Influences shaping members' decision making: Congressional voting on the Persian Gulf War

In this paper I examine what influences members viewed as shaping their voting decisions on U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf in January 1991. Rather than focusing on predictors of votes and the outcomes of members' decision-making processes (the yea or nay votes as in roll-call analyses), I focus on the predominant considerations that members perceived as swaying voting choices. More specifically, drawing on data gathered from interviews with 365 congressional staff people, I show that three influences in particular stand out as significant in the decision-making process on this crisis policy: members' own policy views, supportive constituents, and (for certain groups of members) the president. Thus, while the analysis confirms, in part, the conventional view of legislators' personal policy assessments as the critical influence on foreign and defense policy votes, it also underscores that this influence does not operate in a vacuum.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1993 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.     

Military Socialization: A Motivating Factor for Seeking Treatment in a Veterans’ Treatment Court

The veterans’ treatment court movement is just beyond the nascent period, and given the rapid proliferation of these courts in recent years it is imperative that the scientific community understand their operational procedures and assess whether they are meeting a unique need beyond those addressed by other problem-solving courts. This paper provides an in-depth examination of veteran culture and how it helps to distinguish veterans’ treatment courts from other courts that focus on similar populations (e.g., drug, DWI, and mental health courts). Using in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus group data collected from veteran participants, veteran mentors, and court team members in Pennsylvania, we employ content analysis to explore the veteran culture as a motivator for participants to enroll in a veterans’ treatment court and engage with others throughout participation in treatment. The results of this exploratory study suggest that a shared culture serves to motivate justice-involved veterans to seek out the veterans’ treatment court over other treatment options and remain engaged in this problem-solving court, while inspiring a sense of obligation to do well in treatment for them and their fellow veterans. The shared experiences of military service and across-the-board support for fellow service members suggest that the veterans’ treatment court creates a unique environment for pursuing treatment.     

The impact of race and extra-legal factors in charging defendants with serious sexual assault: Findings from a five-year study of one Pennsylvania court jurisdiction

Research on sexual assault case processing remains mixed regarding how extra-legal factors such as the racial-ethnic composition of the defendant-victim dyad may impact prosecutorial decision-making. We use data from 2006–2010 in a Pennsylvania county court jurisdiction to examine the victim- and defendant-related factors that influence charging decisions. We also explore how the demographic and offense characteristics influence decisions to prosecute offenders for more serious types of sexual assault. Our findings indicate that the racial composition of the defendant-victim dyad contributed to the prosecutorial decision to charge an offender with a more serious sexual assault, while victim characteristics and use of violence during the offense were not related to seriousness of the charge.     

Disunited in ethnicity: the racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong

In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontents surrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong, there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China are racialized. Lowe and Tsang's article provides an examination of the campaign against Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflicts between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duality of time or differing time-inflected cultural habits of Mainlanders and Hong Kongers. As Hong Kong's citizenry and Mainlanders contest the status of the former colony and claim rights over it in ways aberrant to both factions' national consciousness, discrimination increases as Mainlanders are castigated by Hong Kongers for grazing their territory with mannerisms deemed unsettling to Hong Kong's everyday notions of time and space. Hong Kongers' sense of collective identity is shored-up as they reject the People's Republic of China’s favoured concept of pan-Chinese ethnicity by constructing Mainlanders as the inverse of themselves.     

The Evolution of International Conflict Resolution: From Cold War to Peacebuilding

Shaped by the changing nature of international conflict, the field of international conflict resolution evolved significantly throughout the latter years of the twentieth century and continues to be redefined. The end of the Cold War created space for a major transformation of the international conflict resolution field. This transformation was marked by three trends: (1) an expansion from a focus on superpower negotiating strategies to a wider peacebuilding agenda, (2) an increase in the role of nongovernmental actors as both disputants and third parties in international conflicts, and (3) a growing concern about human security in addition to state security, creating both tensions and opportunities for collaboration between governmental and nongovernmental bodies. This article presents a brief overview of each trend, as well as some concluding questions to frame the field's further development at this important juncture.     

Feminist Judgments Projects at the Intersection

Feminist Legal Studies -     

Exploring Citizen Assessments of Unilateral Executive Authority

This study investigates the interaction between constitutional considerations and democratic context in evaluations of executive authority. An identical experiment is conducted using undergraduate and Mechanical Turk samples. A hypothetical article raising the question of executive power varies the (1) issue context, (2) expert assessment of constitutional authority, and (3) level of public support for proposed action. Measures of participants’ issue preferences and level of satisfaction with President Obama are also included in the analysis. Results indicate that participants think differently about the desirability and legitimacy of proposed executive action. Constitutional considerations and satisfaction with the President weigh most heavily in assessments of the appropriateness of executive conduct. Differences observed across samples demonstrate that institutional rules have the potential to constrain the influence of political factors in assessments legitimacy, but this is not inevitably the case. Feelings about the President may be especially important where experts agree that he lacks authority to take action. This could indicate that citizens will rally behind presidents they like, and think more critically of those they do not, in times of constitutional crisis.     

Abusing Vulnerability? Contemporary Law and Policy Responses to Sex Work in the UK

There has been an exponential rise in use of the term vulnerability across a number of political and policy arenas, including child protection, sexual offences, poverty, development, care for the elderly, patient autonomy, globalisation, war, public health and ecology. Yet despite its increasing deployment, the exact meaning and parameters of this concept remain somewhat elusive. In this article, we explore the interaction of two very different strategies??one in which vulnerability is relied upon by those seeking improved social justice as a mechanism by which to identify, problematise and compel state responses to a universal condition of precarious dependency, and the other in which it is used as a category of neo-liberal governance which legitimates state encroachment whilst constructing ??vulnerable?? individuals as ??risk-managers?? who must behave ??responsibly?? in the face of disadvantage. We suggest that the co-existence of these divergent approaches highlights the fluidity and malleability of the concept of vulnerability. Using sex work as a specific case study, we explore the ways in which vulnerability bears multiple meanings, and has been used in recent times in the furtherance of moralistic and regressive agendas, which collude with, rather than challenge, state power. Without seeking to reject the label or normative import of vulnerability, we call, therefore, for a more circumspect approach to its usage, and a more critical evaluation of recent claims which hail it as a mechanism, preferable to the conventional use of equality paradigms, by which to secure progressive feminist outcomes.