Elite Preferences in a Consolidating Democracy: The Brazilian Legislative Surveys, 1990–2009

This article examines key ideological, economic, and institutional preferences of the Brazilian political elite in the first 25 years of the country's present democratic regime. Introducing the unified dataset of the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, it examines several crucial dimensions of politicians' attitudes, including elite placement on a traditional left‐right scale, preferences concerning the fundamental economic model, direct comparisons of the recent Cardoso and Lula governments, and orientations toward Brazil's global and regional projection. On many of the central issues, attitudes have remained stable, but on the dimensions that have seen notable change, nearly all the change has been in the direction of decreasing polarization. In contrast to the experience of some neighboring countries, the Brazilian case demonstrates that the sustained practice of democracy can lead to attitudinal convergence and macro‐political stability, even when the initial political and socioeconomic conditions appear daunting.     

Improving eyewitness identification accuracy by screening out those who say they don't know

Improving eyewitness identification evidence remains a key priority for research. Basic laboratory research has consistently demonstrated that allowing participants to withhold answers about which they are unsure leads to improved accuracy. Surprisingly, this approach has not been the subject of comprehensive investigation in the eyewitness identification literature. In this article, we explored the utility of allowing uncertain witnesses to opt out of an identification decision, by providing an explicit don't know option. Further, we contrasted the rate of use of this explicit option with the frequency that participants spontaneously withheld a decision when asked to respond in their own words. Four hundred and twenty participants witnessed a mock crime video before being presented with a showup of the perpetrator or an innocent suspect. Participants were tested either immediately or after a 3-week delay, with one of the three report options: Participants either made their choice in their own words (spontaneous report), chose between identifying and rejecting the showup (forced-report), or chose between identification, rejection and don't know (free-report). Only 2.2% of witnesses spontaneously used a don't know response, compared to 19.3% who used it when the option was explicit. Compared with the forced-report decisions, free-report decisions were more accurate, more diagnostic of the suspect's guilt or innocence, and came at no cost to the number of correct decisions rendered. These data suggest that utilisation of an explicit don't know option may be of practical value.     

Texas Christian University (TCU) Short Forms for Assessing Client Needs and Functioning in Addiction Treatment

The TCU Short Forms contain a revised and expanded set of assessments for planning and managing addiction treatment services. They are formatted as brief (1-page) forms to measure client needs and functioning, including drug use severity and history (TCUDS II), criminal thinking and cognitive orientation (CTSForm), motivation and readiness for treatment (MOTForm), psychological functioning (PSYForm), social relations and functioning (SOCForm), and therapeutic participation and engagement (ENGForm). These instruments facilitate optically-scanned data entry, computerized scoring, and rapid graphical feedback for clinical decisions. The present study (based on 5,022 inmates from eight residential prison treatment programs) examines evidence on scale reliabilities and measurement structures of these tools. Results confirmed their integrity and usefulness as indicators of individual and group-level therapeutic dynamics.     

An Evaluation of Six Brief Interventions that Target Drug-Related Problems in Correctional Populations

Finding brief effective treatments for criminal justice populations is a major public need. The CJ-DATS Targeted Intervention for Corrections (TIC), which consists of six brief interventions (Communication, Anger, Motivation, Criminal Thinking, Social Networks, and HIV/Sexual Health), were tested in separate federally-funded randomized control studies. In total, 1,573 criminal justice-involved individuals from 20 correction facilities participated (78% males; 54% white). Multi-level repeated measures analyses found significant gains in knowledge, attitudes, and psychosocial functioning (criteria basic to Knowledge, Attitude, and Practices (KAP) and TCU Treatment Process Models). While improvements were less consistent in criminal thinking, overall evidence supported efficacy for the TIC interventions.     

Turbulent Stasis: Comparative Reflections upon Intercommunal Violence and Territoriality in the Israel/Palestine Conflict

From (at least) the Balfour Declaration of 1917 right down to the present day, the Zionist-Palestinian conflict has been sculpted by external forces. But never entirely so: grassroots patterns of confrontation have also been vital. This article therefore adopts a “bottom-up” approach to the evolution of the conflict since the early twentieth century.     

How U.S. decision-makers assessed their control of multilateral organizations, 1957–1982

Although quantitative studies have identified relationships between the interests of powerful, wealthy states and the lending patterns of international financial institutions, they do not illuminate influence processes that give rise to these patterns. Three closely held internal assessments by the U.S. government of its influence over decisions in various international organizations are now declassified; they provide information about internal processes unlikely to be obtained through interviews of current officials or observation of public behavior. Their findings overlap to some degree academic research on this phenomenon, but also reveal hitherto unsuspected facets of U.S. diplomacy as well as candid internal assessments of U.S. successes and failures.