The Last Word in Court—A Hidden Disadvantage for the Defense

In the legal systems of most western countries, defense attorneys present their sentencing recommendation after the prosecution has presented its sentencing demands. This procedural sequence for criminal cases is intended to balance the impact of both parties on the judge's final decision. Especially the positioning of the defense's plea at the end of the trial follows the fundamental legal principle “in dubio pro reo.” Research on judgmental anchoring, however, suggests that the standard procedural sequence may in fact work against this principle. Consistent with this implication, the present studies demonstrate that the defense's sentencing recommendation is anchored on, and consequently assimilated toward, the preceding recommendation by the prosecution. This influence prevents the defense attorney from effectively counterbalancing the prosecutor's demand. Instead, the biased defense attorney's recommendation partially mediates the impact of the prosecutor's demand on the judge's decision. These findings suggest that the standard procedural sequence in court may place the defense at a distinct disadvantage.     

Ideology and the construction of nationality: The Canadian elections of 1993

Canada is one nation, but it is in many ways two communities, one Francophone and the other Anglophone. We employ a formal model of ideology and analyze how nationality is constructed in people's minds. The magnitude of the changes in expressed preferences in terms of ideology depends on the salience of the new issue, the extent to which it confirms with the existing ideological cleavage, and the difference between the perceived status quo on the new dimension and the voter's most preferred alternative. Using data from the 1993 Canadian National Election Study, we consider the relative importance of different policy dimensions in explaining voting decisions among educated Canadians. The issue of Quebec sovereignty, alone, is shown to have significant power for predicting vote choice. A plausible explanation, confirmed here by regression analysis, is that Quebec sovereignty stands for other issues in voters' conception of Canadian politics.     

The Details Are in the Dress Code

'Without silver or flowers a girl won't be a girl," an old Miao minority saying goes. Silver is an important part of their culture, found to this day mostly in Guizhou Province, but also across Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Yunnan, Hunan, and Hainan provinces. All political affirmations and connotations aside, China's various traditional minority dress codes have had an extensive influ-ence on clothing hangers (inter) nationwide, comprising the full scale from hard-to-handle fabrics to exuberant em-broidery to fantastical earrings.     

READY,RESET, ACTION!

正Whether you are a fan of Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg,Belgium's Anuna de Wever or China's Howey Ou,one thing is clear:Climate change is trending and has become a hashtag of great concern to many millennials and Gen Zs worldwide.The year 2021 got off to a promising start in terms of climate change.In February,the United States announced its return to the Paris Agreement.On July 14,the European Union adopted its first ambitious climate bill.     

The Power Of Dialogue

正Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on the world’s younger generations to increase mutual understanding and friendship through participation in international exchange programs. President Xi made the call in response to a letter from 36 participants in the Global Young Leaders Dialogue (GYLD)program.     

The stability of stated preferences for public goods: Evidence from recent budget games

We have investigated the stability of the individual response in recent budget games based on survey data, which is an important requirement for the reliability of this instrument. Budget games have gained popularity due to the problems encountered with alternative methods to determine preferences for public goods, such as the analysis of actual public expenditure date using median-voter theory or similar approaches. The short-term test-retest correlations (within an interval of one month) turn out to be rather low, typical around 0.3. No explanation of the test-retest differences could be found from the usual socio-economic and political characteristics of the respondents or from information characteristics of the survey design. Also, the pattern of budget-game outcomes for different countries and different periods is rather similar. The cumulative evidence suggests that the survey response to budget games is generated to a large extent by very general notions on the (un)desirability of public goods: defence is bad, education and health care are good. This implies that outcomes are often not related to the actual level and structure of public expenditure or revenues. As a result, the individual responses, even to the more sophisticated budget games, are subject to large uncertainty margins. Our results should warn researchers and, even more important, policy makers against giving too much weight to stated preferences for public expenditure or taxation levels obtained from budget games. Of course, further research is needed to obtain the precise limits of the instrument, including laboratory experimental economics.     

The balance of ecumenism and sectarianism: rethinking religion and foreign policy in Iran*

Foreign policy development in the Islamic Republic is often conceived through secularizing homologies of ideology and pragmatism and radicalism and moderation. Policy practice, however, has often welded their crossed terms together religiously. This article seeks to resolve some contradictions in extant models by reconceiving of Iran’s foreign policy since 1979 as a religious system that differentiates contending values hierarchically. It explores policy in three periods representing particular balances of ecumenism and sectarianism: the revolutionary decade (1979–1989), the reformist interlude (1989–2005) and the era of radical reassertion (2005–2013). Rather than being perceived as fundamentally opposed orientations, ecumenism and sectarianism are presented as integrated tendencies of Shiite Islamism.