Force Size for the Post-Westphalian World

The quality of the U.S. military has improved steadily since the end of the Cold War, but technological and managerial advancements cannot compensate for the inadequate size of the American armed forces. The post–Cold War years saw a shift from the Westphalian, state-ordered world to one where Western states are at war with transnational, substate terrorist groups. This requires adjustments in the American military establishment. Improvements in quality must be matched by an increase in quantity in order to meet U.S. security needs. As interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven, a minimalist force may be sufficient to win a war, but where nation-building is required, it will find it difficult to win the peace.     

Is compulsory voting more democratic?

Lijphart (1997) endorses compulsory voting as a means to increase voter turnout. Considering the likely effects of the role of information (including its costs) on the decision to vote and taking an expressive view of voting, however, compels us to investigate two unexamined claims by such advocates: (i) that individuals are transformed by forcing them to vote, and (ii) that a compulsory electoral outcome is a more accurate reflection of community preferences.We argue that compelling those who are not particularly interested in, or informed about, the political process to vote increases the proportion of random votes and we show that under simple majority rule, compulsory voting may violate the Pareto principle; the less popular candidate is more likely to be elected. Our results cast doubt on the ”miracle of aggregation“ argument, which optimistically concludes that as long as uninformed votes are not systematically biased, they will have no effect on voting outcomes. We also briefly consider how information cascades can exacerbate this problem.     

Information, Litigation, and Common Law Evolution

It is common in the legal academy to describe judicial decisiontrends leading to new common law rules as resulting from consciousjudicial effort. Evolutionary models of litigation, in contrast,treat common law as resulting from pressure applied by litigants.One apparent difficulty in the theory of litigation is explaininghow trends in judicial decisions favoring one litigant, andbiasing the legal standard, could occur. This article presentsa model in which an apparent bias in the legal standard canoccur in the absence of any effort toward this end on the partof judges. Trends can develop favoring the better-informed litigantwhose case is also meritorious. Although the model does notsuggest an unambiguous trend toward efficient legal rules, itdoes show how private information from litigants becomes embodiedin common law, an important part of the theory of efficientlegal rules.     

The Forces of Conviction: The Power and Practice of Mandatory Prosecution upon Misdemeanor Domestic Battery Suspects

This article provides an ethnographic account of the power and practice of mandatory prosecution upon misdemeanor domestic battery suspects. Integrating law and society studies, domestic violence research, and poststructuralist theories of power, it finds that mandatory prosecution engages suspected batterers in multiple power operations that shape their agency in different ways. While many of these operations are familiar from past law and society research, mandatory prosecution alters their practice. In general, the different tactics that legal authorities deploy in their interactions with domestic battery suspects coalesce in an effort to have them plead guilty. The impact of these tactics on batterers, however, is far from clear. Mandatory prosecution increases the number of persons convicted of domestic violence. But abusers' violence is repeatedly redefined and displaced, as they are processed through the court setting, thus casting doubt on the criminal court's power to affect their accountability. By detailing the court's various points of encounter with domestic battery suspects, this study offers a much-needed empirical framework for future evaluations of court interventions against domestic batterers.     

Repression of the Human Right to Personal Integrity Revisited: A Global Cross-National Study Covering the Years 1976–1993

Here we seek to build on our earlier research (Poe and Tate, 1994) by re-testing similar models on a data set covering a much longer time span; the period from 1976 to 1993. Several of our findings differ from those of our earlier work. Here we find statistical evidence that military regimes lead to somewhat greater human rights abuse, defined in terms of violations of personal integrity, once democracy and a host of other factors are controlled. Further, we find that countries that have experienced British colonial influence tend to have relatively fewer abuses of personal integrity rights than others. Finally, our results suggest that leftist countries are actually less repressive of these basic human rights than non-leftist countries. Consistent with the Poe and Tate (1994) study, however, we find that past levels of repression, democracy, population size, economic development, and international and civil wars exercise statistically significant and substantively important impacts on personal integrity abuse.