AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF EXITING FROM CRIMINAL CAREERS

This paper explores the process of exiting from criminal careers through unstructured interviews with twenty nonprofessional property offenders. he findings suggest that (I) exiting is motivated by the deterrent force of imprisonment and the offender's desire to “settle down”; (2) success in exiting revolves around the establishment of a social bond to the conventional world. In general, these findings support social control as a theory of criminal behavior.     

CONTRIBUTIONS OF FAMILIES AND PEERS TO DELINQUENCY*

A model is presented that explains the contribution of parents and peers to adolescent delinquent behavior. It is hypothesized that during adolescence a failure in Parent Monitoring and deficits in Social Skills increase the likelihood that a youngster associates with Deviant Peers. Poor Parent Monitoring Deviant Peers, and low levels of Academic Skills are hypothesized to contribute directly to an adolescent's engagement in delinquent behavior, The present model was tested on a sample of 136 seventh and tenth grade male adolescents by using the structural modeling approach in the LISREL IV analysis program (Jöreskog & Sörbom, 1978). The major revision of the model was that the correlation between Academic Skills and Parent Monitoring was set to zero. A chi square goodness-of-fit test for the revised model showed adequate agreement between the hypothesized model and the observed covariance structure of the data. It was suggested that a number of requirements be completed before accepting the above model: (1) replication of this model on a new set of data, (2) longitudinal analyses showing the hypothesized relations through time, and (3) experimental testing by manipulation of one or more independent variables, as is possible in clinical intervention studies.     

Throwing the rascals out? Problems of accountability in two‐party systems

This article critically examines the concept of ‘accountability’ as it is understood in two‐party systems and majoritarian democracy – namely the ability of voters to remove governments that violate their mandates or otherwise perform poorly. Voters’ capacity to ‘throw the rascals out’ is one of the main normative appeals of two‐partism and the single‐member plurality (SMP) electoral system. However, this article uses a spatial model to show that in at least two types of situation voters are left in a bind when confronted with a mandate‐breaking governing party: (1) when both major parties undertake unexpected non‐centrist shifts in opposing directions after an election, leaving centrist voters with an unappealing choice; and (2) when a governing party that had won an election on a non‐centrist platform undertakes a post‐election shift to the centre, leaving its more radical supporters dissatisfied. In each case, voters have four imperfect options: punish the governing party by throwing the rascals out, but in doing so vote for a party that is ideologically more distant; abstain, and withdraw from the democratic process; vote for a minor party that has no hope of influencing government formation, but which might detach enough votes to allow the ideologically more distant major opposition party to win; and forgive the governing party its mandate‐breaking. All of these options represent accountability failures. The problems are illustrated with two case studies from two‐party systems: the United Kingdom in the mid‐1980s and New Zealand in the period 1984–1993. In both instances, many voters found it difficult to ‘throw the rascals out’ without harming their own interests in the process. The article concludes that accountability may sometimes be better achieved if voters can force a party to share power in coalition with another party in order to ‘keep it honest’ instead of removing it from government completely, as can happen in multi‐party systems based on proportional representation. Thus, although two‐partism based on plurality voting is normally regarded as superior to multi‐partism and proportional representation on the criterion of accountability, in some instances, the reverse can be true. The article therefore undermines a core normative argument advanced by supporters of majoritarian democracy and SMP.     

Portfolio allocation patterns and policy-making effectiveness in minority coalition governments

Although minority coalition has become a relatively frequent form of governance, it is often considered politically ineffective in policy making. To obtain sufficient support in parliament, government bills must go through the scrutiny activities initiated by coalition partners and overcome the concerns of external support parties in opposition. By examining parliamentary scrutiny on government bills, this paper explains the surprising policy-making effectiveness in minority coalition governments. Specifically, we argue and show that different patterns of portfolio allocation with the specific ideological locations of the ministerial office-holder, the coalition partner and the external supporter, structure the extent to which government bills are scrutinized in parliament, and therefore, the effectiveness of the minority coalition on managing and implementing policies. We empirically examine bills initiated by 256 ministries in 13 Danish minority coalitions between 1985 and 2015, and we reveal robust evidence that corroborates our argument.     

