Political Participation and Civic Courage: The Negative Effect of Transparency on Making Small Campaign Contributions

This study assesses whether public disclosure of campaign contributions affects citizens’ willingness to give money to candidates. In the American states, campaign finance laws require disclosure of private information for contributors at relatively low thresholds ranging from $1 to $300. The Internet has made it relatively easy to publicize such information in a way that changes the social context for political participation. Drawing on social influence theory, the analysis suggests that citizens are sensitive to divulging private information, especially those who are surrounded by people with different political views. Using experimental data from the 2011 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, it demonstrates how individuals refrain from making small campaign contributions or reduce their donations to avoid disclosing their identities. The conclusion discusses the implications of transparency laws for political participation, especially for small donors.     

The great tradition: The spread of diplomacy in the ancient world

Diplomacy as we understand it to the present day — a sophisticated system for handling affairs of state and negotiating treaties, based on accredited envoys working within a framework of international law and protocol - emerged in the third millennium BCE in the ancient Near East at the same time as the development of writing and urban culture. Transmitted by the great cuneiform civilizations of Babylon and Assyria to Achaemenid Persia and classical Greece and Rome, the heritage of diplomacy continued to flourish in Byzantium, Rome, and Venice. The Renaissance provided the conditions for the spread of a tradition that had existed in many essential aspects for millennia.     

The Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 – Secure Colleges and the Legitimation of State Sponsored Violence

The Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 empowers staff in secure colleges to subject young people in custody to dangerous force for the purpose of ensuring ‘good order and discipline’. The use of force to restrain young people in custody can cause serious physical injury, profound psychological damage and has contributed to the custodial deaths of two young people in 2004. Despite these dangers, in most youth custodial establishments the use of force remains high and has been increasing. The 2015 Act will further legitimise the use of coercive violence against vulnerable children, consequently sustaining the power imbalance between children and adults, diminishing the special status of childhood and violating the child's human rights. This comment considers the effectiveness of using force and argues that the deliberate infliction of pain should only be used as a last resort and exclusively to prevent harm to the child or others.     

Population Heterogeneity and State Dependence: State of the Evidence and Directions for Future Research

Criminological research has consistently uncovered a positive correlationbetween past and current criminal behavior. Continuity in offending overtime can be attributed to at least two processes—populationheterogeneity and state dependence. A population heterogeneity processattributes stability in offending over time to differences in ananti-social characteristic (self-control, impulsivity, psychopathicpersonality) across persons that is established early in life andtime-stable thereafter. An implication of a population heterogeneityexplanation for continuity in offending over time is that the anti-socialcharacteristic is likely to have reverberations throughout life, takingmany manifestations later in life (unemployment, drug addiction, maritalinstability). Any observed correlation between these later life events andcriminality, therefore, is spurious rather than causal, due to the factthat they are all the effects of a common cause. A state dependenceexplanation, in contrast, attributes observed stability in criminaloffending to a process of contagion. That is, criminal behavior has agenuine causal effect on subsequent criminality by eroding constraintsand strengthening incentives to crime. The implication of a statedependence process is that criminal conduct may be influenced by laterlife events. In this paper, we draw a connection between populationheterogeneity and state dependence processes and extant criminologicaltheory. We also review the literature that has investigated theplausibility of these two processes. Finally, concluding that weknow very little about them we make recommendations for future researchon population heterogeneity and state dependence.