The Cross-Cultural Association Between Marital Status and Physical Aggression Between Intimate Partners

Some research suggests that the risk of physical aggression by an intimate partner is related to marital status, but this relationship may vary across cultures and by gender. In the present study, we systematically examine the relationship between marital status and physical partner aggression by gender across 19 countries. Logistic and multilevel regression confirmed previous findings of lower rates of physical aggression for legally married versus cohabiting and separated/divorced women and men across most, but notably, not all countries. Single status was associated with higher risk in some countries and lower in others reflecting possible cultural differences in risk for different marital statuses. For example, single women had significantly lower rates of victimization than did married women in India where violence against wives is often accepted. The variation in the cross-cultural findings highlights the importance of examining both men and women and considering the cultural context when interpreting the relationship between partner aggression and marital status.     

Taking Stock: What Drives Landlord Participation in the Housing Choice Voucher Program

ABSTRACT

To succeed, the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program must be attractive to rental property owners. When landlords refuse to accept subsidized renters, lease-up rates decline, administrative costs increase, and options become limited to high-poverty neighborhoods where owners are most desperate. This article examines what motivates landlords’ decisions to accept subsidized tenants. We use 127 interviews with a random and field sample of landlords, combined with administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on property ownership in Baltimore, Maryland, Dallas, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio. We find that landlords’ perspectives on the HCV program, including rents, tenants, and inspections, are highly dependent on context; landlords weigh the costs and benefits of program participation against the counterfactual tenant that a landlord might otherwise rent to in the open market. We argue that policymakers can boost landlord participation by better understanding how landlords think about their alternatives within each local context. Finally, we consider what drives nonparticipation in the program. Our results show that the majority of landlords who refuse voucher holders had accepted them previously. We suggest that policy reform should be dually focused on improving bureaucratic inefficiencies that deter landlord participation, and providing training and education to landlords.     

Designing Public Participation Processes

The purpose of this Theory to Practice article is to present a systematic, cross‐disciplinary, and accessible synthesis of relevant research and to offer explicit evidence‐based design guidelines to help practitioners design better participation processes. From the research literature, the authors glean suggestions for iteratively creating, managing, and evaluating public participation activities. The article takes an evidence‐based and design science approach, suggesting that effective public participation processes are grounded in analyzing the context closely, identifying the purposes of the participation effort, and iteratively designing and redesigning the process accordingly.     

Healthy Families America: ruminations on implementing a home visitation program to prevent child maltreatment

Following a 1990 federal report forecasting a national child abuse and neglect epidemic, Prevent Child Abuse America (PCA America) promoted a home visitation program known as Healthy Families America (HFA). HFA achieved rapid adoption and implementation across the nation going from 25 sites in 1992 to 430 in a decade. In this article, the authors describe PCA America's approach to develop, promote, oversee, and evaluate a national home visitation program. Despite its promising growth, HFA has been criticized for failing to achieve the goal of preventing child maltreatment. HFA's past and present are critiqued based on theory and implementation practice of home visitation and its future projected from the perspective of insiders. Developing a better understanding of HFA's history will advance existing models of home visitation and add to the emerging knowledge base of child maltreatment prevention.     

Anatomy of the Rise and Fall of a Price-Fixing Conspiracy: Auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's

The Sotheby's–Christie's price-fixing scandal that endedin the public trial of Alfred Taubman provides a unique windowon a number of key economic and antitrust policy issues. Thetrial provided detailed evidence as to how the price-fixingworked, and the economic conditions under which it was startedand began to fall apart. The role of the amnesty program wasimportant to the case, and does not appear to have had a rolein the cartel's enforcement of price-fixing or the cartel'sdemise. The outcome of the case also provides evidence on theauction process used to choose the lead counsel for the civilsettlement. Finally, though buyers received the bulk of thedamages, a straightforward application of the economic theoryof auctions shows that it is unlikely that successful buyersas a group were injured.     

The Pursuit of Equality in Public Administration

Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, Fairness versus Welfare
Samuel Leiter and William M. Leiter, Affirmative Action in Antidiscrimination Law and Policy: An Overview and Synthesis
Stephen L. Ross and John Yinger, The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement     

Reforming Global Sport: Hybridity and the Challenges of Pursuing Transparency

In light of recent controversies in global sport, this article surveys the challenges of pursuing transparency in this particular domain of governance. Although corruption in sport is attracting more scholarly attention, there remains little sociolegal research that reflects critically on corporate governance in sport and its implications. This article outlines current calls for greater transparency in global sport and considers how capitalistic underpinnings and distinct hybrid arrangements complicate the task of transparency. It concludes by reflecting on how insights from studies of regulatory capitalism can inform alternative approaches to transparency and accountability in global sport.     

Impact of procedural factors on perceived justice in divorce settlements

We used a decision-making conceptual framework from family resource management combined with procedural justice frameworks from social psychology to (i) articulate the elements and rules of procedural fairness, (ii) develop a theoretical organization and code to include procedural fairness principles as applied to legal decision processes in divorce, and (iii) describe the perceptions of divorcing parties about the violations of procedural fairness principles in their own divorce process. Procedural fairness principles included accuracy, consistency, ethicality, bias suppression, correctability, and representativeness. Results of qualitative data analyses were consistent with experimental studies in that divorced people were concerned with fair procedures and particularly with violations of the principles of ethicality, consistency, accuracy, and representativeness.