Book notes

Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties 1991–1992 by Freedom House Survey Team. New York: Freedom House, 1992. Pp.570; tables; ratings. £58.50 (hardback); £22.50 (paperback). ISBN 0 932 088 75 9 and 74 0

The Middle East and Problems of Democracy by Heather Deagan. Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1993. Pp.152; index; bibliography. £37.50 (hardback); £12.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 335 and 15686 X

Nation‐building and Democratisation in Thailand: A Political History by Prudhisan Jumbala. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute, 1992. Pp.144; index; bibliography; appendices. ISBN 974 582 219 1

Economic Reforms in New Democracies: A Social‐Democratic Approach by Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, José María Maravall and Adam Przeworski. Cambridge: University Press 1993. Pp.227; index. £30 (hardback); £10.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 521 43259 6 and 43845 4

Post‐Socialist World Orders: Russia, China and the UN System by Robert Boardman. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Pp.200; index. £35 (hardback). ISBN 0 312 10671 8

Regime Transitions, Elites and Bureaucracies in Eastern Europe by Hans‐Ulrich Derlien and George J. Szablowski. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993. Pp.150; index; bibliography; appendices. £10.99 (paperback). ISBN 1 55786 522 1

Political Dissent and Opposition in Poland: The Workers’ Defence Committee ‘KOR‘ by Robert Zuzowski. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992. Pp.295; index; bibliography; appendices. £58.95 (hardback). ISBN 0 275 94138 8

Debating the Constitution: New Perspectives on Constitutional Reform edited by Anthony Barnett, Caroline Ellis and Paul Hirst. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Pp.183. £39.95 (hardback); £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 1199 0 and 1081 1

Quelling the People: the Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement by Timothy Brook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp.x + 222; notes; bibliography, appendix. $27.50. ISBN 0 19 507457 2     

Heterogeneity in the Frequency Distribution of Crime Victimization

Objectives

Tests the idea that the frequency distribution typically observed in crosssectional crime victimization data sampled from surveys of general populations is a heterogeneously distributed result of the mixing of two latent processes associated, respectively, with each of the tails of the distribution.

Methods

Datasets are assembled from a number of samples taken from the British Crime Survey and the Scottish Crime Victimization Survey. Latent class analysis is used to explore the probable, latent distributions of individual property crime and personal crime victimization matrices that express the frequency and type of victimization that are self-reported by respondents over the survey recall period.

Results

The analysis obtains broadly similar solutions for both types of victimization across the respective datasets. It is demonstrated that a hypothesized mixing process will produce a heterogeneous set of local sub-distributions: a large sub-population that is predominantly not victimized, a very small ‘chronic’ sub-population that is frequently and consistently victimized across crime-type, and an ‘intermediate’ sub-population (whose granularity varies with sample size) to whom the bulk of victimization occurs. Additionally, attention is paid to the position of very high frequency victimization within these sub-populations.

Conclusions

The analysis supports the idea that crime victimization may be a function of two propensities: for immunity, and exposure. It demonstrates that zero-inflation is also a defining feature of the distribution that needs to be set alongside the significance that has been attached to the thickness of its right tail. The results suggest a new baseline model for investigating population distributions of crime victimization.     

Contested Cyberspace and Rising Powers

Abstract

The USA developed and has therefore historically played a lead role in cyberspace. Yet rising powers, including brics , have been increasingly challenging the established regime. China and Russia submitted a joint proposal on information security to the United Nations in 2011. India, Brazil, and South Africa have been focusing on the information society since their 2003 Brasilia Declaration. These initiatives demonstrate that cyberspace has become hotly contested. However, there is still a need to explain this divergence. Are rising powers challenging the USA because of their national interests, the urge to maximise their security, or do factors such as values and political structures explain the different trajectories vis-à-vis the hegemon? This article examines the foreign policies of brics from 1995 to date, explaining the influence of different path-dependent origins, of the systemic shift and the type of political system, together with rising civil society pressure.     

Religion as Catalyst or Restraint of Radical Right Voting?

It is often found that religious people are underrepresented among the radical right electorate, despite radical right parties’ claim of being defenders of the Judeo-Christian society. This study investigates this paradoxical finding and examines to what extent two dimensions of religion – practice and belief – play a role in voting for a radical right party across seven West European countries. Using the European Values Study from 2008, it was found that religiously active people are indeed less likely to vote for a radical right party, because they tend to vote for a Christian party. However, the study challenges the common wisdom that religion alone is a restraint on radical right voting and shows that orthodox believers in three countries – Belgium, Norway and Switzerland – feel more threatened by the presence of immigrants and therefore are more likely than their mainstream counterparts to vote for a radical right party.     

New Region,New Story: Imagining Mobile Subjects in Transnational Space

This paper investigates the changing relations between citizens and Europe's internal borders by seeing these relations as objects of governmentality of mobilities. It focuses on the particular discursive space of one transnational ‘corridor in the making’, studying how, through practices of visioning and strategy-making, governmental actors make new transnational governmental territories by breathing life into the imagined mobile subjects of these future territories. These mobile subjects play a central part in the politics of emergent transnational governmentalities and in legitimising potential border-crossing infrastructures. In a case study of the COINCO project (Corridor of Innovation and Co-operation), linking Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Malmö and Berlin, it is shown how deconstructing imagined mobile subjects reveals the will to power over mobility and sheds light on how governmental practices are remaking European borders.     

Measuring intra-generational redistribution in PAYG pension schemes

Public Choice - Voters in ageing societies expect pension reforms to be both inter-generationally and intra-generationally fair. In this paper, we propose a global measure of intra-generational...     

Understanding the factors that affect the severity of juvenile stranger sex offenses: the effect of victim characteristics and number of suspects

Understanding factors that affect the severity of a juvenile-stranger sexual assault has implications for crime prevention, and potentially, the assessment and treatment of juvenile sex offenders. This study investigated how victim characteristics and the number of suspects affected the use of physical violence and weapons and the occurrence of penetration in 495 allegations of sexual assault committed by juveniles against strangers. Statistically significant interactions between victim age and gender were found for occurrence of penetration and use of violence. Differences in offense characteristics were also found between offenses with varying victim-suspect age differences. When comparing the rate of penetration in the presence and absence of violence, little change was observed for lone suspects. However, the rate of penetration increased significantly for groups in the presence of physical violence, suggesting that violence in this context may be more expressive than instrumental. Theoretical explanations and practical implications are considered.