Revolutionary Pathways: Leaders and the International Impacts of Domestic Revolutions

How much and in what ways do individual leaders matter for international politics? This article sheds new light on these questions by considering the consequences of domestic revolutions in international relations. We argue that revolutions have international effects due to two separate pathways, one associated with the event and one associated with the new leader’s administration. In the first pathway, a revolutionary event disrupts established relationships and perceptions, creating uncertainty both within the state and abroad. In the second pathway, revolutions put individuals into office who are more willing to challenge the status quo and who have publicly committed to a sustained shift in policies during their administration. These two distinct pathways suggest that the important question about revolutions is not whether leaders or events matter most but rather the conditions under which they matter. Consequently, we studied these pathways on three phenomena: international economic sanctions, domestic economic growth, and interstate alliances. We find that revolutionary events have a short-term negative effect on domestic economic growth, while revolutionary leaders have a long-term effect on the probability that a revolutionary state is targeted for sanctions. Both the revolutionary leader and the revolution’s immediate events alter the state’s international alliances. Our findings suggest that no single level of analysis completely dominates, and the answer depends on the outcome of interest.     

The Associations between Substance Use,Sexual Behavior,Deviant Behaviors and Adolescents’ Engagement in Sexting: Does Relationship Context Matter?

While prior research has identified multiple associations between engagement in sexting and risky behaviors, most existing studies do not take into account the contexts in which sexting occurs. The present study extends prior research by examining whether the associations between adolescents’ sexting behavior and engagement in substance use, sexual behaviors, and deviant behaviors differ depending on the relational context (within or outside of a romantic relationship) in which young people engage in sexting. Results from a survey of 1187 secondary school students (61.3% girls, n?=?728) between 16 and 22 years old (M?=?17.82 years; SD?=?0.88) revealed that sexting with a romantic partner is not a significant marker of engagement in risk behaviors. However, single youth who engage in sexting outside of a romantic relationship are more likely to report substance use, relative to their non-sexting counterparts. These findings underscore the need to use more nuanced measures to investigate sexting and for sexual education initiatives to integrate messages about substance use.     

YOUNG ADULTS' PERSPECTIVES ON DIVORCE Living Arrangements

There is increasing consensus that the perspectives of children need to be taken into account in decisions made by divorcing parents and the courts and that young adults who have lived through their parents' divorces can be an important source of information about children's perspectives. In this study, the authors assessed the perspectives of 820 college adults from divorced families on the issue of children's living arrangements after divorce. Respondents wanted to have spent more time with their fathers as they were growing up, and the living arrangement they believed was best was living equal time with each parent. The living arrangements they had as children gave them generally little time with their fathers. Respondents reported that their fathers wanted more time with them but that their mothers generally did not want them to spend more time with their fathers.     

Is Partial-Dimension Convergence a Problem for Inferences from MCMC Algorithms?

e-mail: jgill{at}wustl.edu Increasingly, political science researchers are turning to Markovchain Monte Carlo methods to solve inferential problems withcomplex models and problematic data. This is an enormously powerfulset of tools based on replacing difficult or impossible analyticalwork with simulated empirical draws from the distributions ofinterest. Although practitioners are generally aware of theimportance of convergence of the Markov chain, many are notfully aware of the difficulties in fully assessing convergenceacross multiple dimensions. In most applied circumstances, everyparameter dimension must be converged for the others to converge.The usual culprit is slow mixing of the Markov chain and thereforeslow convergence towards the target distribution. This workdemonstrates the partial convergence problem for the two dominantalgorithms and illustrates these issues with empirical examples.     

Melting Down and Scaling Up: Stabilizing Climate Change by Promoting Private Sector Technology Development

This paper will examine the role the private sector plays in researching, developing, and deploying technology that has the potential to deter or decrease the impacts of global warming. It will explore the degree to which the private sector can have an impact on global warming by focusing on four specific technologies: aircraft engines, wind turbines, solar energy, and clean coal technologies. We will compare the environmental impact of these technologies with the business case for pursuing each, specifically related to profitability and market maturity. We conclude that the business case alone is not sufficiently compelling to stimulate meaningful industry investment in these areas. Consequently, specific government involvement is needed for CO₂ reduction. This analysis will shed light on the role that government must play in order to more effectively engage potential private sector players in the global warming challenge.     

“In One Direction Only”: Chains of Reasoning and Tail Events in CAFA Amount-in-Controversy Claims

While the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) establishes a bright-line jurisdictional amount in controversy for removing cases from state to federal court, calculating that quantitative threshold in practice is a fraught and heavily litigated exercise. This article examines removals under CAFA to show the substantial lack of clarity in how state-law causes of action and damage claims interact to reach the jurisdictional threshold. It compiles cases illustrating the challenges surrounding removal litigation that flow from these uncertainties, particularly in how the structure of CAFA incentivizes defendants to chain together tail-event precedent to inflate theoretical amounts in controversy. It then applies a Coasean analysis to suggest these uncertainties impede efficient resolutions to litigation. Finally, it suggests a series of practical amendments to CAFA and its interpretive case law that would provide clarity, decrease forum-selection litigation, and enhance the efficacy of class litigation.     

Flexibility versus Inflexibility: discursive discrepancy in US democracy promotion and anti-corruption policies

This article analyses US discourses on democracy promotion and anti-corruption strategies. The analysis shows that there is a cosmetic agreement in these discourses on notions of the good society that identify democracy as a good thing and corruption as a bad thing. However, despite this agreement, there are differences in the discourses on the measures recommended to promote democracy and fight corruption that may lead to policies and processes pulling in opposite directions. This discrepancy arises, on the one hand, from a mode of operation of democracy promotion that is flexible and adaptable to various contexts and, on the other hand, from the uncompromising and inflexible language of anti-corruption policies that threatens to ‘undo’ what US democracy promotion's rhetoric aims to achieve: ownership and sustainability of democratic reforms through re-empowering the state.     

Cultural Criminology and the Politics of Meaning

Cultural criminology focuses on situational, subcultural, and mediated constructions of meaning around issues of crime and crime control. In this sense cultural criminology is designed for critical engagement with the politics of meaning, and for critical intervention into those politics. Yet the broader enterprise of critical criminology engages with the politics of meaning as well; in confronting the power relations of justice and injustice, critical criminologists of all sorts investigate the social and cultural processes by which situations are defined, groups are categorized, and human consequences are understood. The divergence between cultural criminology and other critical criminologies, then, may be defined less by meaning than by the degree of methodological militancy with which meaning is pursued. In any case, this shared concern with the politics of meaning suggests a number of innovations and interventions that cultural criminologists and other critical criminologists might explore.