THE SEMANTICS OF SYMBOLIC SPEECH

More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court held that the free speech protection of the First Amendment is not limited to verbal communication, but also applies to such expressive conduct as saluting a flag or burning a flag. Even though the Supreme Court has decided a number of important cases involving expressive conduct, the Court has never announced any standards for distinguishing such conduct from conduct without communicative value. The aim of this paper is to examine which conceptions of nonverbal expression underlie judicial decisions on expressive conduct, and to offer an account of expressive conduct grounded in contemporary semantic theory. The central hypothesis of this paper is that significance of expressive conduct can be explained by principles that explain important features of linguistic meaning. I propose an analysis of expressive conduct that takes the meaningfulness of conduct as a function of the action and its consequences in context. I develop a theory of expressive conduct whose underlying conception of expression is based on a number of ideas from speech act theory. These are Grice's account of nonnatural meaning, Austin's theory of illocutionary force, and Grice's work on conversational implicature. My analysis understands the meaningfulness of conduct in terms of its relational properties and relevant features of the context upon which illocutionary force, perlocutionary properties and implicature are predicated. The natural and conventional properties of types of conduct, features of the context, and underlying social and cultural presumptions and expectations about human conduct thus play a role in the constitution of symbolic speech.     

Putting Electronic Voting under the Microscope

Electronic voting entered the political arena some years ago, with some countries advocating its use, some countries trialling and then abandoning it and yet others preferring to preserve the status quo of paper‐and‐pencil voting within a voting booth. In this paper we present the pros and cons of electronic voting and propose a set of characteristics we think electronic voting systems should exhibit. We then briefly review some pertinent concerns, issues and worries. We conclude by introducing the Handivote system, an electronic voting system that supports voting by means of SMS messaging, and explain how it measures up in terms of our own specified characteristics.     

DOES THE TIME CAUSE THE CRIME? AN EXAMINATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TIME SERVED AND REOFFENDING IN THE NETHERLANDS*

This work uses a sample of Dutch offenders, serving an average of 6.7 months of confinement, to examine the relationship between time served in prison and future criminality. To overcome the selection issues inherent in this examination, this article introduces a new method to the criminological literature that relies on a generalization of the propensity score to control for observed differences in offenders sentenced to different periods of confinement. On the whole, very little evidence of a relationship between time served and future offending was found. In particular, 3‐year reconviction rate and the proportion of offenders reconvicted in the next 3 years do not seem to depend on incarceration length. Although a relationship between time served and future sentence length was found, the evidence is modest.     

The Impact of Presidential Campaigning for Congress on Presidential Support in the U.S. House of Representatives

Presidential influence is partly a function of the partisan, economic, and international context within which the president governs. Presidents are, however, more than bystanders relying on the political milieu for policy opportunities. Recent scholarship demonstrates that presidents consciously influence this milieu and build political capital by campaigning for congressional candidates. We contribute to this literature by assessing the effects of presidential campaigning on legislative support for two presidents who governed under extremely dissimilar circumstances: Bill Clinton in the 106th Congress and George W. Bush in the 108th Congress. We find evidence of campaign effects on congressional policymaking during both administrations.     

Democracies and Deficits: Prospects for Fiscal Responsibility in Democratic Nations

The financial crisis had significant implications for the fiscal positions of OECD. As nations seek to cope with the economic contraction, budget deficits and debt have risen to near record postwar levels. As the crisis in Europe and other advanced economies has deepened, fiscal consolidation will have to be coupled, and even preceded, by actions to jump‐start crippled economies. Nonetheless, when fiscal consolidation becomes necessary, nations that procrastinate by waiting for a crisis to provide cover for the politically hard choices will pay a steep price indeed both economically and politically. Many in the academic and policy community have raised questions about whether advanced democracies have the political wherewithal to respond to gathering fiscal pressures through early and timely action. Recent fiscal actions in advanced nations suggest that democracies are not doomed to wait for market shocks and crises. Rather, leaders have shown that fiscal sacrifice can be achieved in ways that promote electability. In this article, we discuss the impetus for democratic fiscal actions and the strategies used to gain public support.