Strict Liability and the Paradoxes of Proportionality

This essay explores the case against strict liability offenses as part of the more general debate about proportional punishment. This debate takes on a very different look in light of a formal result derived by the authors elsewhere, that is briefly summarized and whose implications are pursued here. Traditional objections that consequentialists have mounted against the deontologists’/retributivists’ defense of proportionality fall by the wayside, but a new threat to the proportionality requirement replaces it: the ease with which any such requirement can be circumvented.     

Rallying Votes? A Multilevel Approach to Understanding Voter Decision-Making in the 2016 Presidential Nominating Contests

The 2016 presidential nominating process presented the American public with an interesting and tumultuous set of contests. Despite the unique nature of both the Democratic and Republican contests, the candidates stuck to the usual campaign activities to help influence voters. However, one of these campaign tactics, campaign visits, has been vastly understudied. Using a uniquely compiled dataset and a hierarchical linear model, I am able to test how campaign effects, including visits, as well as an individual’s predispositions impacted vote choice in the 2016 presidential nominating contests. The results demonstrate that the 2016 presidential nominating contests were decided based on a combination of both campaign activities and individual-level predictors.     

Special Issue 2019: European and American Political Parties: Becoming More Similar?

ABSTRACT

For theories to be useful across systems requires a fundamental similarity of the things theorized about. In the 1980s, it was easy to question whether European and American political parties were sufficiently of the same “genus” for a single theory of parties to be relevant in both contexts. This paper asks whether that is still the case, identifying several respects in which European and American parties have become more comparable, but also a dimension on which they have become more different.     

Inspire Magazine: A Critical Analysis of its Significance and Potential Impact Through the Lens of the Information,Motivation, and Behavioral Skills Model

This article presents an analysis of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's English language publication Inspire that was conceptualized and conducted on the basis of the Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) framework. The IMB model has been widely tested, validated, and applied across a range of behavior change interventions, and provides both a conceptual and analytic framework to examine the range and quality of content featured across the 11 issues of Inspire that were published and distributed online starting in July of 2010. Inspire has been implicated in multiple instances of terrorism cases in the U.S. and its impact and potential can be analyzed on the extent to which it effectively targets core attitudes, perceptions of social normative support for violence, and its regular featuring of behavioral skills such as bomb making, weapons training, and emphasizing a creative and do-it-yourself ethos.