Male MPs,electoral vulnerability and the substantive representation of women's interests

What are the political conditions affecting male MPs’ willingness to represent women's interests in parliament? This paper explores the role of electoral vulnerability in this regard and analyzes whether male MPs’ re-election prospects affect their likelihood of paying attention to women's concerns. Theoretically, we expect that male MPs are not blamed if they do not represent women's interests but can gain additional credit for doing so. Thus, male MPs should be more likely to speak on behalf of women if their electoral vulnerability is high and if they need to win additional votes to be re-elected. Empirically, the paper analyzes the representation of women's issues in the British House of Commons, by using Early Day Motions tabled preceding the General Elections in 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2015. The results show that male MPs are more likely to represent women's interests when their re-election is at risk.     

Values,trust and democracy in Germany: Still in search of ‘inner unity’?

Twenty years after German reunification, surveys have persistently uncovered differences in political trust between the eastern and western parts of the country. Studies have offered disintegrated and inconclusive assessments of the cross‐regional variation. This variation is traced to a tenacious, retrospective sympathy for socialism steeped in political socialisation and experiential learning. Empirical analyses confirm the presence of two key effects. First, retrospective evaluations of socialism not only fuel popular distrust of political institutions, but are more strongly correlated with trust in the east. Second, East–West evaluations of socialism are sufficiently different to contribute towards explaining the contrasting levels of trust between the two regions. That socialist values constitute a core axis upon which East German attitudes pivot presents a challenge for nurturing trust in democratic institutions and renews attention to processes through which supportive attitudes to democracy are acquired in transitional countries.     

HISTORICAL CONTINGENCIES AND THE EVOLVING IMPORTANCE OF RACE,VIOLENT CRIME,AND REGION IN EXPLAINING MASS INCARCERATION IN THE UNITED STATES

This article combines insights from historical research and quantitative analyses that have attempted to explain changes in incarceration rates in the United States. We use state‐level decennial data from 1970 to 2010 (N = 250) to test whether recent theoretical models derived from historical research that emphasize the importance of specific historical periods in shaping the relative importance of certain social and political factors explain imprisonment. Also drawing on historical work, we examine how these key determinants differed in Sunbelt states, that is, the states stretching across the nation's South from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, from the rest of the nation. Our findings suggest that the relative contributions of violent crime, minority composition, political ideology, and partisanship to imprisonment vary over time. We also extend our analysis beyond mass incarceration's rise to analyze how factors associated with prison expansion can explain its stabilization and contraction in the early twenty‐first century. Our findings suggest that most of the factors that best explained state incarceration rates in the prison boom era lost power once imprisonment stabilized and declined. We find considerable support for the importance of historical contingencies in shaping state‐level imprisonment trends, and our findings highlight the enduring importance of race in explaining incarceration.