The Anti-Poll Tax Movement: a Pressure Movement?

The anti-poll tax campaign has been the subject of scant empirical or theoretical analysis. One explanation lies in the difficulty of locating the campaign within existing theories of pressure groups or social movements. This article argues for the creation of a distinct model of protest, based upon the concept of a pressure movement, to explain a campaign that was single-issue, decentralised, non-hierarchical and variable according to location. Distinctions between pressure groups and social movements have become increasingly arbitrary with the rise of groups lacking formalised membership. Pressure movements are thus likely to form key contestatory actors in future years.     

Turf wars: authority and responsibility for the investigation of mass graves

Mass graves are complex products of large-scale crimes. Such scenes pose four conceptual challenges to investigators and forensic experts: the individual victim, the crime, the setting, and the statistical. Exhumation and post-mortem examination of mortal remains with associated personal and forensic evidence require integrated management of core forensic personnel including investigators, archaeologists, anthropologists, odontologists and pathologists, among whom there is overlapping expertise. The key to avoiding competition and ill-will among experts is to recognize that all such experts should be enabled to make known how their expertise matches with the temporal and spatial boundaries of victim, crime and setting. In turn, they should be apprised of where they fit into the overall judicial process and their limits within the investigation. Consequently, each expert requires access to the factual background of the case, to the site and its contents throughout the investigation. Each forensic team member has a responsibility to influence the investigation--throughout its course when possible--to make findings within their areas of expertise, and to make these available to the rest of the team so as to contribute most meaningfully to the aims of the investigation, both forensic and humanitarian. The on-site crime scene manager has an overarching role to enable integrated access to the complete scene and its contents by each forensic expert team member. In other words, the forensic scientist is given access and the ability to influence the investigation while control of evidence from the site as to identity and criminal activity are maintained by the crime scene manager. This contribution is directed at both the crime scene manager and each forensic expert; it describes the essential spatial and temporal parameters of an expert's opinion so as to encourage cooperation, and discourage conflict, within the forensic team.     

Persuasion and Resistance: Race and the Death Penalty in America

Although there exists a large and well-documented "race gap" between whites and blacks in their support for the death penalty, we know relatively little about the nature of these differences and how the races respond to various arguments against the penalty. To explore such differences, we embedded an experiment in a national survey in which respondents are randomly assigned to one of several argument conditions. We find that African Americans are more responsive to argument frames that are both racial (i.e., the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are black) and nonracial (i.e., too many innocent people are being executed) than are whites, who are highly resistant to persuasion and, in the case of the racial argument, actually become more supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates against blacks. These interracial differences in response to the framing of arguments against the death penalty can be explained, in part, by the degree to which people attribute the causes of black criminality to either dispositional or systemic forces (i.e., the racial biases of the criminal justice system) .     

The merits of Neo-Downsian modeling of the alternative vote: A reply to Horowitz

In Professor Horowitz’s rejoinders (2004, 2006) to Fraenkel and Grofman (2004, 2006a), he mischaracterizes our formal results, retreats from previous claims about the conditions for the alternative vote electoral system to generate centripetal outcomes, renders explicit his dubious assumptions about voter behavior in divided societies, and greatly exaggerates the global evidence in support of pro-moderation outcomes under the alternative vote. Here we respond to Horowitz's (2004), criticism in this journal of the formal model of Fraenkel and Grofman (2004) and to the broader defense in Horowitz (2006) of majoritarian vote pooling arrangements as means of mitigating ethnic conflict in deeply divided societies.     

RPR officials: a report on an inquiry into the Neo-Gaullist Party elite

Abstract. Based upon a questionnaire survey of delegates to the RPR National Congress held in Grenoble in November 1984, this paper summarizes a three-dimensional analysis of RPR officials (demographic and sociological identification; political mobilization, party functions and activism; ideological trends and political attitudes) which seeks to appraise how the evolution of the Gaullist movement correlates with changes in French politics between 1976 and 1986.