Felony-murder and community sentiment

The controversy over capital felony-murder resurfaced in two recent Supreme Court cases (Enmund v. Florida, 1982;Tison v. Arizona, 1987), where two bitterly divided Courts made highly questionable assertions regarding where community sentiment stood on this matter. To test these assertions about the felony-murder rule and the accessorial liability theory, two experiments were run (N=275, 73% death qualified, andN=212, 81% death qualified) where mock jurors rendered verdicts and sentences for four defendants who varied in their level of culpability and level of participation in the crime. To test the Supreme Court's reasoning, subjects rendered decisions and reasons using the “ninth Justice” paradigm, where they could “reverse and remand” or “let stand” the death sentence for felony-murder. The empirical evidence indicates that subjects clearly and consistently reject the accessorial liability theory and the felony-murder rule, and these results refute the majority's assertions inTison about where community sentiment stands.     

Representative Democracy as a Necessary Condition for the Survival of a Federal Constitution

It does not follow from the supposition that the union is beneficialthat its terms would go unchallenged by its members. The argumentin this article suggests that federal stability (robustness)requires for itself a well-functioning democratic process, whichsatisfies a fairly restrictive condition. A necessary conditionfor the resiliency of the federal regime is a representativedemocracy; furthermore, it is the representative democracy inwhich rewards to the representatives are only in part vestedin their parochial constituencies, while in the other part comeform other sources, e.g., from an oversized at-large coalition.The requirement to the democratic process is, of course, onlya necessary, not a sufficient condition for the federal success.Yet, we argue in this essay that only the states with well-developed(properly institutionalized) democratic electoral competitionhave a chance to form a resilient federal union and sustaintheir federal constitutional arrangements not just in form,but in their political practice as well.     

Characterization of the Caucasian haplogroups present in the SWGDAM forensic mtDNA dataset for 1771 human control region sequences. Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods

Currently, the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (SWGDAM) mtDNA dataset is used to infer the relative rarity of mtDNA profiles (i.e., haplotypes) obtained from evidence samples and for identification of missing persons. The Caucasian haplogroup patterns in this forensic dataset have been characterized using phylogenetic methods. The assessment reveals that the dataset is relevant and representative of U.S. and European Caucasians. The comparisons carried out were both the observation of variable sites within the control region (CR) and the selection of a subset of these sites, which partition the variation within human mtDNA control region sequences into clusters (i.e., haplogroups). The aligned sequence matrix was analyzed to determine both single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a phylogenetic context, as well as to check and standardize haplogroup designations with a focus on determining the characters that define these groups. To evaluate the dataset for forensic utility, the haplogroup identifications and frequencies were compared with those reported from other published studies.     

A Simple Distribution-Free Test for Nonnested Model Selection

e-mail: kevin.clarke{at}rochester.edu This paper considers a simple distribution-free test for nonnestedmodel selection. The new test is shown to be asymptoticallymore efficient than the well-known Vuong test when the distributionof individual log-likelihood ratios is highly peaked. MonteCarlo results demonstrate that for many applied research situations,this distribution is indeed highly peaked. The simulation furtherdemonstrates that the proposed test has greater power than theVuong test under these conditions. The substantive applicationaddresses the effect of domestic political institutions on foreignpolicy decision making. Do domestic institutions have effectsbecause they hold political leaders accountable, or do theysimply promote political norms that shape elite bargaining behavior?The results indicate that the latter model has greater explanatorypower. Authors' note: This work was supported by National Science FoundationGrant SES-0213771. I thank Paul K. Huth and Todd L. Allee forgraciously sharing their data and code. I also thank Bear Braumoeller,Curtis Signorino, Tasos Kalandrakis, participants in the NorthEastMethodology Program, New York University, 2003, and the reviewersfor their comments. Errors remain my own. Supplementary materialsare available on the Political Analysis Web site.     

