Baring it all for Activism: The 1985 Naked Protest in Mexico

This article analyses the 1985 naked protest carried out by silver miners of Pachuca, Mexico. This singular form of resistance, the first in Mexican labour history and organised by a dissident group within the miners' union called Liberación Minera (Miners Liberation), forced management to recognise and temporarily solve some of the miners' grievances. The naked protest unveiled the shady practices of the miners' employer, the state-owned Compañía Real del Monte y Pachuca, which refused to provide work clothes and safety equipment to miners. It also pointed to the miners' union leadership's complicity in the deterioration of labour conditions. Part of the miners' naked protest success had to do with the support that they gained from members of the left-wing press who used the protest to offer an early critique of Mexico's neoliberal policies. The 1985 naked protest occurred during one of Mexico's most severe economic crises and only four years before the company became privatised. This protest is one of the last examples of organised labour resistance before industries closed down and fired thousands of workers.     

Party Sub-Brands and American Party Factions

Scholars and pundits have long noted the dominance of the American two-party system, but we know relatively little about new, endogenous institutions that have emerged within the two major parties. I argue that ideological factions provide party sub-brands, which allow legislators to more precisely define their partisan type and capture faction-specific resources. To support this claim, I analyze new data on nine ideological factions in the House of Representatives (1995–2018). I find that (1) faction voting is distinct, suggesting a product ripe for party sub-branding, and (2) joining a faction changes the ideological composition of a candidate's donor base—conditional on the strength of the faction's institutions. Party sub-branding is effective only when factions possess organizational features that induce coordinated and disciplined position taking (e.g., whips, PACs, membership restrictions). These results suggest that, even within highly polarized parties, American political ideology is more than a dichotomous choice, and factions target niche markets of political donors as a means of blunting financial instruments of party power.     

The believability of repressed memories

Two experiments investigated how mock jurors react to a case involving a repressed memory of child sexual assault. Subjects read a fictional civil trial (Experiment 1) or criminal trial (Experiment 2) summary involving the sexual assault of a 6-year-old female. The summary was presented in one of three conditions: (a)child condition: the alleged victim reported her memory of the assault in the same year that the assault occurred; (b)repressed condition: the alleged victim reported the assault 20 years later, after remembering it for the first time; or (c)no-repressed condition: the alleged victim reported the assault 20 years later, but the memory of the assault had been present for the 20 years. Although the testimony of the alleged victim was believed to some extent in all conditions, the alleged victim in the child condition was believed at the highest level, and this was associated with more decisions against the defendant. The results are discussed in terms of how delayed reporting of child sexual assault crimes is associated with lower believability of the alleged victim.We would like to thank Christy Kennedy, Paula Brinegar, and Elizabeth Thomas for their assistance in collecting and scoring the data, as well as Michael Nietzel, Monica Kern, Ronald Roesch, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.     

Beyond Sentencing Guidelines: Additional Functions for Intermediate Sentencing Entities

The first part of this two-part special issue on structured sentencing in the U.S. focused on individual jurisdictions and the relationship of five types of sentencing reforms to judicial discretion and to the political and legal forces that originated, maintained, altered or sometimes ended the reform. This issue moves the focus to a comparative one, looking across a variety of different jurisdictions to report common threads of advantage and disadvantage to the various structured sentencing systems. Originating in political and legal arenas, structured sentencing affects not only the sentencing process, but can itself affect the political process and the distribution of sanctioning discretion among the different branches of government.     

Family violence and depressive symptomatology among incarcerated women

This study examines the potential association between witnessing parental violence as a child and later adult depressive symptomatology within a population that has received limited attention in the scientific literature, namely, incarcerated women. The Conflict Tactics Scale and the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale were administered to 60 women incarcerated in a maximum security prison in North Carolina. A majority of the women reported that they had witnessed verbally aggressive or physically violent interactions among the adult members in their families. Seventy percent of these women suffered from clinically relevant levels of depressive symptomatology. Stepwise multiple linear regression analysis revealed that increasing levels of reasoning conflict resolution strategies used in the women's families of origin were associated with decreasing levels of depressive symptomatology of the women, whereas increasing levels of physically violent conflict resolution strategies were associated with increasing levels of depressive symptomatology.     

The cultural construction of gender

Bronwyn Davies, Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. Preschool Children and Gender (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1989; E. Deidre Pribram (ed.), Female Spectators. Looking at Film and Television (Verso) London/New York, 1988; Derek Longhurst (ed.), Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure (Unwin Hyman) London, 1989.     

Social role playing and moral judgment development

This study examined the relationship between social role playing and moral judgment development. Subjects were 197 students enrolled in introductory social science courses at a public junior/community college in a metropolitan area in southeast Florida. The 78 males and 119 females ranged in age from 17 to 66 years, with a mean age of 22. Rest's (1979a, 1979b) Defining Issues Test (DIT) was used to measure level of moral judgment. Social role playing was measured by the number of separate roles held by subjects in the past or present. Academic aptitude, socioeconomic status, age, and sex were included as control variables. Academic aptitude, age, and social role playing each had significant zero-order correlations with moral judgment, and social role playing added significantly to the explanation of moral judgment, controlling for academic aptitude and age. Implications of these results for the understanding of the development of moral judgment and for intervention programs are discussed.     

A predictive model of male spousal violence

This study presents and tests a predictive model of severe marital violence by men based on social learning theory and previous research. Results of the path analytic procedure suggest that sex-role egalitarianism and approval of marital violence both have direct effects on the use of severe marital violence. At the same time, sex-role egalitarianism and the observation of marital violence as a child have indirect effects by several paths. Egalitarianism has an indirect negative effect on use of severe violence which depends upon approval of marital violence. Observation of marital violence has a negative effect on self-esteem which influences marital stress and level of alcoholism, both of which have an effect on approval of marital violence. Observation of violence as a child also has a direct effect on approval of violence and a negative effect on sex-role egalitarianism.