Effects of victim's and defendant's physical attractiveness on the perception of responsibility in an ambiguous domestic violence case

A 2 × 4 × 4 factorial design was used to assess the effects of physical attractiveness in a domestic violence case. The attractiveness of both the defendant and victim were varied along four levels. Subjects were asked to read a domestic violence scenario where pictures of the defendant and victim were varied according their physical attractiveness. Results showed no significant effect of physical attractiveness in a juridic decision-making process in domestic violence. However, there were significant differences between male and female subjects in the sentencing of the defendant. This difference did not hold true for finding the defendant guilty or not guilty.     

Policy success for whom? A framework for analysis

This article develops a heuristic framework to help analysts navigate an important but under-researched issue: ‘policy success for whom?’ It identifies different forms of policy success across the policy making, program, political and temporal realms, to assess how a specific policy can differentially benefit a variety of stakeholders, including governments, lobbyists, not-for-profits, community groups and individuals. The article identifies a three-step process to aid researchers in examining any policy initiative in order to understand the forms and extent of success experienced by any actor/stakeholder. Central to these steps is the examination of plausible assessments and counter assessments to help interrogate issues of ‘success for whom.’ The article demonstrates a practical application of the framework to a case study focused on the Fixing Houses for Better Health (FHBH) program in Australia—a time-limited Commonwealth government-funded program aimed at improving Indigenous health outcomes by fixing housing.

     

Afro-Porteños at the end of the nineteenth century: discussing the nation

Argentina is a country that, even today, identifies itself as a modern, white, and European nation. This representation began to be projected in the last decades of the nineteenth century, framed in the state-consolidation and nation-building processes, which will be the historical context for this paper. It was also the time when a certain notion became broadly accepted: that Afro-Argentines, the descendants of formerly enslaved African people, had ‘disappeared’. By contrast, in that same period, Afro-Porteños (Porteños are citizens of Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina) had not disappeared but constituted an important community, which produced numerous newspapers. Through the analysis of Afro-Porteño newspapers, their self-representations and discourses, some of the ways they negotiated with the ideology of modernity and Europeanism (that implied whiteness) will be discussed. The agency of Afro-Porteños will be examined as we analyze how Afro-Porteño intellectuals promoted state values to their group and at the same time defended their community against discrimination.     

Broker Organizations to Facilitate Cross-Sector Collaboration: At the Crossroad of Strengthening and Weakening Effects

Cross-sector collaboration has emerged as an important way for public management to address complex social issues. Given the manifold challenges of governing and implementing such collaborations, scholars emphasize the benefits of using broker organizations to facilitate and strengthen cross-sector collaboration. However, this comparative longitudinal case study of broker organizations that support global health partnerships shows a less straightforward pattern: despite their good intentions, two of the four broker organizations analyzed subtly weakened the collaboration by gradually replacing the partners’ cross-sector tasks and decision-making with unilateral, broker-based ones. By juxtaposing this pattern with the other two broker organizations’ trajectories, this study reveals the processes underlying brokers’ role drift and unintended collaborative weakening and those allowing them to maintain their facilitation role. On this basis, the study exposes overlooked collaboration dynamics to reveal the boundaries of using broker organizations as a mechanism to facilitate cross-sector collaboration.     

Measuring Puberty and Understanding Its Impact: A Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Twins

Pubertal development is an important focus of current biopsychosocial research. The Pubertal Development Scale or PDS (Petersen, Crockett, Richards, and Boxer, J. Youth Adolesc. (1988) 17: 117–133) has become a widely used measure in school-based and longitudinal research, because it incorporates several indices of pubertal development. This study reports normative data on the PDS for two population-based birth cohorts of Finnish twin boys and girls, assessed at ages 11–12 and 14. Additionally, we report longitudinal analyses of the associations between pubertal development and substance use, suggesting that the impact of pubertal timing is more complex than previously reported; associations commonly assumed between pubertal development and substance use held only for those whose developmental level, relative to peers, remained stable across follow-up. Finally, we report twin correlations for the PDS which suggest that sibling similarity for pubertal development arises from both shared genes and shared environments and that the patterns of these influences vary between sexes and across time.     

The Making of Democratic Citizens: How Regime‐Specific Socialization Shapes Europeans’ Expectations of Democracy

When analysing support for democracy, researchers tend to assume that ‘democracy’ is a concept that travels across countries. This paper argues that democracy is not the same thing for every citizen, because collective and individual socialization experiences strongly shape the criteria citizens expect a democracy to fulfil. Based on the literature on varieties of democracy, I suppose that individual expectations of democracy are influenced by regime‐specific socialization, and depend on the democratic history, authoritarian legacies, and the prevalent democratic model. Due to socialization and democratic learning, individuals acquire democratic preferences and value those dimensions more which they experience in their own democracy. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Democracy Barometer, I test how the national democratic context in 26 European democracies influences these individual democratic ideals. I find evidence for both socialization and participation effects of the democratic context on citizens’ democratic expectations.