Legitimacy in a Postcolonial Legal System: Public Perception of Procedural Justice and Moral Alignment Toward the Courts in Hong Kong

Legitimacy is said to be comprised of two underlying constructs: obligation to obey and moral alignment. However, legitimacy studies are mainly derived from contexts where the legal system has evolved naturally and is said to reflect the values of society. There is a paucity of research measuring public perceptions of legitimacy in postcolonial settings such as Hong Kong where the legal system was initially transplanted and many of its values may not reflect those of the local population. Procedural justice has been asserted to be a primary antecedent by which legal authorities improve their legitimacy and moral alignment. This study examines whether procedural justice is positively associated with legitimacy and moral alignment with the courts. Moreover, this study tests whether legitimacy is positively associated with cooperation with the courts. Using a random survey of the Hong Kong general population, both questions are answered in the affirmative. Implications are discussed.     

Quasi-experimental designs for community-level public health violence reduction interventions: a case study in the challenges of selecting the counterfactual

Objectives

We highlight the importance of documenting the step-by-step processes used for the selection of comparison areas when evaluating a community-level intervention that targets a large-scale community.

Methods

We demonstrate the proposed method using a propensity score matching framework for an impact analysis of the Cure Violence Public Health Model in Philadelphia. To select comparison communities, propensity score models are run using different levels of aggregation to define the intervention site. We discuss the trade-offs made.

Results

We find wide variation in documentation and explanation in the extant literature of the methods used to select comparison communities. The size of the unit of analysis at which a community is measured complicates the decision processes, and in turn, can affect the validity of the counterfactual.

Conclusions

It is important to carefully consider the unit of analysis for measurement of comparison communities. Assessing the geographic clustering of matched communities to mirror that of the treated community holds conceptual appeal and represents a strategy to consider when evaluating community-level interventions taking place at a large scale. Regardless of the final decisions made in the selection of the counterfactual, the field could benefit from more systematic diagnostic tools that document and guide the steps and decisions along the way, and ask: “could there have been another way of doing each step, and what difference would this have made?” Overall, across community-level evaluations that utilize quasi-experimental designs, documentation of the counterfactual selection process will provide a more fine-grained understanding of causal inference.

     

Introduction: Understanding Thailand’s Politics

ABSTRACT

Thailand’s politics from the mid-2000s has seen considerable conflict and contestation, with seven prime ministers, two military coups, and scores of deaths from political violence. This article, as well as introducing the eight articles in the Special Issue, examines various aspects of this tumultuous period and the authoritarian turn in Thai politics. It does this by examining some of the theoretical and conceptual analysis of Thailand's politics and critiquing the basic assumptions underlying the modernisation and hybrid regimes perspectives that have tended to dominate debates on democratisation. While the concepts of bureaucratic polity and network monarchy shed light on important political actors in Thailand, they have not grappled with the persistence of authoritarianism. In theoretical terms, the article suggests that it is necessary to understand historically specific capitalist development as well as the social underpinnings that establish authoritarian trajectories and reinforce the tenacity of authoritarianism.     

Speaking Different Languages or Reading From the Same Script? Word Usage of Democratic and Republican Politicians

Words are believed to be indicators of the values that are important to politicians and an impressive amount of empirical research has analyzed variations in language use. While it is generally accepted that there are value differences between Democrats and Republicans, the extent to which these differences are reflected in word usage has been theorized but is largely untested. The connection between values and language is, theoretically, not limited just to politicians, but should be especially evident among politicians as representatives of existing ideological poles. In this article, we examine elite rhetoric through the lens of four value-centered theoretical frameworks (Lakoff’s Parenting Styles model, Moral Foundations Theory, Schwartz’s Values Theory, and Motivated Social Cognition Theory). Contrary to the expectations posited by these four theories, we find little reliable evidence of value-related language differences between Democratic and Republican politicians. Our findings suggest that, at least when it comes to elite rhetoric, widely accepted theoretical claims about the value-based nature of political language and political differences are not consistently supported by empirical analysis.