Condemning corruption while condoning inefficiency: an experimental investigation into voting behavior

This article reports results from an economic experiment that investigates the extent to which voters punish corruption and waste in elections. While both are responsible for reductions in voters’ welfare, they are not necessarily perceived as equally immoral. The empirical literature in political agency has not yet dealt with these two dimensions of voters’ choice calculus. Our results suggest that morality and norms are indeed crucial for a superior voting equilibrium in systems with heterogeneous politicians: while corruption always is punished, self-interest alone—in the absence of norms—leads to the acceptance and perpetuation of waste and social losses.     

A quantitative differentiation method for plastic bags by wide angle X-ray diffraction for tracing the source of illegal drugs

Thirty-three shopping bags, commonly encountered in the packaging of drug doses, were characterized by wide angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD). Using this single technique, without sample preparation, nearly all the considered samples could be differentiated, achieving a discriminating power of 0.992. The rather large degree of variability existing in grocery bags, even though they are mass produced, was shown, confirming that these items can be useful in tracing the source of illicit drug doses.     

Evidence of Haldol (haloperidol) long-term intoxication

A case of intoxication by haloperidol is reported. Haloperidol is a butyrophenone derivative commonly used in many hospital units as an antipsychotic agent. Adverse reactions due to haloperidol intoxication include drowsiness, blurred vision, extrapyramidal effects, tardive dyskinesia, tachycardia, hypotension and muscular rigidity. In August 2008, a 49 year-old female nurse started feeling various symptoms such as muscular rigidity, drowsiness and buccal dyskinesia. After 3 months, she was hospitalized for the worsening of these symptoms. Four months later, she showed once more the same symptoms. Two open water bottles from which the nurse used to drink in the hospital were confiscated and analyzed. Moreover, the nurse was asked to give a sample of her hair for executing the inherent toxicological analyses. Haloperidol was found in both bottles 1 and 2 at a concentration of 31.5 μg/mL and 43.6 μg/mL, respectively. Based on segmental hair analysis, it was deduced that the nurse consumed haloperidol in the approximate period from August 2008 to March 2009. The higher levels of haloperidol in hair were found in accordance with the periods of most severe appearance of symptoms, requiring the hospitalization of the nurse. The analysis of preservatives and excipients led us to conclude that the pharmaceutical drug was probably added to the water bottles as "Haldol 2mg/mL oral solution".     

Different farming styles behind the homogenous soy production in southern Brazil

Soy is often perceived as a typical example of a homogenous capitalist agricultural model that is responsible for ecological damage and social conflicts. But this monolithic perception of soy production can be challenged: more than 30 percent of the soy producers in Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) are family farmers. In this contribution, we study soy production, the soy producers and their institutional environment from an actor-oriented perspective. We have uncovered different farming styles behind soy production: the colonial farmer, the niche farmer and the entrepreneurial farmer. The farming styles differ from each other not only in the farming system, but also in attitudes (for example, towards the forest). We found that the institutional environment and the technology are mainly focused on the entrepreneurial farmer. However, also, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) neglect the existence of small-scale soy producers. These results have several repercussions for further analysis of this problematic crop and how it can shift towards a more sustainable agricultural production model as small-scale farmers might produce soy more sustainably.     

Euthanasia as a Serious Homicide: An Empirical Study of (Normative) Consensus in Israel

The present study tests the applicability of the consensus versus the conflict model of criminal law in the case of homicide, and euthanasia, in particular. Although most criminal statutes consider euthanasia to be a serious homicide, many studies have revealed increasing public support for it. A survey of a national sample of Israeli respondents, based on a factorial design methodology, was conducted to determine the extent to which the criminal law reflects general or particular public attitudes toward euthanasia. The findings revealed that although social groups varied in their views on the seriousness of euthanasia, the public at large perceived it as significantly less serious than any other type of homicide. These findings are compatible with calls for reassessment of the criminal law with regard to euthanasia.     

“Neither Traditional nor Fully Modern...”

The issue of modernity has occupied the center stage of Brazilian sociology ever since its beginning. It is fair to say that “reaching for modernity” is a sort of obsession that crisscrosses and permeates the public imagery of a wide range of sectors of Brazilian contemporary society: “Are we really a modern society? How close is Brazil from the so-called ‘modern way of life’ experimented by First World nations?” This article is mainly concerned with showing how key-figures in Brazilian sociology have coped with such questions. I will focus on two of the most important and impacting sociological strands which are widely acknowledged in the Brazilian academia as two opposite lines of interpretation. These are: the so-called dependency approach (Caio Prado Jr., Florestan Fernandes, Fernando H. Cardoso and Octavio Ianni) and the patrimonial–patriarchal strand (Gilberto Freyre, S. B. Holanda, Raymundo Faoro and Roberto DaMatta). The argument that I pursue is that despite resting on different premises these two interpretive strands arrive at a quite similar diagnosis. In the end of the day, this shared diagnosis turns out to reinforce a sort of disorientating feeling that most Brazilians have about their contemporary condition, namely, that they are neither traditional nor fully-modern.     

Chivalry and the Moderating Effect of Ambivalent Sexism: Individual Differences in Crime Seriousness Judgments

Previous studies have shown that female offenders frequently receive more lenient judgments than equivalent males. Chivalry theories argue that such leniency is the result of paternalistic, benevolent attitudes toward women, in particular toward those who fulfill stereotypical female roles. Yet to date, studies have not examined whether such leniency is indeed associated with paternalistic societal attitudes toward women. The present study goes beyond the investigation of demographics and employs Glick and Fiske's (1996) concepts of hostile and benevolent sexism. We use these concepts to highlight the role of individual differences in attitudes toward women as a key to our understanding of lenient attitudes toward female offenders. Eight hundred forty respondents from a national sample of Israeli residents evaluated the seriousness of hypothetical crime scenarios with (traditional and nontraditional) female and male offenders. As hypothesized, hostile and benevolent sexism moderate the effect of women's "traditionality" on respondents' crime seriousness judgments and on the severity of sentences assigned.     

Exploratory Space–Time Analysis of Burglary Patterns

This paper introduces two new methods for the exploratory analysis of the spatial and temporal dynamics of residential burglary patterns. The first is a conditional spatial Markov chain which considers the extent to which a location??s probability of experiencing a residential burglary in a future period is related to the prevalence of residential burglaries in its surrounding neighborhood in an initial period. The second measure extends this conditional perspective to examine the joint evolution of residential burglary in a location and its surrounding neighborhood. These methods are applied to a case study of residential burglary patterns in Mesa, Arizona over the period October 2005 through December 2009. Strong patterns of spatial clustering of burglary activity are present in each year, and this clustering is found to have an important influence on both the conditional and joint evolution of burglary activity across space and time.     

Opportunistic and partisan election cycles in Brazil: new?evidence at the municipal level

This article tests the hypothesis of opportunistic and partisan cycle models using a new large data set of Brazilian municipalities over the 1989?C2005 period. The results show an increase in total and current expenditures and a decrease in municipal investments, local tax revenues, and budget surplus in election years. They also show that partisan ideology exerts a relative influence on the performance of the local public accounts. These results confirm that both opportunistic and partisan cycles have occurred in the management of the budgets of Brazilian municipalities after the end of the military government.