Clear cases,do they exist?

Conclusion What I sought to demonstrate was that the relations between (a) how a case fits into the system, (b) what the main structure of the justification is, and (c) whether discretionary authority is used, are not as simple as suggested in the literature.What we saw is that if the justification for a decision in a particular case is a practical syllogism with an established legal rule as its major premiss, there are many possibilities: (a) the case did or did not raise a conflict for the judge between his intuitions about reasonableness and his interpretation of the legal system; (b) the case had or had not a clear solution in conformity with the legal system; (c) the case was or was not decided according to what the system seemed to prescribe.Therefore, the main structure of a justification cannot inform us about questions as: Did the case fit into the system? Is discretionary authority used? The opposition between hard cases and clear cases is much too complex to be of any use to clarify such issues.     

Fraud victimization: Risky business or just bad luck?

Victimology theory recognizes that the characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors of potential victims influence the likelihood of criminal victimization. An important question for victimologists is whether potential victims put themselves at risk by engaging in risky behavior or whether victimization is primarily a result of bad luck. While this question has been investigated extensively with respect to street crime victimization, little attempt has been made to apply it to victimization by fraud. This article investigates the influence of attitudes toward financial risk taking on the likelihood of fraud victimization. Using data from a telephone survey of 400 randomly sampled respondents, we find that age and attitudes toward financial risk taking are significantly related to the likelihood of attempted victimizations but not to successful victimizations.     

Social stratification: Individual importance and social welfare

A method to estimate a household's social status in a stratified society is described. We do not leave it up to the respondents what is to be understood by status, as most methods do, but define it as the weight of the household with respect to social welfare. In order to operationalize this individual relative importance concept we measure and utilize the individual welfare evaluations. Our empirical results for a data set collected in the Boston area in 1983 show the dependency of social status and social stratification on individual characteristics. A comparison made with some other methods shows the feasibility of our approach.     

Government survival in Western multi-party democracies

Abstract Based upon findings in other fields in the social sciences, it is proposed in this article that cooperation between government parties can be induced when parties in governments are able to exercise credible exit threats. As stability is more likely to be induced by cooperation than by defection, more durable governments can be expected. The possibility for credible exit threats in a government is operationalized via the presence of a dominant party in the government. The corresponding prediction is tested against a data set that contains 261 postwar governments in twelve western multiparty democracies. In the event history analyses of government survival, I control for variables pertaining to the bargaining environment, bargaining complexity, and the ideological diversity of the governments. It is found that the presence of dominant parties in governments does indeed enhance the survival time of governments.     

Extending the General Theory of Crime to “The East:” Low Self-Control in Japanese Late Adolescents

This study examined the measurement of low self-control as well as the low self-control-deviance relationship in a sample of N = 335 Japanese late adolescents. Participants completed the Grasmick et al. low self-control instrument and the Normative Deviance Scale (NDS). Findings indicated that the low self-control measure was a valid and reliable indicator of low self-control among male and female Japanese late adolescents and that it was multi-dimensional. Furthermore, the study provided evidence that low self-control was consistently related to diverse measures of deviance, ranging from trivial to more serious norm-violating behaviors (e.g., assault). Finally, in a series of comparisons of partial unstandardized regression coefficients between Japanese and U.S. late adolescents, the study found that the low self-control-deviance relationship was invariant across all measures of deviance with the exception of alcohol use. Findings are discussed in terms of their importance for cross-cultural/cross-national predictions made by the General Theory of Crime.