Democracy and Human Rights in the Mexican States: Elections or Social Capital?

Why does the relationship between a government and its citizens deteriorate to violence? Large-N cross-national quantitative analyses of human rights violations have found an inverse relationship between democracy and violations. These analyses, however, have not been able to address the central finding of an influential subnational analysis of democracy that stresses the importance of a single dimension of democracy, social capital. In this article we combine these two streams of research with fresh data from the Mexican states to investigate how and why democracy inhibits violations. Theoretically, we connect a policy interest in protecting human rights to politicians' office-seeking goals and to the level of social capital. Empirically, our data allow us to disentangle two principal components of democracy, elections and social capital, and include important control variables, notably ethnic diversity, which have been largely left out of the cross-national analyses. Our central finding is that the electoral components rather than social capital produce important consequences for the protection of citizens' human rights.     

The Politics of Russia's Partial Democracy

This review looks at the failure of Russia to consolidate democracy over the past decade. Most explanations of this failure concentrate on the role of institutions, particularly the influence of the presidency. The design of Russian democracy has undermined democratic governance and lessened the chance of democratic consolidation in the future by weakening two preconditions for democratic maturity in Russia, the development of a common legal and political space through the improvement of the federal system and the construction of a national market economy. The review concludes by asking whether, and in what dimensions, Russia's partial democratic system can be stable.     

The Idea of Constitutional Pluralism

Constitutional discourse has perhaps never been more popular, nor more comprehensively challenged than it is today. The development of new constitutional settlements and languages at state and post-state level has to be balanced against the deepening of a formidable range of sceptical attitudes. These include the claim that constitutionalism remains too state-centered, overstates its capacity to shape political community, exhibits an inherent normative bias against social developments associated with the politics of difference, provides a language easily susceptible to ideological manipulation and, that, consequent upon these challenges, it increasingly represents a fractured and debased conceptual currency. A rehabilitated language of constitutionalism would meet these challenges through a version of constitutional pluralism. Constitutional pluralism recognises that in the post-Westphalian world there exists a range of different constitutional sites and processes configured in a heterarchical rather than a hierarchical pattern, and seeks to develop a number of empirical indices and normative criteria which allow us to understand this emerging configuration and assess the legitimacy of its development.     

Developmental Pathways in Youth Sexual Aggression and Delinquency: Risk Factors and Mediators

Childhood exposure to violence against females and male-modeled antisocial behavior were examined as risk factors for sexual aggression, and nonsexual aggression and delinquency, in a sample of 182 adolescent male sex offenders using structural equation modeling. Both risk factors produced direct and indirect effects on nonsexual aggression and delinquency with Psychosocial Deficits and Egotistical–Antagonistic Masculinity playing important mediating roles. Exposure to violence against females helped explain sexual aggression through the mediating role of Psychosocial Deficits. As hypothesized, youth who sexually offended against prepubescent children manifested greater deficits in psychosocial functioning, committed fewer offenses against strangers, and demonstrated less violence in their sexual offending than offenders against pubescent females. Findings are discussed within the context of two major evolutionary psychological concepts for explaining human sexual behavior: intrasexual selection and intersexual selection.     

The Logic of Transnational Action: The Good Corporation and the Global Compact

This article examines corporate participation in the UN Global Compact programme. Using data on the world's 2,000 largest companies, we address the question of why companies voluntarily assume the programme's responsibilities and promote the rights of 'global citizenship'. Our analytic approach is to view transnational corporate political behaviour as a result of firm-level decisions shaped by country-level variation in political audience effects. Drawing on earlier research on more conventional forms of corporate political activity, we expect factors influential in the standard model of firm political activity to determine participation in the Global Compact. In addition, we argue that this highly visible, less instrumental dimension of a firm's political behaviour is driven by efforts to build a good environmental and human rights reputation with its audience of external actors. The importance of environmental and human rights concerns depends on the substance of the firm's business activities, the availability of investment and 'exit' options, and the home audience's bias towards the UN and human and environmental rights. We find support for political factors as well as firm and industry-level characteristics influencing the decision to participate in the Global Compact.     

Contracts for Legal Aid: A Critical Discussion of Government Policy Proposals

In this paper, we examine the UK government's proposals for the reform of legal aid, which are based on block franchising. We identify several potential incentive-compatibility problems mainly concerned with the possibility of chiseling on quality after contracts are awarded or with supplier control of access to legal aid. Our suggestions for improving the scheme are based around awarding vouchers for legal aid.     

The Law of the Land

This article considers the status of foreign precedents in national courts. It examines possible reasons for courts referring to them and concludes that, absent some incorporating convention, judges cannot ever be said to have an obligation to refer to them. But it also shows that there is nothing unprincipled about national courts choosing to treat foreign precedents as persuasive authority, notwithstanding that there are some good reasons, especially in the context of constitutional adjudication, for cautioning against this. It is also suggested that no satisfactory argument can be adduced to support the proposition that a national court must never rely on foreign precedent as the sole reason for modifying the indigenous common law – though it seems very unlikely that judges would ever need (still less want) to rely on foreign precedent in this way.     

Contrary Siblings: Syria,Jordan and the Iraq War

Jordan and Syria, severed parts of the same country, were in many ways ‘siblings’: their systemic situation, as economically weak small states surrounded by more powerful enemies, was similarly vulnerable; their leaders at the time of the Iraq War were of a similar ‘modernising’ generation; the identities of their populations were similarly Arab-Islamic. Yet, they followed diametrically opposite policies toward the invasion of Iraq: Jordan bandwagoning with the United States and Syria defying it. This contrary behaviour is explained by their differential experiences of state formation and the differing social forces incorporated and identities institutionalised in Ba'thist Syria and Hashemite Jordan.