Why weren't (many) European women ‘missing’?

In a 1990 article, Amartya Sen observed “More than 100million Women … Missing” from the populations of parts of south and east Asia. Direct observation and census data suggested that gender ratios deviated sufficiently from what is known to be normal in modern human populations to suggest that the phenomenon was not random. Researchers have explored major proximate causes of “missing” girls and women such as female-selective abortion, routine neglect of young girls in their families including differential access to modern medical care, and even infanticide. This article uses Sen's work and the research of others on Asia to compare with evidence of the disadvantaging or even “mortal neglect” of girls and women in Western European society in the early modern and modern periods — roughly from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It argues that the current state of the evidence suggests little support for similar gender-specific forms of mortal neglect in Western Europe. It explores why this may have been so, using evidence from economic, social, demographic and religious life.     

Objections to medico-legal autopsy--recent developments in case law

Medico-legal autopsies can be directed by coroners. However, in a number of jurisdictions family members can lodge objections with coroners against such procedures taking place. The authors analyse the objections, successful and unsuccessful, taken in Australia. Reviewing recent Victorian developments, they emphasise the public interest in autopsies which reveal medical causes of death. They identify the ongoing importance of coroners being able to exercise their statutory function to undertake death investigations effectively and to make informed recommendations to reduce the incidence of avoidable deaths.     

Don’t let them kill you on some dirty roadway: survival,entitled violence,and the culture of modern American policing

The police subculture serves as a means for police officers to cope with the perceived stresses associated with police work, including the belief that their lives are constantly threatened by dangerous ‘others’. As a result, the police subculture is peppered with racialized survivability discourse that reminds police of the possibility of their own mortality, mobilizes them through fear, and facilitates an entitlement to violence in the name of guardianship. Drawing from the author’s past experiences as a police officer, this paper offers insight into how, through this racialized police survivability discourse, police officers come to believe that their lives are more valuable than others, particularly when compared to Black lives. This has not only been demonstrated by the disproportionate killing of unarmed Black men but also by the emergence of the Blue Lives Matter ‘movement’ that arose in direct oppositional response to the subculture’s perceived threat of the Black Lives Matter movement.     

The contributions of higher education to ethical behavior in law enforcement

This paper examines the relationship between higher education and ethical practice among law enforcement officers. The spoken and unspoken values of the academic world and their influence on college educated police is explored. The specific values of studying options available to law enforcement practitioners in an academic setting is reviewed, e.g., the role of a policeman acting as a witness at a trial. The areas where college experience can appreciably increase the ethical awareness of policemen is presented.     

Transnational Dialogue in an Age of Terror

11 September led many people to dismiss the prospects for a meaningful dialogue between Islam and the West. This article argues that the terrorist attacks against the United States also created the potential for a new kind of dialogue by initiating a virtually unprecedented issue-specific global public sphere focused on the question of the relations between Islam and the West. It draws on Habermas to consider the potential for dialogue under contemporary conditions. By examining the constructivist foundations of both Islamist and neoconservative approaches to international politics, this article posits both a demand for and an important potential supply for a meaningful dialogue. In particular, it discusses the intense and important public arguments within the Islamic world about the concept of dialogue and its political possibilities. It focuses upon the internal arguments between moderates and extremists on both sides, and considers how dialogue (or its absence) can change the terms of the interaction by breaking the monopoly over representation claimed by – and too often granted to – radicals.     

Analyzing the 2000 National Election Study

Nancy Burns Center for Political Studies 4246 ISR, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1248 e-mail: nburns{at}umich.edu (corresponding author) Michael J. Ensley Department of Political Science, 210 Woodburn Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 e-mail: ensley{at}indiana.edu Donald R. Kinder Center for Political Studies 4258 ISR, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1248 e-mail: drkinder{at}umich.edu In an earlier report, two of us (Bowers and Ensley, 2003, NationalElection Studies Technical Report, www.umich.edu/nes) provideda general framework for understanding the particular strategyoutlined by Fogarty et al. (in this issue). Fogarty et al.'sstrategy is to make the face-to-face variables more like therandom digit dial (RDD) telephone variables by trimming theends in order to reduce the variance of the face-to-face (FTF)variables. Perhaps some scholars will want the FTF variablesto look like the RDD variables, but that would be a fix fora specific research question. Given the significant differencesin the representativeness of the samples, the processes of surveynonresponse, and the quality and character of the responsesbetween data taken from a National Area Probability sample inperson and data taken from an RDD telephone sample, researchquestions involving comparisons with other years in the 50-yeartime series will require different remedies.     

Digital dilemmas: the unintended consequences of election technology

Digital technologies are increasingly used in elections around the world. Where the resources and capacity of the state are limited, some have argued that such technologies make it possible to rapidly “leapfrog” to cleaner and more credible elections. This article argues that the growing use of these technologies has been driven by the fetishization of technology rather than by rigorous assessment of their effectiveness; that they may create significant opportunities for corruption that (among other things) vitiate their potential impact; and that they carry significant opportunity costs. Indeed, precisely because new technology tends to deflect attention away from more “traditional” strategies, the failure of digital checks and balances often renders an electoral process even more vulnerable to rigging than it was before. These observations are not intended as a manifesto against the digitization of elections; apart from anything else, we argue that the drivers of the adoption of these new methods are too powerful to resist. But the analysis draws attention to the importance of more careful assessments of the problems, as well as the benefits, of such technologies – and to the need for more careful planning in their deployment.