Measuring media oriented terrorism

Although long established, media oriented terrorist events have not been conceptualized or measured in a coherent manner. To forward the empirical study of media oriented terrorism, a measure that can be applied to terrorist events or to terrorist groups was developed and employed to compare terrorist activity for twenty terrorist groups and two hundred terrorist events. The media orientation measure taps into five factors of media orientation and successfully differentiates high from low media orientated events and active and inactive media oriented terrorist groups. The single most important factor regarding any group's individual media orientation level was their base of operation. Terrorist groups that were engaged in regional struggles were found to be less media oriented. Despite the news value of death and injury, the terrorist group with the highest fatality and injury averages ranked ninth in its media orientation score indicating that death and injury was not a necessary indicator of media orientation. Scores further suggest that media savvy well-known terrorist groups did not pursue media oriented activity as a constant strategy.     

Maturity in Adolescent and Young Adult Offenders: The Role of Cognitive Control

This study examined the role of cognitive control in explaining the psychosocial maturity of adolescent (n = 43) and young adult male (n = 40) offenders. We separated psychosocial maturity into prosocial and criminal components, which were statistically unrelated and were explained by different variables. Individuals with higher levels of prosocial maturity were older, had better proactive cognitive control, and had better short-term memory than those with lower levels of prosocial maturity. Individuals with higher levels of criminal maturity were older and had better reactive cognitive control than those with lower levels of criminal maturity. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to juvenile justice policy and practice.     

The International Monetary Fund: A review of the recent evidence

A review of recent quantitative studies on the International Monetary Fund reveals that much of the conventional wisdom is incorrect. Recent studies have demonstrated a new degree of methodological rigor, have drawn more heavily upon insights from political science, and have asked a number of new questions. We review studies of participation in IMF programs, design of IMF conditionality, implementation and enforcement of IMF conditions, conventional program effects and catalytic effects. At every stage, we find substantial evidence of the influence of major IMF shareholders, of the Fund’s own organizational imperatives, and of domestic politics within borrowing countries. We conclude that very little is known with certainty about the effects of IMF lending, but that a great deal has been learned about the mechanics of IMF programs that will have to be taken into account in order to obtain unbiased estimates of those effects.

Back to the Archives? A Critique of the Danish Part of the Manifesto Dataset

The dataset of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) is one the best known and often used datasets in comparative studies of Western Europe. However, the Danish part of the data is very problematic. On average, nearly a third of the content of the Danish manifestos is deemed impossible to code. A close examination of the Danish data reveals large variations in the number of coded sentences across time and parties. An analysis of the manifestos on which the coding is based sets all the warning lights flashing. First, not all manifestos are in fact manifestos; a number consist of other political texts (i.e. speeches, drafts) or even stem from different elections (e.g. municipal manifestos masquerading as national manifestos). Second, the large variation in the length of the manifestos across time suggests that the information derived from them is not readily comparable. This leads to a distorted picture of the positions of the Danish parties. The conclusion of this article is that in order for the Danish part of the CMP dataset to become more trustworthy, it is necessary to search the archives, find the actual manifestos and recode them.     

More Flies with Honey: Positive Economic Linkage in German Ostpolitik from Bismarck to Kohl

The existing literature on economic sanctions has rarely addressed the key question of comparing the effectiveness of positive and negative sanctions. It is the contention of this study that positive sanctions can potentially be more effective, even in cases where contentious "high politics" issues are being negotiated, relations between the states concerned are tense and militarized, and the state being targeted with sanctions has substantial military power. This assertion will be tested in a set of case studies drawn from German-Polish and German-Russian/Soviet relations from the nineteenth century to the present. It will be shown that positive sanctions can be used effectively, both as "specific" sanctions to influence a target state on one particular issue, and as "general" sanctions, which aim to change the state's behavior as a whole in a more slow and subtle process.     

The multidimensionality of crime: A comparison of techniques for scaling delinquent careers

The construction of typologies of criminal behavior can benefit from the use of multidimensional analytic methods. Yet while some studies have applied such techniques to crime data (e.g., Shortet al, 1963; Nutch and Bloombaum, 1968; Chaiken and Chaiken, 1982), few have examined the assumptions of these methods as they apply to arrest histories. We argue that arrest histories represent a special form of data that are not ideally suited to standard multidimensional analyses. An examination of the different theoretical assumptions of factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and variance centroid scaling (a form of correspondence analysis) reveals marked difierences in what is being uncovered by the analysis. In general, these claims are supported by an application of each technique to the arrest histories of 767 chronic juvenile delinquents.