VHA Primary Care Providers’ Perspectives on Screening Female Veterans for Intimate Partner Violence: A Preliminary Assessment

Female Veterans experience intimate partner violence (IPV) at alarming rates. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) requires foundational research to guide the development of policy and programs to detect IPV among women Veterans and provide interventions. This pilot study reports findings from in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with 12 VHA primary care providers treating female Veterans in the New England region. Although most providers indicated that they were not currently routinely screening for IPV, they expressed positive attitudes and beliefs about screening in VHA primary care settings. Themes also included the importance of a comprehensive health care response to IPV, such as interdisciplinary coordination of care and team-based approaches to detection and intervention. Barriers to routine screening were identified, as well as recommendations for training programs and clinical tools to inform the successful implementation of a standardized IPV screening and response program in VHA. Although preliminary, these findings represent an initial step in an essential line of research.     

Justifying violence: legitimacy,ideology and public support for police use of force

Under what conditions do people support police use of force? In this paper we assess some of the empirical links between police legitimacy, political ideology (right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation), and support for ‘reasonable’ use of force (e.g. an officer striking a citizen in self-defence) and ‘excessive’ use of force (e.g. an officer using violence to arrest an unarmed person who is not offering violent resistance). Analysing data from an online survey with US participants (n?=?186) we find that legitimacy is a positive predictor of reasonable but not excessive police use of force, and that political ideology predicts support for excessive but not reasonable use of force. We conclude with the idea that legitimacy places normative constraints around police power. On the one hand, legitimacy is associated with increased support for the use of force, but only when violence is bounded within certain acceptable limits. On the other hand, excessive use of force seems to require an extra-legal justification that is – at least in our analysis – partly ideological. Our findings open up a new direction of research in what is currently a rather sparse psychological literature on the ability of legitimacy to ‘tame’ coercive power.     

The Failure of Defamation Law to Safeguard against SLAPPs in Ontario

The authors examine the failure of the law of defamation in Canada to reflect changed realities with respect to public participation in decision-making processes and the impact that this has had on Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) in the Ontario context. They examine the enhancement of the public's substantive and procedural rights to participate in environmental decision-making processes reflected in legislation at the international, federal and provincial levels. They argue that SLAPPs threaten to reverse these shifts in norms in the development of public policy. The authors review anti-SLAPP legislation as well as the evolution of defamation law in Canada and other jurisdictions and conclude by offering some law reform recommendations for Ontario.     

The impact of race on perceptions of criminal injustice

Based on a stratified sample of 239 residents of Cincinnati, Ohio, the present study explored whether African Americans and Whites differ in their perceptions of racial injustice in the criminal justice system. The data revealed a cleavage in the extent to which the races believed that Black citizens would be differentially stopped by the police, given a speeding ticket, jailed, and sentenced to death. The effect of race remained strong even when controls were introduced for sociodemographic characteristics, experience with the criminal justice system, experience with crime, neighborhood disorder, and political and crime related ideology. Perceptions of injustice, moreover, were strongest among the least affluent African Americans. The possibility that the racial divide in perceived criminal injustice both reflects and contributes to a larger racial chasm in how Black and White citizens understand and experience their lives in American society is explored.     

Campaign Strategies in the 2015 Swiss National Elections: Nationalization,Coordination, and Personalization

This research note examines parties' campaign strategies in the 2015 Swiss elections. We base our analyses on a collection of more than 5000 party advertisements, which were published in the forefront of the national elections in more than 50 daily and weekly national and cantonal print media. By comparing the amount of party and candidate ads, as well as the content and nature of the political advertisements, we explore the degree of professionalization of electoral campaigns in the most recent federal elections in terms of nationalization, coordination and personalization. First results show that although national campaign coordination exists, Swiss elections are to a considerable extent still cantonal and personal affairs.     

Voting in the rain: the impact of rain on participation in open-air assemblies

ABSTRACT

The analysis of how weather conditions influence participation at the ballot and whether bad weather influences ballot decisions has recently gained momentum. This paper analyses the influence of rain on participation in the Landsgemeinde – the main decision-making body of two Swiss cantons, wherein citizens meet on the main square in order to debate and decide bindingly on political matters of all sorts. We rely on a survey with an in-built conjoint experiment that presents citizens with several hypothetical Landsgemeinde situations characterized by randomly varied combinations of weather and other conditions such as outcome favorability, the expected closeness of the vote and the company available during the event. We find that rain not only decreases overall participation but it also lowers participation when votes are expected to be uncontested and for individuals who do not primarily attend the Landsgemeinde for political reasons.     

Above the Law? A Comparative Study of National Prosecutions of Heads of State

Official polices on the appropriate government response to crimes committed by a head of state are seldom dictated by strict principles of justice. Deciding whether to bring an errant leader to justice is often influenced by political expediency. Given the number of documented cases of official abuse, there is a need to understand why some governments choose to prosecute a former or sitting head of state while others do not. Yet, few studies have been done on this subject. This study reviews 52 cases of heads of state accused of crimes and explores how their own national governments responded to such accusations. Using data culled from various documentary sources, it employs a grounded theory approach to focus on the process that drives the decision to prosecute. Analysis indicates that political legitimacy, perception of threat, political stability, and degree of politicization of the military influence the decision to prosecute. The article concludes with a discussion of the significance and implications of these findings and suggestions for future research.     

Listening to law enforcement officers: The promises and problems of police - adult probation partnerships

Police-probation partnerships have increased in recent years, but evaluations of such partnerships are rare. Particularly within probation agencies, such partnerships can be perceived as an abandonment of service responsibilities in favor of enforcing the law against probationers, but the views of police officers involved in these partnerships have not been examined in the past. The current study began this process by examining the perceptions of law enforcement officers in Texas. In particular, the following questions were addressed: (1) whether they experience role conflict or role ambiguity, (2) how they perceive the effectiveness of partnerships, and (3) how they evaluate the impact of partnerships on crime reduction. Three partnership patterns were identified using cluster analysis. The analysis revealed a significant relationship between the extent of partnerships and the perceptions of law enforcement officers on the partnerships. The policy implications of the findings are discussed.     

Disagreement and the Avoidance of Political Discussion: Aggregate Relationships and Differences across Personality Traits

Social networks play a prominent role in the explanation of many political phenomena. Using data from a nationally representative survey of registered voters conducted around the 2008 U.S. presidential election, we document three findings. First, we show that during this period, people discussed politics as frequently as (or more frequently than) other topics such as family, work, sports, and entertainment with frequent discussion partners. Second, the frequency with which a topic is discussed is strongly and positively associated with reported agreement on that topic among these same discussion partners. Supplementary experimental evidence suggests this correlation arises because people avoid discussing politics when they anticipate disagreement. Third, we show that Big Five personality traits affect how frequently people discuss a variety of topics, including politics. Some of these traits also alter the relationship between agreement and frequency of discussion in theoretically expected ways. This suggests that certain personality types are more likely to be exposed to divergent political information, and that not everyone is equally likely to experience cross‐cutting discourse, even in heterogeneous networks.