The Nefarious Helping Hand: Anti-Corruption Campaigns,Social Service Provision,and Terrorism1

This article offers a novel contribution to the terrorism literature by using mathematical modeling and case studies to demonstrate how terrorist and extremist groups can utilize social service provision activities and anti-corruption campaigns instead of violent activities to gain support.The basic argument of the model is that terrorist groups will try to gain support by promising that they will be better distributors of resources than the current regime once they gain power and by promising that they will be less corrupt. However, because all organizations can freely make these promises, their words are cheap talk, and the general population should ignore them. To overcome this problem, organizations must offer a costly signal. Provision of social goods and implementation of explicit anti-corruption campaigns before taking power serves as such a signal. As the United States government and its allies widen their “war on terrorism,” they must consider the ramifications of social service provision and anti-corruption activities, which are common, effective, and potentially useful for increasing the probability of group success.     

Intergroup Contact and Beliefs about Homosexuality in Adolescence

This study examines the relationship between intergroup contact and adolescents’ attitudes regarding homosexuality and the treatment of lesbian and gay (LG) peers. Fourteen- through 18-year-olds (n = 1,069, 59.7% females) completed self-report attitude and judgment questionnaires about the acceptability of homosexuality, levels of comfort around LG peers, and the acceptability of excluding or teasing an LG peer. The results suggest that having an LG friend is related to more positive attitudes toward homosexuals/homosexuality and less tolerance toward the unfair treatment of LG peers. The findings lend further support to intergroup contact theory and provide evidence that the intimacy of contact is related to prejudice reduction, and offer general support that age is related to prejudicial attitudes, but less so to prejudicial behaviors.     

Appropriators not Position Takers: The Distorting Effects of Electoral Incentives on Congressional Representation

Congressional districts create two levels of representation. Studies of representation focus on a disaggregated level: the electoral connection between representatives and constituents. But there is a collective level of representation—the result of aggregating across representatives. This article uses new measures of home styles to demonstrate that responsiveness to constituents can have negative consequences for collective representation. The electoral connection causes marginal representatives—legislators with districts composed of the other party's partisans—to emphasize appropriations in their home styles. But it causes aligned representatives—those with districts filled with copartisans—to build their home styles around position taking. Aggregated across representatives, this results in an artificial polarization in stated party positions: aligned representatives, who tend to be ideologically extreme, dominate policy debates. The logic and evidence in this article provide an explanation for the apparent rise in vitriolic debate, and the new measures facilitate a literature on home styles.     

Indigenous Australians: Language, and the Law

Indigenous peoples face a number of hurdles intaking cases to Australian law courts. In thecase that the social and economic problems canbe overcome, they face problems related to theintellectual structures of the court and thelanguage and philosophical beliefs that thecourt systems are based on. Derrida shows thatWestern metaphysics privileges speech overwriting, and this counts against indigenouscultures in which narrative knowledge is a formof writing. Due to this privileging, there is adifferend involving the courts and indigenouspeoples which makes the achievement of justicedifficult in the legal arena in Australia. Thisarticle questions whether the courts are thecorrect bodies to deal with indigenous issues.The achievement of justice is made moredifficult again by the truth-producing effectsof legal decisions, which render native titleas a weaker form of property right. Finally,indigenous Australians are caught in a catch-22situation, in which in order to receivejustice, they must Westernise their thought toadapt to the court system, and yet not allowany Westernisation of their culture. Such aWesternisation can be forced upon indigenouspeoples by the truth-producing effects oflanguage.