A multilevel puzzle: Migrants’ voting rights in national and local elections

How does international migration impact the composition of the demos? Constitutional doctrines and democratic theories suggest contrasting responses: an insular one excludes both non‐citizen immigrants and citizen‐emigrants; a deterritorialised one includes all citizens wherever they reside; a postnational one includes all residents and only these. This article argues that none of these predicted responses represents the dominant pattern of democratic adaptation, which is instead a level‐specific expansion of the national franchise to include non‐resident citizens and of the local franchise to include non‐citizen residents. This is demonstrated by analysing an original dataset on voting rights in 31 European and 22 American countries, and outlining a level‐sensitive normative theory of citizenship that provides support for this pattern as well as a critical benchmark for current franchise policies. The findings can be summarised in two inductive generalisations: (1) Voting rights today no longer depend on residence at the national level and on citizenship of the respective state at the local level; (2) Voting rights do, however, generally depend on citizenship of the respective state at the national level and on residence at the local level. In the article, these are called the patterns of franchise ‘expansion’ and ‘containment’. The former supports the idea of widespread level‐specific expansion of the franchise and refutes the insular view of the demos. The latter signals corresponding level‐specific restrictions, which defeats over‐generalised versions of deterritorialised or postnational conceptions of the demos. In order to test how robust this finding is, cases are analysed where the dominant patterns of expansion have been resisted and where unexpected expansion has occurred. With regard to the former, the article identifies constitutional and political obstacles to voting rights expansion in particular countries. With regard to the latter, the article shows that even where national voting rights have been extended to non‐citizen residents, containment remains strong through indirect links to citizenship.     

An Opposing View of Scotland's Ballot Paper Problem: Arbuthnott and the Government had the Right Idea

The May 2007 Scottish Parliament election used a different ballot format from the one used in the previous elections, one that combined the regional and constituency votes onto one ballot paper (two separate papers were used before). Because there were many more invalid votes in 2007, the problem was blamed on the two‐vote ballot paper, which was recommended by the Arbuthnott Commission to prevent misunderstandings about what the two votes were for. Other places that use the mixed‐member proportional (MMP) electoral system tend to use a two‐vote ballot paper, with Germany and New Zealand seeing low levels of invalid votes. While the decision to revert to two separate papers in future Scottish Parliament elections might reduce the number of invalid votes, the price could be more confusion about the proportional nature of the electoral system unless public education improves significantly.     

Should I stay or should I go? An experimental study on voter responses to pre-electoral coalitions

Abstract.  Pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) are one of the most often used methods to coordinate entry into the electoral market. Party elites, however, do not know how voters will respond to the coalition formation at the polls. In this article, the authors report on an experimental study among 1,255 Belgian students. In order to study voter responses to the formation of PECs, respondents were presented with two ballots: one with individual parties (party vote condition) and one with coalitions (coalition vote condition). The aim of this experiment is to predict under what conditions party supporters will follow their initially preferred party into the coalition and vote for the PEC, and under what conditions they would desert the PEC at the polls. The decision whether to follow the coalition or not can be traced back to four considerations: dislike of the coalition partner; ideological congruence between coalition partners; size of the initially preferred party; and being attracted to a specific high-profile candidate. (Dis)liking the coalition partner is independent from the ideological congruence between the two coalition partners. The study's results also show support for an adjustment effect, as respondents became more loyal toward cartels over the course of the 2003–2005 observation period.     

The importance of personal vote intentions for the responsiveness of legislators: A field experiment

Individual legislators can be important agents of political representation. However, this is contingent upon their responsiveness to constituency requests. To study this topic, an increasing number of studies use field experiments in which the researcher sends a standardized email to legislators on behalf of a constituent. In this paper, we report the results of an original field experiment of this genre with the members of the German Bundestag. Supplementing previous research, we explore whether constituency requests in which voters mention a personal vote intention (rather than a partisan vote intention) increase legislators’ responsiveness, and how this treatment relates to electoral system's incentives. We find that legislators treated with a personal vote intention were more likely to respond (67 per cent) and respond faster than those treated with a partisan vote intention (59 per cent). However, we also show that the treatment effect is moderated by electoral system incentives: it is larger for nominally-elected legislators than for those elected via a party list. Our results suggest that electoral system's incentives matter for legislators’ responsiveness only when constituents explicitly signals an intention to cast a personal vote.