Integrity Systems and Local Government

Australia's third sphere of government is local government, consisting of about 675 councils nationally, responsible for an average of 6 percent of total public sector expenditure (around $18 billion) annually. This article reviews key integrity issues confronting local government, based on experience in NSW and Queensland. Current issues confirm integrity to be a significant concern manifesting in a large variety of forms, both in council administration and in local government politics. A new generation of responses are increasingly tailored to recognising local government as a permanent, elected sphere of government, accounting directly to the public, while, supported by state regulators, individual councils also pursue better practice in the management of their own administrations.     

Social Context and Campaign Volatility in New Democracies: Networks and Neighborhoods in Brazil's 2002 Elections

In new democracies party systems are often young, so partisan cues and roots in the electorate tend to be weak. The results, in many instances, include volatile campaigns with comparatively high degrees of short-term preference change among voters. We explore the mechanisms of voter volatility and, more broadly, the ways in which citizens learn about issues and candidates in weak-party systems. We claim that citizens in such settings rely heavily upon persuasive information gathered from their immediate social contexts. Utilizing a unique panel survey implemented during Brazil's historic 2002 presidential election, we demonstrate the importance of political discussion within social networks and neighborhood context for explaining preference change during election campaigns. We also demonstrate the concrete political consequences of social context by showing how candidate momentum runs can be driven by waves of discussion.     

Idiopathic precocious puberty in girls: Psychosexual development

A promising model syndrome for the examination of the role of physical maturation in the development of female sexuality is idiopathic precocious puberty (IPP). In this first controlled study of psychosexual development in IPP females, 16 females between 13 and 20 years of age with a history of IPP were compared to 16 control subjects with a history of normal puberty pair-matched to the index subjects on the basis of sex, race, age, socioeconomic level, and menarcheal status. The psychosexual history and the current psychosexual status were assessed by a systematic half-structured interview. The IPP females on average passed the psychosexual milestones at an earlier age than their normal maturing peers, with a particularly early onset of masturbation. Those who were sociosexually active tended to report a higher total orgasmic outlet and a higher sex drive. There was no increase in homosexuality among IPP girls. The timing of puberty has a (modest) influence on psychosexual development in females.This work was supported by NIMH Center Grants MH 30906-01A and MH 30906-03 and by a grant from the Spencer Foundation.     

Judicial discretion and sentencing disparity in adult felony courts in Israel

This study focuses on a series of legal, extralegal, and systemic variables presumed to affect the workings of criminal-justice systems. These variables are employed first to analyze the decision of the court to refer defendants for presentence investigation when such a referral is not mandatory, then to examine how these referrals, once made, influence disposition. The relationship of legal representation to disposition is also explored.The findings contradict conventional wisdom regarding the advantages to defendants of legal representation and of presentence reports. Lawyers do not appear to influence either referral or sentencing. The presentence reports are requested by judges seeking to individualize their sentencing decisions, but this process of individualization is as likely to result in harsher sentences as in greater leniency.     

The 2014 Thai Coup and Some Roots of Authoritarianism

ABSTRACT

Thailand is the only country currently ruled by a coup-installed military government. The 2014 coup aimed not only to abolish the influence of Thaksin Shinawatra but also to shift Thailand’s politics in an authoritarian direction. While the army authored the coup, the professional and official elite played a prominent role in engineering the coup and shaping political reforms. This article examines some historical antecedents of this authoritarian turn, first in the broad trends of Thailand’s modern political history, and second in the emergence and political evolution of the Bangkok middle class.     

Reuniting families: an online database to aid in the identification of undocumented immigrant remains

The Reuniting Families project attempts to aid federal, state and local agencies currently working towards the identification of deceased undocumented immigrants. This initiative has created a distributed on-line database, accessible by public officials and private citizens interested in searching for missing individuals based on both phenotypic and genotypic characteristics. This broad effort includes the exhumation of individuals from geographically disparate pauper graves, the classification of their physical characteristics, and the cataloging of observed metric traits in a local relational database, to include associated articles of possession and related metadata. Concurrent with the documentation of physical forensic evidence is the analysis of mitochondrial DNA sequences. Computational techniques and scoring parameters are applied to automate the process of discovery and identification as well at to preserve information on the missing. The result is a prototype knowledge base that may serve as a model for future efforts in international forensic science collaborations.