Toga Party: The Political Basis of Judicial Investigations against MPs in Italy (1983–2013)

Scholars agree that ideology affects judicial decision-making. We demonstrate that this proposition holds true even when the judiciary is independent of political control. Focusing on Italy (1983–2013), where the politicisation of the judiciary was an issue well before the entry of Berlusconi into politics, we estimate judicial orientations according to the support for factions within the National Judiciary Association. The results show that ideology affects trial court activity against deputies. As the support for left-wing factions increases, prosecutors are more likely to investigate right-wing parties. Conversely, as the share of right-leaning factions grows, investigations of moderate or rightist parties decrease.     

Out of Sight,Out of Mind? External Voting and the Political Representation of Portuguese Emigrants

Over recent decades, emigrants have gained expanded voting rights on a global scale. Despite the normative debates about this issue, there are few empirical studies on why states decide to implement external voting and how electoral systems perform. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at the Portuguese case. Our study suggests that a combination of political and socio-economic factors explains the implementation of external voting. On the other hand, the interests of political parties and the low level of civil society engagement are key to determining the failure of electoral reforms and the attempts to overcome the shortcomings of external voting.     

Optimal contest design, closeness and the contest success function

This paper considers the optimal design of an asymmetric two-player contest when the designer’s payoff depends not only on performance of the contestants, but also on the closeness of the contest measured by the difference in winning probabilities. In contrast to previous studies, the impact of closeness on the optimal prize depends on the shape of the contest success function. Furthermore, including closeness in the designer’s objective may induce the designer to uniformly increase the contestants’ effort costs. A similar result is obtained in case the designer may handicap the stronger contestant, but an even contest is never optimal.     

Finding hidden value through mixed-methodology: Lessons From the Discovery Program’s Holistic Approach to Truancy Abatement

Policy makers often bemoan the shortcomings and inefficiency of youth development and similar social work programs whose effectiveness cannot be demonstrated by quantifiable performance indicators. This study argues, through illustration of the Odyssey Learning Center’s Discovery Program (an alternative school serving rural Southern youth in an abject poverty context), that program value can only be evidenced through a mixed-methodological evaluation design. Reasons precluding traditional statistical analysis and effectiveness determinations are discussed and alternative conceptualizations of program value are considered. This research was funded from Federal Grant Number 2002-JE-FX-0034 from the United States Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention through the South Carolina Department of Public Safety, Office of Justice Programs. Points of view or opinions stated are those of the researchers and do not necessarily represent the opinion or official position of the United States Department of Justice or the South Carolina Department of Public Safety.     

The Impact of Officer and Agency Characteristics on the Likelihood of Arrest in Domestic Violence Situations among Rural Law Enforcement Officers

Domestic violence cuts across all demographic groups. The factors related to why police officers arrest in some domestic violence situations but not others have been often studied. Little research, however, has been conducted on the arrest views of rural police officers. One hundred seventy line officers in six rural Midwestern counties were surveyed to determine the impact of officer personal characteristics and agency type on arrest decisions in various hypothetical domestic violence scenarios. First, the same situational factors appeared to be important in shaping the arrest decision in domestic violence calls of rural officers as have previously been found with urban officers. Second, the characteristics of officers and the type of agency had some impact on the likelihood of arrest, particularly if there was evidence of a physical assault. Third, the presence of evidence of a physical assault helped shape the arrest decisions of rural officers. Fourth, situational factors were more important than officer characteristics and the type of agency. Nancy Hogan and Shannon Barton contributed equally to the paper. The authors thank Janet Lambert for editing and proofreading the paper. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.     

Women and Men in Jail: Attitudes Towards and Experiences of Domestic Violence

This study explores the pre-arrest domestic violence victimization and attitudes towards domestic violence reported by women and men confined in a Midwestern metropolitan jail. Results indicated that women in the jail sample had more fear for the safety of battered women than men in the jail sample. Women in jail were more likely than men in jail to view the legal system as a deterrent to domestic violence. Logistic regression models were constructed to explore associations between jail detainees’ pre-arrest experiences of domestic violence and their gender, age, education, race, parental status and other violent victimizations. The variables associated with pre-arrest domestic violence victimization were being a woman, a parent, a victim rape and a victim of threats with a deadly weapon.     

Water as a political good: implications for investments

There is an urgent need for investments in the water sector. Still about a billion people lack access to drinking water services, and the double amount lacks proper sanitation services. To reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) substantial additional funding needs to be accessed. In view of the low priority given to the water sector by all prospective investors, the perspective of failure to reach the MDGs is eminent. The main argument made in this paper is that a formidable obstacle in accessing and using funds in the water sector is the omission to include explicitly the political nature of water in investment decisions. Due to its multifaceted and internally conflicting character, politics are a fact of life in the water sector. The menu of (suitable) investment options for a given locality is very much dependent on the political environment in which these water services are to be provided. While the impact of the political realm on water services is often acknowledged (most frequently in negative terms as it is seen as one of the main causes of poor performance of public utilities), few professionals really take the political environment explicitly into account when taking decisions relating to the provision of water services. In this paper it is propagated that the political dimension of water should be made explicit in an attempt to increase access and sustainability of investments in the water sector. Sound and sustainable investment in water services can only be achieved by taking into account the existing political environment in which those water services are to be delivered.     

The Internationalization of Network Industries: A Comparative Policy Analysis of Italian Railways and Utilities

Internationalization constitutes a dominant strategy for former public enterprises, as they enter emerging markets in other countries. This article provides a firm-level analysis of the drivers of (and obstacles to) internationalization. It focuses primarily on the experience of Italian companies in the railway and utility sectors by comparing and contrasting them with major European companies as well as among themselves. The article shows the diverse degrees of internationalization of Italian companies and takes into account possible explanations, showing how the policy and regulatory environment do interact with the configurations of actors’ preferences in shaping companies’ strategies.     

Simpler is better? Analysis of a codesign session with elders

Prototyping plays various roles in software engineering: it can function in an exploratory way in order to gather requirements, or generate an artifact that, through iterative cycles of development, leads to final delivery of the product or system. According to literature (Beaudouin-Lafon, M., and W. Mackay. 2007. “Prototyping Tools and Techniques.” In Human Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals. CRC Press.; Lim, Y. K., E. Stolterman, and J. Tenenberg. 2008. “The anatomy of prototypes: Prototypes as filters, prototypes as manifestations of design ideas.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 15 (2): 7.), a prototype can be described as an incomplete but flexible communication tool for a design idea, both manifesting and filtering interesting aspects of the original idea. On this basis, we propose a Peircean definition for this tool: a prototype can be considered as a complex set of signs, or better as a text, because each of its features literally “stands for” corresponding features of the final artifact, foreseeing particular aspects or the overall capacity of the outcome. But what happens when stakeholders involved in a project have no or little competence in tools and technologies discussed? Can they correctly interpret a prototype? To answer this question, we propose a Discourse Analysis (Duranti, A. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press; Potter, J. 2004. “Discourse analysis as a way of analyzing naturally occurring talk.” In Qualitative research: Theory, Method and Practice, edited by D. Silverman, 200–221. SAGE; Schegloff, J. 1989. “Harvey Sacks’ lectures on conversation: an Introduction/memoir.” Human Studies 12: 185–209.) of a co-design session with elders of a daily centre for frail adults in Rome. In this context, we could observe how interactions between the material aspect of the prototype (i.e. the product itself) and its intended meaning (i.e. its significance) can produce distortions, in the form of aberrant interpretations or even a complete lack of comprehension. During this communication breakdown, prototypes lose their connection to the features and behaviors of the product: the relation between representamen and interpretant is lost.