When Do Laws Matter? National Minimum‐Age‐of‐Marriage Laws,Child Rights,and Adolescent Fertility, 1989–2007

Using the case of adolescent fertility, we ask the questions of whether and when national laws have an effect on outcomes above and beyond the effects of international law and global organizing. To answer these questions, we utilize a fixed‐effect time‐series regression model to analyze the impact of minimum‐age‐of‐marriage laws in 115 poor‐ and middle‐income countries from 1989 to 2007. We find that countries with strict laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 experienced the most dramatic decline in rates of adolescent fertility. Trends in countries that set this age at 18 but allowed exceptions (for example, marriage with parental consent) were indistinguishable from countries that had no such minimum‐age‐of‐marriage law. Thus, policies that adhere strictly to global norms are more likely to elicit desired outcomes. The article concludes with a discussion of what national law means in a diffuse global system where multiple actors and institutions make the independent effect of law difficult to identify.     

Developing a Tripartite Prevention Program for Impoverished Young Women Transitioning to Young Adulthood: Addressing Substance Use,HIV Risk,and Victimization by Intimate Partners

Little is known about the transition to adulthood for adolescent females and young women who are impoverished and homeless. Co-occurrence of drug use and abuse, HIV risk, and victimization is notable among homeless women, highlighting the need for comprehensive interventions. Unfortunately, evidence-based prevention approaches addressing these inter-related problems among impoverished women transitioning into adulthood are lacking. To address this gap, we designed an innovative prevention program by utilizing open- and closed-ended interview data from impoverished women (n = 20), focus groups with community experts and providers (2 groups; n = 9), and a theoretical framework to direct the research. Information provided by our focus groups and interviews with women supported our theoretical framework and highlighted the importance of addressing normative information, providing skills training, and utilizing a non-confrontational approach when discussing these sensitive issues.     

“We All Have to Eat”: Experiential Learning in Courses on Food and Hunger

Community-based learning offers students the opportunity to understand important concepts through their own experiences. Two courses on food and hunger in society, one a first-year seminar of 12 students and one an upper-level psychology course of 20 students, made site visits to local farms, markets, and a soup kitchen while reading about the issues and discussing them in class. At the end of the semester, each student wrote a short self-evaluation in which they were invited to discuss the aspects of the course that affected them most. Student responses suggest that the experiential component of the course was disproportionately powerful, impelling many of them to make changes in their lives as a result.     

Written in Their Own Voice: First-Year and Older Students' Perceptions on Their University's Identity

Undergraduate students (218 women, 57 men) attending a Roman Catholic, suburban university with a Franciscan charism tradition completed open-ended items assessing their perception on the mission, vision, and values of their university. However, only 41 lower division, first-year students (33 women, 8 men) and 29 upper division students (22 women, 7 men) actually wrote about different aspects of their school's identity. Qualitative themes emerged in regard to students' assessment of their school identity, such as university mission activities are perceived important, and overall support for different institutional values within the university community.     

Political Parties and Representation of the Poor in the American States

Motivated by recent work suggesting that low‐income citizens are virtually ignored in the American policymaking process, this article asks whether a similar bias shapes the policy positions adopted by political parties much earlier in the policymaking process. While the normative hope is that parties serve as linkage institutions enhancing representation of those with fewer resources to organize, the resource‐dependent campaign environment in which parties operate provides incentives to appeal to citizens with the greatest resources. Using newly developed measures of state party positions, we examine whether low‐income preferences get incorporated in parties’ campaign appeals at this early stage in the policymaking process—finding little evidence that they do. This differential responsiveness was most pronounced for Democratic parties in states with greater income inequality; it was least evident for Republicans’ social policy platforms. We discuss the implications of these findings for representation in this era of growing economic inequality.     

Governance as a Path to Government

During the 1970s, analyses of state and government in Western Europe were preoccupied with crises of governability and legitimacy. The early 1980s witnessed sharply differing responses to these crises, exemplified by the socialist experiment in France and Thatcherism in the UK. By the end of the 1980s, ‘governance’– in both national and European arenas – began to be regarded as the dominant institutional response to problems of governability. Considered from the perspective of comparative European government, the oft-claimed shift from government to governance appears overstated. Governance is less widespread and consequential both at national and European levels than its proponents suggest, as a survey of the propellants, conditions and national and European constellations of governance shows. Viewed historically, governance does not so much indicate a shift from government as towards government, as the core institutions of the state build up capacity to deal authoritatively and hierarchically with new governing challenges.     

A Mark for Peter

Abstract

This paper objects to certain forms of punishments, such as supermax confinement, on grounds that they are inappropriately contemptuous. Building on discussions in Kant and elsewhere, I flesh out what I take to be salient features of contempt, features that make contempt especially troubling as a form of moral regard and treatment. As problematic as contempt may be in the interpersonal context, I contend that it is especially troubling when a person is treated contemptuously by her political community's institutions—such as by certain forms of punishment. Punishment is contemptuous if it fails to respect offenders as moral persons, who as such are always capable of moral reform. Respect for offenders therefore requires, at least, that punishment not tend to undermine the prospect of offenders’ reform. I flesh out this constraint by considering various ways in which punishments may tend to undermine offenders’ reform. In particular, I discuss ways in which supermax confinement tends to violate the reform-based constraint. Finally, I address several potential objections to my account.     

Increased Voting for Candidates Who Compensate Victims Rather than Punish Offenders

Three studies demonstrate that people are more likely to vote for political candidates who respond to injustice in a compensatory rather than punitive manner. Participants were more likely to vote for candidates who responded to various transgressions (the Darfur crisis, campus bike theft, and domestic violence) by compensating victims (or simultaneously compensating victims and punishing perpetrators) rather than solely punishing the perpetrator or not responding. Furthermore, participants’ perceptions of candidates’ warmth (but not competence) mediated the relationship between punishing versus compensating and voting.