The Electronic Pillory: Social Time and Hostility Toward Capital Murderers

In early modern Europe, popular hostility toward criminals could be expressed through the use of the pillory (a device in which offenders were restrained and publicly displayed). Modern electronic communications have facilitated the emergence of contemporary versions of the pillory. One such example is prodeathpenalty.com , a Web site created by supporters of capital punishment that permits members to post comments about particular executions. Most such comments are markedly hostile toward the convicted offender. But is the hostility random or patterned? A new theory by Donald Black predicts that hostility will increase with changes in social space, or the movement of social time. Testing Black's theory, we find that the number of online comments hostile to the killer and supportive of the execution increases with the degree to which the murder was a movement of relational, vertical, and cultural time. Moving beyond the electronic pillory, we argue that Black's theory has much to offer to law and society scholars.     

National protest agenda and the dimensionality of party politics: Evidence from four East-Central European democracies

Contemporary democracies show considerable differences in the issue composition of their protest politics, which tends to remain relatively stable over time. In countries like Germany or the Czech Republic, the vast majority of protests have been mobilised around sociocultural issues, such as human rights, peace, nuclear power or the environment, and only a tiny portion of protest has focused on economic issues. At the opposite extreme, protest in France or Poland usually has a strongly economic character and voices demands relating to material redistribution and social policy. What lies behind the cross-country differences in national protest agendas? In this article, the national protest agenda depends on what issues mainstream political parties are contesting: the content and strength of the master-issue dimension. In reference to the literature on the multidimensional political space and niche political parties, one should expect that there is a substitutive effect; where the stronger a specific master-issue dimension is in party politics, the less salient that issue dimension is in protest politics. This substitutive effect results from the tendency of electoral politics to reduce political conflict to a single-dimension equilibrium, which decreases the importance of other issues and relegates the contest over secondary, niche issues to the realm of policy-seeking strategies, with protest being a common type of this political strategy. In party systems where single-dimension equilibrium does not exist and the master-issue dimension is weaker, the same dynamics result in a more convergent relationship between party and protest politics and a greater similarity between the protest- and party-system agendas. To investigate this theory, the national protest agendas in four countries are examined. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia show four combinations of two crucial factors that are not available in the old Western democracies: the content and the strength of the master-issue dimension. The study draws on an original dataset of protest events organised in the four countries between 1993 and 2010, and on qualitative and quantitative data on issue dimensions of party politics obtained from studies on party politics and expert surveys. The results show that in the Czech Republic, where the master-issue dimension has remained strongly economic, protest has been predominantly sociocultural. In Poland between 1993 and 2001 and Hungary between 1993 and 2006, the master-issue dimensions are strongly sociocultural, while protest is predominantly economic. There is no single-dimension equilibrium in party politics in Slovakia or in post-2001 Poland and mainstream parties compete on both economic and sociocultural issues. Consequently, the substitutive dynamics between party and protest politics is weaker and the issue agendas in party and protest arenas are here more alike.     

Reconsidering the relationship between alcohol and lethal violence

Prior event-based research regarding the relationship between alcohol and violence suffers from important limitations, including the absence of a comparison group, an inappropriate comparison group, or a comparison group that could be considered appropriate but does not control for potential confounders. To overcome such limitations, we use a matched pair design. Drawing on interviews with men imprisoned for an aggravated assault or homicide committed in response to a conflict with another man, we examine matched pairs of violent and nonviolent conflicts nested within respondents. The results suggest that guns mediate the relationship between alcohol and lethal male-male violence.     

The patent lottery

A recent study by Boston academic economists James Bessen andMichael Muerer has argued that many patents are simply not worthhaving. Their case is based on the analysis of a large bodyof data. As James Bessen says, in a comment posted in responseto criticism on the IPKat weblog,

"We derived our estimatesof patent rents after reviewing 16 different papers publishedover 25 years, involving 17 different authors and several differentmethodologies.     

从网络成瘾少年的被强制戒除看家庭保障应当承担的社会责任

从近期有关于中国知名戒网瘾专家杨永信用强行禁闭、电休克等非人道的手段进行治疗网瘾患者的事件为引,从家庭保障的角度出发,重点探讨家庭在青少年网络成瘾的问题中应该承担的责任。     

School Choice: Money,Race, and Congressional Voting on Vouchers

Milton Friedman has suggested that the political power of the AmericanFederation of Teachers and the National Education Association (the twomajor teachers unions) has been instrumental in defeating the adoption ofeducational vouchers. We test this hypothesis.We find that a campaign contribution to a memberof the U.S. House of Representatives by either unionreduces the probability that also a Representative will vote for apro school choice amendment to the ``No Child Left Behind Act of2001.'' Also a Representative whose districthas a large African American population or who is Republicanis more likely to vote for vouchers.     

论"布什主义"

文章分析了布什主义产生的历史背景 ;阐述了布什主义的主要内容和特征 ;并对布什主义的本质及其影响作了评价。文章指出 ,布什主义的主要内容是 :(一 )以“恐怖分子”和“无赖国家”作为美国的主要现实对手 ;(二 )以防止能对美国霸权地位构成挑战的大国的崛起作为长期战略目标 ;(三 )推行“先发制人战略” ;(四 )重视维护美国本土安全 ;(五 )倚重军事力量的作用 ;(六 )单边主义倾向突出 ;(七 )意识形态色彩严重。     

IP: the universal lubricant

Press coverage of IP law is generally pathological: it focuseson things that have gone wrong. Youngsters who have the brightidea of copying and file-sharing their favourite recordingsand movies end up in court, as do sellers of knock-off perfumesin street markets, as do fashion chains whose new ranges ofdresses or accessories bear a striking resemblance to the linespreviously unveiled on Paris catwalks by leading designers. Even when there isn't