The Inside View: Using the Enron E‐mail Archive to Understand Corporate Political Attention

For decades, scholars have debated the role of corporations in American politics. To date, they have relied on either interviews or publicly disclosed spending and lobbying reports. This article presents new methods and data that enable us to consider the internal processes of corporate political attention instead. Aided by automated content analysis, this article uses more than 250,000 internal e‐mails from Enron to observe its political attention between 1999 and 2002. These e‐mails depict Enron's employees as focused on monitoring and formally participating in political processes, including bureaucratic processes. Only a small fraction of their political attention focused on elections.     

Keeping Up with the Joneses Affects Perceptions of Distributive Justice

An experimental field study investigated why people of higher social standing might jump to the conclusion that an injustice has occurred when an authority implements a program that benefits some constituents but not others. High-status individuals are uniquely vulnerable to downward mobility, especially in the event that a situation does not benefit them, but does benefit their high-status peers. In our study, students in a university course were asked to judge a bonus program by which the grades for some would increase and the grades for others would remain the same. Two framing conditions were used, each providing an example in which only one of two students would benefit from the program. In the peer-gets-ahead condition, the two students were of equal status before the program acted to differentiate them, and in the inferior-catches-up condition, the two students differed in status before the program acted to equate them. A majority of students responded favorably to the program, although this number was affected strongly by framing, with almost unanimous approval in the inferior-catches-up condition and comparatively modest approval in the peer-gets-ahead condition. Objections in the latter condition were most frequent among high-status students, who were implicitly uncomfortable with the possibility that their status could decrease relative to some of their high-status peers. Explicitly, their objections used the language of social injustice, especially claims of distributive unfairness. We argue that these perceptions of injustice are a cognitive manifestation of an aversion to any situation that could result in downward mobility.     

The OECD and “The Rest”: Analyzing the Limits of Policy Transfer

Abstract

Prompted by the rise of the emerging economies and the growing importance of the G20, the OECD has formally announced its intention of establishing itself as a key actor in global policy coordination. As part of this ambition, it has embarked on cultivating closer relations with five G20 countries it designated as key partners through the so-called “Enhanced Engagement” programme: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. This article mobilizes concepts from the policy transfer literature to explain why the OECD’s attempts to increasingly involve all five countries in its policy have fallen short of its original ambitions, and also why the transfer of its policy work has been uneven across policy and country issue.     

First Steps Towards Hearts and Minds? USAID's Countering Violent Extremism Policies in Africa

The United States government has adopted new approaches to counter violent extremist organizations around the world. “Soft security” and development programs include focused educational training for groups vulnerable to terrorist recruitment, norm messaging through local radio programming, and job creation in rural communities. This article evaluates the effectiveness of one set of these multi-vectored, community-level programs through data from 200 respondents in two similar, neighboring towns in northern Mali, Africa. The data show that residents in Timbuktu who were exposed to the programming for up to five years displayed measurably altered civic behavior and listening patterns in comparison with their counterparts in the control town of Diré, which had no programming (controlling for potential covariates including age, ethnicity, and political and socioeconomic conditions). However, there was little measurable difference between the groups in terms of their cultural identities and attitudes towards the West. While this study is unable to definitively prove a causal connection between programming and behavioral outcomes, it nonetheless strongly suggests that the process of “winning hearts and minds” can be effective at certain levels but may require extended time and dedicated resources to generate higher-level results.     

Do Corrective Effects Last? Results from a Longitudinal Experiment on Beliefs Toward Immigration in the U.S.

Political Behavior - Although interest in the efficacy of efforts to correct false beliefs has peaked in recent years, the extent to which corrective effects endure over time remains understudied....     

Spanish Translations of Miranda Warnings and the Totality of the Circumstances

Spanish-translated Miranda warnings are administered annually to thousands of Hispanic custodial suspects. In examining 121 Spanish translations and their English counterparts from 33 states, the lengths of Miranda warnings were generally comparable but marked differences were observed in the reading levels for individual Miranda components. The adequacy of Miranda translations varies markedly from minor variations to substantive errors. The most serious problems involved the entire omission of Miranda components; several omissions were observed in the Spanish translations for even the basic rights to silence and counsel. More commonly, Miranda discrepancies involved dissimilar content with a substantial trend toward more information in English than Spanish versions. Findings related to the Miranda translations, different word lengths, and varied reading levels are discussed using the totality of circumstances as its framework.

Perceptions of Work-Life Balance Among Military Law Enforcement Personnel and their Spouses

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which military law enforcement agents and their spouses shared similar perceptions of work-life conflict and organizational support. One hundred seventy Special Agents in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and their spouses participated in the study. Survey results revealed that Agents and spouses shared very similar views regarding the Agents’ work-life conflict and organizational support. Agents had slightly more positive views of supervisory support than their spouses did. Agents perceived somewhat more work-to-family conflict, and considerably more family-to-work conflict than their spouses thought they did. Both Agents and their spouses perceived greater support for work-life balance from immediate supervisors than from the organization as a whole. Implications for managing work-life conflict are discussed.     

Punitive Attitudes in Latin America

The purpose of this paper is to describe, initially, the population’s perception regarding some aspects related to the phenomenon of crime, the criminal system and the punitive response the State should supply (the population’s disapproving attitudes), bearing in mind the role of the mass media, since the latter perhaps represents the most important link providing feedback between social demand and the activity of the State with regard to subjective perceptions of criminality and the construction of a State with greater punitive reaction. A second part will analyze the scope of the expansive tendencies in criminal matters in Latin America and particularly in Argentina. With this aim, after outlining the phenomenon — from several theoretical perspectives — and summarising its characteristics in Latin America, we shall specify its distinctive features in our midst, as a way of sounding the main problems entailed in this legislative inflation — decidedly influenced by the multiplying effect of the mass media. This diagnosis is necessary in order to intuit possible strategies for criminal policy.