INTERPOL's Surveillance Network in Curbing Transnational Terrorism

This paper investigates the role that International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) surveillance—the Mobile INTERPOL Network Database (MIND) and the Fixed INTERPOL Network Database (FIND)—played in the War on Terror since its inception in 2005. MIND/FIND surveillance allows countries to screen people and documents systematically at border crossings against INTERPOL databases on terrorists, fugitives, and stolen and lost travel documents. Such documents have been used in the past by terrorists to transit borders. By applying methods developed in the treatment‐effects literature, this paper establishes that countries adopting MIND/FIND experienced fewer transnational terrorist attacks than they would have had they not adopted MIND/FIND. Our estimates indicate that, on average, from 2008 to 2011, adopting and using MIND/FIND results in 0.5 fewer transnational terrorist incidents each year per 100 million people. Thus, a country like France with a population just above 64 million people in 2008 would have 0.32 fewer transnational terrorist incidents per year owing to its use of INTERPOL surveillance. This amounts to a sizeable average proportional reduction of about 30 percent.     

Convenient and Inconvenient Truths in Family Law: Preventing Scholar‐Advocacy Bias in the Use of Social Science Research for Public Policy

This is the second of two articles on the risks of advocacy bias in the reporting of research findings when boundaries are blurred between social science research and advocacy in the pursuit of public policy. In the first article we identify common ways in which social science researchers and reviewers of research—wittingly or unwittingly—can become advocates for ideological positions and social policies at the expense of being balanced reporters of research evidence. The first article discusses the difference between truth in social science and truth in law and identifies a range of scholar‐advocacy strategies that bias research evidence, illustrated by recent debates about overnight parenting of infants and toddlers. In this second article we show how biased research evidence by scholar advocates results in increased confusion and controversy that diminishes the credibility of all parties and stalemates progress in the field, using a case illustration of intimate partner violence in family court. We also show how adherence to scientific methods prevents the misuse of research and suggest a number of collaborative, integrative measures that can help transcend the adversarial stalemate. In a look to the future we consider some unbiased, standardized ways of assessing the strength and generalizability of research evidence.     

A Randomized Comparative Effectiveness Trial of Two Court‐Connected Programs for High‐Conflict Families

Parents who experience great amounts of legal conflict as they dissolve their relationship and arrive at their parenting arrangements require an outsize proportion of courts’ time and resources. Additionally, there is overwhelming evidence that conflict has a deleterious effect on their children. We partnered with the family court to conduct a study comparing the effectiveness of two programs for families deemed by their judge to be high conflict and thereby mandated to a program. Both involved one 3‐hour session; the existing program, Parent Conflict Resolution (PCR), used exhortational lecture and video; the newly designed experimental program, Family Transitions Guide (FTG), based on motivational interviewing, employed exercises attempting to get parents to decide for themselves what they needed to do for the sake of their children. Parents were assigned at random to one of the two programs (the literature often terms this a randomized clinical trial) and were interviewed just before it began and 9 months later, as was a child. Results showed that child's report of their own well‐being was significantly improved by FTG as compared to PCR and that these effects were mediated by children feeling less caught in the middle. On several variables, parent report showed that parents in PCR as compared to FTG felt decreased problems in co‐parenting and less interparental conflict, although the effects were not consistent across mother and father report. There was also evidence of diminished legal conflict over 9 months in FTG as compared to PCR.     

Terrorist networks, support, and delegation

The paper presents a game-theoretic representation of a general terrorist organization (GTO) that delegates responsibility to local terrorist representatives in n countries. The GTO achieves a strategic advantage by deploying a more radical representative when the government is perceived to be weak and terrorist supporters are committed. When the government or terrorist supporters alter their posture, the GTO may regret its local representative. Outside assistance can change a besieged government’s posture, thereby removing the GTO’s delegation advantage. When both the GTO and the government delegate to surrogates, the delegators are worse off if the government appears to be weak.     

Copenhagen Accord: Outcomes,Next Steps,and Business Implications

Although the United Nations Climate Change Conference, held recently in Copenhagen, fell short of expectations by failing to achieve a legally binding agreement to fill the gap when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, there were some positive outcomes. A negotiating gridlock limited the resulting Copenhagen Accord to a nonlegally binding treaty drafted in part by the United States. The Accord was not adopted.

This article discusses key elements of the Accord, identifies those countries that have committed to greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and offers insights into the positive outcomes, shortcomings, and business implications of the Accord.     

Religious zionism and the state: Political accommodation and religious radicalism in Israel

In its earlier years Israel was spared the impact of religious radicalism. In the last two decades, however, religious doctrines have begun to claim a role in foreign policy, culminating in the 4 November 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The primary aim of this study is to explore the systemic political processes and contextual factors that in the past have subdued national religious radicalism in Israel. The general argument of this essay is that the tradition of political accommodation with the religious parties fostered their participation in government coalitions, and by doing so, mobilized a large portion of the religious sector to support the state. Equally important in suppressing religious radicalism in Israel were the two main doctrines of religious Zionism, the instrumental and the redemptionist, which applauded cooperation with secular Zionism and the state, hence enabling political accommodation and avoiding a comprehensive violent confrontation. The absence of a religious party in the Rabin government brought the country's political discourse to an unprecedented level of intensity, strengthening a new blend of religious nationalism that posed a potential for deligitimization of the state.     

Are qualified majority rules special?

This essay provides a formal justification for qualified majority rules. Specifically, within an uncertain dichotomous choice framework, in which individual preferences are identical but actual judgments may differ, special majority rules emerge as decision rules that maximize the probability of making correct decisions. The main result specifies the optimal special majority as a function of a priori bias in favor of the status quo, ability, and size of the decision-making body. The analysis of the relationships among these three variables in generating certain common qualified majority rules is then pursued.     

The vulnerability of point-voting schemes to preference variation and strategic manipulation

This essay measures and analyzes for a special class of point-voting schemes (the Borda method, plurality rule and the unrestricted point-voting scheme) sensitivity to preference variation (a simple change in the socially winning alternative resulting from alteration of a single voter's preferences) and vulnerability to individual strategic manipulation (a change in the winning alternative that benefits the voter whose preferences are altered). Assuming that society (n voters with linear preference orders on a finite set of m alternatives) satisfies the impartial-culture assumption, that is, each randomly selected voter is equally likely to hold any one of the randomly picked possible preference orders on the alternatives, we demonstrate:

1. for a given rule and a fixed number of voters, the sensitivity to individual preference variation and the vulnerability to individual strategic manipulation are greater, the larger the total number of alternatives.
2. For a given rule and a fixed number of alternatives, the vulnerability to individual strategic manipulation, in general, is not greater the smaller the total number of voters. Such a relationship does hold, however, if n is sufficiently large.
3. For any given combination of number of voters and number of alternatives, the unrestricted point-voting scheme is more sensitive to preference variation than the Borda method, which, in turn, is more exposed to such variation relative to the plurality rule. A similar conclusion does not hold with respect to vulnerability to individual strategic manipulation, unless the number of voters is sufficiently small.