The value of reducing risks of death: A note on new evidence

Government agencies face difficult resource-allocation decisions when confronted with projects that will reduce risks of fatality. Evidence from individual behavior helps determine society's values for reducing risks. The most credible evidence is based on individuals' willingness to pay (or willingness to accept compensation) for small changes in risks. Studies of consumer behavior are limited, but more evidence is available relating wages to job risks. Contingent valuation studies reinforce the wage-risk implications, leading to a range of values that can be compared with the costs of proposals to reduce fatal risks.     

Direct supervision and delinquency: Assessing the adequacy of structural proxies

This research tests the hypothesis that children who grow up in families that carefully and consistently monitor children's behavior will be less delinquent than children in families where supervision is lax and/or haphazard. Although research operationalizing direct supervision in family interactional terms has supported this hypothesis, research using structural proxies for direct supervision (i.e., family size, broken home, and employed mother) has tended to show negligible effects. This research tests the direct supervision hypothesis using a more parsimonious structural proxy — the ratio of adults to children in a household. It is hypothesized that this ratio will be negatively related to delinquency, and that it will be a stronger predictor of delinquency than more common structural measures. Using data from the 1986 wave of the Monitoring the Future survey (Bachman, Johnston, and O'Malley, 1986), bivariate and multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models reveal that none of the structural variables, including the ratio of adults to children, are good predictors of delinquency. These results support Wells and Rankin's (1958) contention that family structural proxies are inadequate for testing the specific family functional processes on which direct supervision hinges.     

Boundaries of Legitimacy: Sex, Violence, Citizenship, and Community in a Local Sexual Economy

Studies of prostitution have overlooked the role of law in constituting the identities and sexual practices of women in the sex trade and defining the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence in the sexual economy. Drawing on field work with sex trade participants in a northwestern United States city, this paper explores how the cultural logic of modern liberal law shapes women's identities and interpretations of their actions. In positioning women in the sex trade as "sexual outlaws" to be managed and subjected to the full scope of legal authority, the law simultaneously limits women's citizenship and withdraws its protection. Moreover, in restricting women's ca-pacity to invoke fundamental legal rights, the law effectively sanctions "private" or extralegal forms of discipline and creates a space for violence. Given the paradoxical position these women hold as sexual outlaws on the one hand and frequent victims of physical and sexual assault on the other, I explore how they negotiate consent and resist violence.     

Patterns of culture and democratization in Kuwait

Conventional wisdom asserts that Islam and tribalism dispose the countries of the Arab Middle East against democratization. Yet the local culture in the region resembles those in the ancient world where democracy was first established, and neither resembles the pattern of political development that occurred in Western Europe, today’s democratic paradigm. Kuwait, a city-state that has enjoyed a high level of collective wealth throughout the period following World War II, displays many of the attributes of the “positive liberty” that Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, and others see as characteristic of ancient democracies. Vigorous participation in a range of public spaces acts as a check on runaway state power. Kuwait’s record on “negative liberty” is poor, which is why it diverges from the western European model. Population growth and its effect on political development is eroding Kuwait’s qualities as a city-state and pushing it toward mass politics. It is not possible at this stage to predict with any confidence whether these new trends will result in further liberalization or a more authoritarian polity. Mary Ann Tétreault is a professor of political science at Iowa State University. She is the editor ofWomen and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World (1994) and the author ofThe Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and the Economics of the New World Order (1995). She is presently working on a monograph on democratization in Kuwait and, with Robin Teske of James Madison University, is preparing an edited volume on power and social movements.     

The emotional motivation of righteous behavior

A distinction is made between two types of prosocial behavior: personal-helping and righteous behavior. Past studies suggest that sympathy may motivate personal helping but not righteous behavior. The latter may be better predicted by feelings of moral outrage and existential guilt. An experiment was designed to motivate a piece of righteous behavior, the writing of a political letter to stop the testing of nuclear weapons. A series of premeasures ascertained strength of attitude, sense of efficacy, acceptance of responsibility, and prior antinuclear behavior. Subjects who supported a nuclear freeze were exposed to material advocating a nuclear test ban, a video of a congressional aide who argued for the efficacy of writing letters to congressional representatives, and emotionally arousing material on the bombing of Hiroshima. After answering a questionnaire that included items to measure emotional state, subjects were individually given the opportunity to write a letter as they were waiting to be interviewed. Social pressure was deliberately minimized. Extent of moral outrage predicted both previous behavior and letter-writing behavior during the experiment. It combined with previous behavior and sense of efficacy to predict 56% of the variance in experimental behavior: Neither sympathy nor existential guilt were significantly related to this righteous behavior.