating these new orientations to others within their social networks. Individuals who discussed others’ civic education experiences then showed significant growth in democratic knowledge and values, in many instances more than individuals with direct exposure to the program. We find further evidence of a “compensation effect,” such that the impact of civic education and post‐civic education discussion was greater among Kenyans with less education and with lower levels of social integration.