Sexual violence and reproductive health among young people in three communities in Jamaica

A secondary analysis of data collected from 1,130 young people ages 15 to 24 in a population-based household survey to assess the reproductive health needs of young people in three communities in Jamaica was conducted to determine the relationships among three measures of sexual violence, background variables, three measures of sexual risk taking (early sexual debut, multiple partners, and no condom at last sex), and two reproductive health outcomes (genital discharge within the past 12 months and pregnancy). In the multivariate analyses, forced first sex increased the likelihood of genital discharge among males (odds ratio, OR = 5.33) and females (OR = 2.02) and pregnancy among females (OR = 2.05), controlling for background characteristics and sexual risk taking. Associations between sexual violence and reported genital discharge and pregnancy that were not mediated by our measures of sexual risk taking were found. More research into the causal mechanisms for this association is needed.     

The Subjugation of Pacifism in UK Parliamentary Discourse: Analysing the 2015 Debate on Bombing Syria

ABSTRACT

This article shows how pacifism is discursively constituted within politics. Employing Critical Discourse Analysis, it demonstrates how official narratives worked to depoliticise pacifism during the 2015 House of Commons debate on taking military action against ISIS in Syria. It argues that the current rejection of pacifism within politics rests upon a flawed narrative and considers the interests that are served by this. Overall, this article calls for pacifism to be de-subjugated and considers the profound political implication this would have.     

Judicial Practical Reason: Judges in Morally Imperfect Legal Orders

I here address the question of how judges should decide questions before a court in morally imperfect legal systems. I characterize how moral considerations ought inform judicial reasoning given that the law may demand what it has no right to. Much of the large body of work on legal interpretation, with its focus on legal semantics and epistemology, does not adequately countenance the limited legitimacy of actual legal institutions to serve as a foundation for an ethics of adjudication. I offer an adjudicative theory in the realm of non-ideal theory: I adopt a view of law that has achieved consensus in legal philosophy, make some plausible assumptions about human politics, and then consider directly the question of how judges should reason. Ultimately, I argue that judges should be cognizant of the goods that are at stake on particular occasions of adjudication and that this requires treating legal requirements transparently, i.e., as sensitive to their moral justifications.     

The Separation Plot: A New Visual Method for Evaluating the Fit of Binary Models

We present a visual method for assessing the predictive power of models with binary outcomes. This technique allows the analyst to evaluate model fit based upon the models’ ability to consistently match high‐probability predictions to actual occurrences of the event of interest, and low‐probability predictions to nonoccurrences of the event of interest. Unlike existing methods for assessing predictive power for logit and probit models such as Percent Correctly Predicted statistics, Brier scores, and the ROC plot, our “separation plot” has the advantage of producing a visual display that is informative and easy to explain to a general audience, while also remaining insensitive to the often arbitrary probability thresholds that are used to distinguish between predicted events and nonevents. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique in building predictive models in a number of different areas of political research.     

Personality and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from a Sample of Street-Level Bureaucrats

Job satisfaction is an important component of bureaucratic success. In this article, we build on the emerging literature on the five-factor model of personality and argue that basic personality characteristics can help us understand why certain employees are more satisfied with their jobs than others. Multivariate analysis of personality and job satisfaction data from over 1,000 public servants supports this argument. We conclude with a discussion about how personality can add to our theoretical understanding of public personnel management, and help public managers identify applicants who are likely to be satisfied with work in the public sector.     

Mongolia's evolving security strategy: omni-enmeshment and balance of influence

Abstract

With the publication of its 2010 National Security Concept and its 2011 Foreign Policy Concept, Ulaanbaatar has formalised a shift in foreign policy that has been readily apparent since 2000. Whereas Mongolia's foreign policy for the 1990s was formulated around an omni-enmeshment strategy, its foreign policy from 2000 onward is best conceptualised as an amalgam of omni-enmeshment and balance of influence. Ulaanbaatar's new foreign policy strategy implicitly identifies China as the country's largest security concern. This sense of a China ‘challenge’ is mirrored in Ulaanbaatar's post-2000 foreign policy relations.     

Do Judges Have an Obligation to Enforce the Law?: Moral Responsibility and Judicial-Reasoning

Judicial obligation to enforce the law is typically regarded as both unproblematic and important: unproblematic because there is little reason to doubt that judges have a general, if prima facie, obligation to enforce law, and important because the obligation gives judges significant reason to limit their concern in adjudication to applying the law. I challenge both of these assumptions and argue that norms of political legitimacy, which may be extra-legal, are irretrievably at the basis of responsible judicial reasoning.