SOCIAL-DEMOGRAPHIC ATTITUDES AND VIOLENCE*

In this study, we examine the relationships among social-demographic characteristics, attitudes, and violence, drawing on cultural theories. Structural equation modeling techniques are employed to examine data from a representative sample of the general population and a sample of ex-offenders. The findings indicate that age, gender, and SES are related to attitudes toward retribution and courage and to disputatiousness. Further, attitudes toward courage and retribution have significant effects on disputatiousness and violence, which explains a substantial portion of SES effects. The results suggest that lower-class persons are more likely to engage in violence to a large extent because they are more punitive and place greater emphasis on showing courage in conflicts.     

The Professors on Public Life

Many academics misunderstand public life and the conditions under which policy is made. This article examines misconceptions in three major academic traditions—policy as science (e.g., ‘evidence‐based policy’), normative political theory, and the mini‐public school of deliberative democracy—and argues that the practical implications of each of these traditions are limited by their partial, shallow and etiolated vision of politics. Three constitutive features of public life, competition, publicity and uncertainty, compromise the potential of these traditions to affect in any fundamental way the practice of politics. Dissatisfaction with real existing democracy is not the consequence of some intellectual or moral failure uniquely characteristic of the persona publica, and attempts to reform it are misdirected to the extent that they imagine a better public life modeled on academic ideals.     

IS THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN ALCOHOL USE AND DELINQUENCY CAUSAL OR SPURIOUS?*

We attempt to isolate the effects of alcohol on different types of delinquent behavior by identifying the spurious portion of the relationship. Using data on adolescents from Finland, we compare the relationship between drinking and delinquent behavior while sober to the total relationship between drinking and delinquent behavior (sober or not). For each type of offense, we find a substantial relationship between drinking and sober delinquency, which suggests a good deal of spuriousness. For crimes of petty theft (shoplifting and stealing from home), the relationship between drinking and sober delinquency is just as strong as the total relationship, which suggests the relationship is almost completely spurious. For violence, vandalism, car theft, and graffiti writing, the alcohol‐sober delinquency relationship is weaker, which suggests that alcohol has a causal effect on these offenses.     

Political trust and the vote in multiparty elections: The Canadian case

Abstract.  While the causes of declining political trust have been investigated extensively in the literature, much less empirical effort has been devoted to the study of its behavioural implications. This article focuses on the decline of trust in Canada during the period 1984 to 1993, and on its effect on Canadian voting behaviour. We build upon M.J. Hetherington's ('The effect of political trust on the presidential vote, 1968–1996', American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 311–326) work to explore the impact of political trust on the vote and on abstention in a multiparty electoral context. Multinomial logit estimations are performed using individual-level survey data from three Canadian federal elections. While distrust is shown to significantly affect electoral participation, thus acting as an alienating factor, the results indicate that decreasing trust acts more as a motivation to support third-party alternatives. The study further demonstrates that, in a multiple party setting, 'old-line' major parties electorally suffer from declining political trust, but some third parties benefit more from this phenomenon than others. Contrary to what was the case in the previous two elections, distrustful individuals in 1993 were more likely to vote for the Reform Party or the Bloc Québécois than support the New Democratic Party.