It's not the time they spend, it's what they do: The interaction between delinquent friends and unstructured routine activity on delinquency : Findings from two countries

This study examines whether having delinquent friends interacts with other peer-related variables in the explanation of adolescent offending. We hypothesise that the relationship between delinquent friends and offending might be conditioned by the effect of (1) how much time they spend with their friends, (2) how much time they spend in unstructured routine activities and (3) their emotional relationship with their friends. To test these three hypotheses we use data from two independent samples of young adolescents in Halmstad, Sweden (N = 1,003) and in Cologne and Freiburg, Germany (N = 955). The results found strong support that the effect of delinquent friends on adolescent offending is conditional on the level of time they spend in unstructured routine activities. This indicates that delinquent friends have a stronger effect on offending for adolescents who often spend their free time in unstructured routine activities.     

AIDS fatalities in Hamburg (status: February 1985)--legal medicine aspects

The registration of patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and AIDS deaths is centralized for medical research. A short review of the epidemiological state of AIDS in Hamburg is given (situation as of February 1985), and the autopsy results of seven postmortem examinations are referred to. Kaposi's sarcoma was seen in four patients and opportunistic infections in all cases, especially as a result of Pneumocystis carinii and cytomegalovirus. Due to the constellation of groups with an increased risk of acquiring AIDS--homosexual males, intravenous drug abusers and prostitutes--forensic implications have to be expected.     

Civil Litigation, Access to Government-Held Information, and Coordination of Public and Private Enforcement in the Czech Republic

To correct the historical suppression of environmental information under communist rule, the Czech Republic has instituted several new laws granting citizen access to government-held information. This access should facilitate civil litigation by providing evidence in court for establishing causality in a country where practically everyone feels the effects of broad and severe environmental degradation. However, poor de facto citizen access and citizens'; traditional distrust of information severely limits litigation activity. Similarly, this paper examines the joint use of a privately-initiated ex post liability policy (i.e., tort litigation) and a state-initiated ex post liability policy (i.e., penalties). In particular, it explores a potential exchange of information between a government enforcer and plaintiffs, where the government enforcer provides information on the causality of harm to plaintiffs and plaintiffs provide information on the level of harm to the government enforcer. With more accurate information on both causality and damages, the joint use of state and private enforcement should lead to more efficient outcomes. This paper finds great potential for such improvement given the limited use of privately-provided information on harm and poor de facto access to government-provided information on environmental matters.     

The inevitability of the “paradox of redistribution” in the allocation of voting weights

In voting bodies, when voting weights are reallocated, it may be observed that the voting power of some members, as measured by the Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf power indices, increases while their voting weight decreases. By a simple constructive proof, this paper shows that such a “paradox of redistribution” can always occur in any voting body if the number of voters, n, is sufficiently large. Simulation results show that the paradox is quite frequent (up to 30 percent) and increases with n (at least for small n). Examples are given where the Banzhaf and Shapley-Shubik indices are not consistent in demonstrating the paradox.     

Political violence in pre‐coup Turkey

Abstract

The long‐standing and pervasive patterns of political violence in Turkey, which were only abated by the military coup of September 1980, are examined in terms of their historical and sociopolitical antecedents. The paper concludes that political violence in Turkey is the result on the one hand of the specific forms of Kemalist modernization to which the country was subjected from 1920 to 1945. Kemalism led to modern political and legal institutions, but left much of Turkey's cultural and economic life subject to traditional values. In addition, Kemalism bequeathed a legacy of political parties that saw the national good identified solely with each political organization's success, which in turn subjectively legitimized violence against political opponents as acceptable in the struggle for the national welfare. After 1945 the legacy of Kemalism was joined by severe developmental problems in the area of economics and social welfare, a resurgence of hyper‐nationalism over the Cyprus issue, and an anti‐modernist backlash through a revival of Islamic traditions. The results were conflicts in a society already strained by the symptoms of second stage modernization that could not be compromised within the parameters of the Turkish political system.