PATTERNS OF RELITIGATION

Two groups of parents were tracked for 2 years following their divorce: a group of 89 who attended a mandatory divorce education class and a comparison group of 23 who did not. The two groups did not differ in any assessed demographic or family characteristics. At the follow-up assessment, the parents who attended the class had relitigated (over all issues) less than half as often than those who had not attended the class (1.61 vs. 3.74). Moreover, rate of relitigation was related to mastery of skills learned in the class. The results are discussed in terms of the needs for outcome evaluation and design of education programs for divorcing parents.     

Importance of radiological diagnosis applied to necroscopy

The authors evaluate the consequences of incomplete necroscopic examinations wherein it was impossible to apply radiological resources to locate firearm projectiles. The study includes 8185 reports from the Instituto Médico-Legal Afranio Peixoto in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, representing the totality of corpses processed from January to December 2001; of these, 3122 were gunshot victims, 309 of which were buried with unremoved projectiles, being liable to future judicial reappraisal. During the same period, there were 23 exhumation requests by police authorities, 12 of them querying the existence of projectiles. The authors looked into the formal reasons assumed by the medico legal experts to conclude their reports from incomplete examinations, and suggest that gunshot necroscopic examinations should follow specific protocols, as incomplete autopsies will require further exhumations, at unnecessary additional costs.     

Searching for a New Politics: The New Politics Movement and the Struggle to Democratize the Democratic Party, 1968–1978

By the late 1960s, the Democratic Party had fallen into crisis. Vietnam, urban riots, and declining electoral fortunes marked a crossroads in the history of the party, raising questions about the meaning and trajectory of postwar liberalism. Amid the political chaos and economic crisis of the 1970s, a distinct political tendency running through the civil rights, feminist, labor, and antiwar movements demanded a new politics. The New Politics movement attempted to reform and realign the Democratic Party to the left. Reformers perceived party rules and structure as constraining progressives’ influence on public policy. Their project to democratize the Democratic Party began in the wake of the 1968 party crisis, and it ended ten years later with the failure to compel a sitting Democratic president and Democratic Congress to implement the party’s program for full employment. While faced with organized intraparty resistance, the failure of the New Politics movement hinged on the contradictory consequences of its struggle to open the party. The successes and failures of the New Politics movement suggest the limits and possibilities confronting progressive forces in the United States today. The New Politics episode can help clarify the goals and tactics involved in realigning American politics in a more progressive direction.     

Fast,slow and endless variation drives global development

This article explores the dynamics of institutional adaptation in fast-growing, highly interconnected polities in the developing world, and challenges the thesis in modernization theory which posits that economic growth and thus higher per-capita income lead over time to democracy. One mechanism often proposed to explain this link is the idea that economic growth and higher per capita income in a society lead individual citizens in that society to become more receptive to democratic values and norms, and that this receptivity can pave the way for the birth of democracy. Yet evidence increasingly demonstrates that the link is at best tenuous and often not empirically valid. Why have many fast-growing economies and modernizing societies not made a transition to democracy, as predicted by modernization theory? This paper addresses this question, with ideas from complex adaptive systems and evolutionary social psychology, as well as case analyses of Turkey and China.