Intra-Party Politics and Public Opinion: How Candidate Selection Processes Affect Citizens’ Satisfaction with Democracy

Scholars often mention the centrality of parties for the democratic political system. Indeed political parties are indispensable institutions for the linkage between state and society, and should not remain absent in any comparative analysis of citizens’ political attitudes. Yet, only rarely do scholars study how parties shape people’s opinion about democracy. This article seeks to amend this lacuna and examine empirically how party level characteristics, specifically the nature of a party’s candidate selection procedure, relate to the level of satisfaction with democracy among citizens. The authors constructed a cross-national dataset with data on the selection procedures of 130 political parties in 28 country-sessions to examine whether citizens that vote for democratically organized parties are more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country. Additionally, this relationship is examined more closely in Israel and Belgium, two countries where candidate selection procedures show substantial variation and where politicians have made a strong claim for intraparty democratization. Both the cross-national as well as the country-specific analyses indicate that democratic candidate selection are indeed associated with greater satisfaction with democracy.     

From Suicide and Strain to Mass Murder

Mass media explanations and criminological profiles of mass shootings focus on the perpetrator’s individual psychological traits in their search for motive and meaning behind such horrific events. We consider the broader social context to better understand mass shootings. We focus on three recent high profile mass shootings in the United States – Aurora, CO, Newtown, CT, and Santa Barbara, CA as examples of people responding to various experienced strains with violence, and conclude with some ideas to help prevent such occurrences from happening again.     

Modernity,Pluralism, and Catholicism

Over the past century and a quarter, the Catholic Church has passed through four phases in its response to modernity: rejection; the search for a modus vivendi; accommodation; and a critique of modernity from within. The net result of this development has been the recovery of the Church’s understanding of itself as an evangelical or missionary enterprise.     

You’re Not Alone: Mental Health Outcomes in Therapy Groups for Abused Women

Few evaluations have assessed the outcomes of group therapy for women abused by intimate partners. Most group programs emphasize support rather than offering therapy, although women abused by partners often present with significant clinical mental health issues. This paper describes, “You’re Not Alone,” a 14-week therapy group model for women abused by intimate partners informed by a narrative approach Jenkins (The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 12 (4), 186-195 1991). The results present the demographic characteristics of the 379 women who began group, and a comparison of those who completed treatment (N?=?214) versus those who dropped out (N?=?165). Women with less income and a psychiatric history were less likely to complete group, as were women with higher depression, clinical stress, and mental health symptoms. The pretest/posttest outcome evaluation for the completers used measures of mental health symptoms, self-esteem, depression, and clinical stress, finding statistically significant improvements on most measures with moderate effect sizes. Practice implications and suggestions are presented.