Reelection and Legislative Power: Surprising Results from Brazil

A diverse and growing literature ties legislative professionalization and power to career paths. In particular, higher rates of reelection and longer legislative careers should produce more professional, competent, and high‐quality legislatures. Legislators have more incentives to strengthen their own institution when they intend to remain there for a long career. Using data from the most recent constitutional convention in Brazil, we show that legislators with greater prospects for long careers were actually less likely to support strengthening the legislative branch. We explain this as part of a local equilibrium where career legislators’ short‐term need for pork trumped their long‐term interest in a stronger institution.     

Police Interviewing and Interrogation: A Self-Report Survey of Police Practices and Beliefs

By questionnaire, 631 police investigators reported on their interrogation beliefs and practices-the first such survey ever conducted. Overall, participants estimated that they were 77% accurate at truth and lie detection, that 81% of suspects waive Miranda rights, that the mean length of interrogation is 1.6 hours, and that they elicit self-incriminating statements from 68% of suspects, 4.78% from innocents. Overall, 81% felt that interrogations should be recorded. As for self-reported usage of various interrogation tactics, the most common were to physically isolate suspects, identify contradictions in suspects' accounts, establish rapport, confront suspects with evidence of their guilt, and appeal to self-interests. Results were discussed for their consistency with prior research, policy implications, and methodological shortcomings.     

Police-Induced Confessions,Risk Factors,and Recommendations: Looking Ahead

Reviewing the literature on police-induced confessions, we identified suspect characteristics and interrogation tactics that influence confessions and their effects on juries. We concluded with a call for the mandatory electronic recording of interrogations and a consideration of other possible reforms. The preceding commentaries make important substantive points that can lead us forward—on the effects of videotaping of interrogations on case dispositions; on the study of non-custodial methods, such as the controversial Mr. Big technique; and on an analysis of why confessions, once withdrawn, elicit such intractable responses compared to statements given by child and adult victims. Toward these ends, we hope that this issue provides a platform for future research aimed at improving the diagnostic value of confession evidence.     

Depleted Uranium,Public Science,and the Politics of Closure

The public controversy over depleted uranium (DU) seems to follow a standard trajectory—scientific closure, via the reduction of scientific uncertainty, led directly to policy closure, as government bureaucracies increasingly downplayed its dangers and denied redress to exposed individuals. Closer inspection, however, reveals a more complex dynamic. A series of expert, public science reports, while articulating a shared narrative of DU safety, actually accentuated great uncertainty concerning DU's biological effects, mirroring new uncertainties raised by ongoing scientific research. Policy closure is thus mirrored in neither the scholarly scientific literature nor in broader political realms, suggesting a close and unique relation between the expert reports and governmental policy making. Public science institutions and the expert reports they produce are crucial political resources for resolving governmental policy making but are decidedly less successful at closing the broader political debate.     

Definition of "Terrorism" in the UN Security Council: 1985-2004

International debate about the problems of defining terrorismhistorically centred on the General Assembly. Yet, between 1985and 2001, the Security Council adopted a range of measures addressingterrorist threats to peace and security, and analysis of theincidents involved reveals much about the Council's understandingof "terrorism". After September 2001, problems of definitionbecame acute, since the Council adopted general legislativemeasures against terrorism—with serious legal consequences—withoutdefining it. The Council has encouraged States to unilaterallydefine terrorism in national law, permitting wide and divergentdefinitions. A non-binding Council definition of late 2004 failsto remedy the serious difficulties caused by the lack of anoperative definition in Council practice.