Mother teresa meets Genghis Khan: The dialectics of hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating career choices

We replicated and extended earlier work showing the connection between social dominance orientation and the perceived attractiveness of hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating careers using data from two large and independent samples of UCLA students. Consistent with expectations, the data from both studies showed that the greater the students' level of social dominance orientation, the more attractive hierarchy-enhancing careers such as criminal prosecutor, police officer, and FBI agent were perceived to be. Similarly, the greater the students' social dominance orientation, the less attractive they found hierarchy-attenuating careers such as public defender, civil rights lawyer, and human rights advocate. These conclusions held even after controlling for the effects of socioeconomic status and political conservatism. Canonical correlation analysis disclosed that the attractiveness of these career paths within the general domain of law made only one, bipolar and unidimensional projection within social dominance space. The nature of this bipolar dimension reproduced the hypothesized distinction between hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating social roles. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed.     

公安社会管理创新的观念与路径

在大规模社会建设时代到来之际,公安社会管理创新作为今后公安工作的基础性和长期性工作,才刚刚起步,其理论和实践对我们而言都是全新的,特别是在中国国情下。我们特别需要清理已有的基本观念上的迷误,并在此基础上,对公安社会管理创新工作的整体架构作出一种基于国家、市场与社会互动结构关系背景下的勾画。     

Revenge,Retribution, and Values: Social Attitudes and Punitive Sentencing

This study examined the pattern of relations between vengeance attitudes, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO) using the structure of value types proposed by Schwartz (Adv Exp Soc Psychol 25:1–65, 1992). Relations between these variables and support for a variety of sentencing options, including capital punishment, were then investigated. One hundred and forty-eight students in Adelaide, South Australia, completed a Vengeance Scale (Stuckless and Goranson, J Soc Behav Pers 7:25–42, 1992), measures of RWA and SDO, the Schwartz Value Survey (1992), and a Sentencing Goals Scale. As predicted, vengeance attitudes and SDO were found to be positively related to the importance of power values and negatively related to the importance of universalism and benevolence values. Vengeance attitudes were negatively related to rehabilitation and positively related to support for retribution and incapacitation sentencing goals, while RWA was positively related to the endorsement of deterrence and incapacitation as sentencing goals. Regression analyses indicated that only RWA and vengeance attitudes were unique predictors of death penalty support. Results provide support for the suggestion that vengeance is closely associated with our notion of retributive justice.     

The Development of System Justification in the Developing World

System justification theorists have proposed that under some circumstances ‘‘people who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it’’ Jost et al. (2003). These claims are contrary to theories that suggest that group members seek to enhance their self-interest or group-interest (e.g., realistic group conflict theory, rational choice models). The present study, conducted in one of the poorest countries in the world, Bolivia, tested if even the most impoverished people of the world will endorse beliefs justifying the status quo. A survey of 356 Bolivian school children found that low-status children endorse beliefs in the effectiveness of government in meeting the people’s needs more than their high-status counterparts. The results suggest that system-justifying beliefs are endorsed by low-status group members in even the most extreme cases of poverty, and even among the youngest politically aware members of society, and they raise questions about the capacity for true social change in those parts of the world that may need it the most.

Winning Faces Vary by Ideology: How Nonverbal Source Cues Influence Election and Communication Success in Politics

Not just the content of a communication but also the source of the communication shapes its persuasiveness. Recent research in political communication suggests that important source cues are nonverbal and relate to the physical traits of the source such that attractive- and competent-looking sources have better success in attracting votes and policy support. Yet, are all nonverbal source cues similarly received irrespective of audience, or does their reception vary across audiences? Specifically, we ask whether some physical traits are received positively by some audiences but backfire for others. Utilizing research on ideological stereotypes and the determinants of facial preferences, we focus on the relationship between the facial dominance of the source and the ideology of the receiver. Across five studies, we demonstrate that a dominant face is a winning face when the audience is conservative but backfires and decreases success when the audience is liberal. On the other hand, a non-dominant face constitutes a winning face among liberal audiences but backfires among conservatives. These effects seemingly stem from deep-seated psychological responses and shape both the election and communication success of real-world politicians. If the faces of politicians do not match the ideology of their constituency, they are more likely to lose in the competition for votes and policy support.     

Political differentiation and the problem of dominance: Segmentation and hegemony

At first glance, one might view the political differentiation in the European Union as a reflection of the autonomy of its member states, signifying flexibility and the dispersion of democratic control. However, under conditions of complex interdependence and economic integration, political differentiation can undermine the fundamental conditions for democratic self‐rule. Political differentiation may cause dominance. It is argued in this article that we must move beyond Philip Pettit's conception of dominance as the capacity to interfere with others on an arbitrary basis, in order to properly identify the undemocratic consequences of differentiation. Political freedom is also a question of institutional provisions to co‐determine laws. From this vantage point, differentiation raises the spectre of dominance in the form of decisional exclusion and the pre‐emption of political autonomy. Drawing on a re‐conceptualisation of dominance, the effects of differentiation on the possibility of self‐rule are examined, and two systematic effects of political differentiation are identified. It is argued that segmentation is the systemic effect of differentiation in the vertical dimension of integration. Here, dominance occurs in the form of exclusion from decision‐making bodies and the denial of choice opportunities. In the external horizontal dimension, the systemic effect of differentiation is hegemony. Some states are vulnerable to arbitrary interference and the pre‐emption of public autonomy. The article discusses developments within the Eurozone as a case of segmentation and the statues of associated non‐members as a case of hegemony. With regard to the latter, we are faced with the phenomenon of self‐incurred dominance.     

Incumbency Dominance in Letters to the Editor: Field Experimental Evidence

This article reports the results of a randomized field experiment conducted three weeks before the 2017 federal election in Germany. Four different versions of a letter to the editor were sent to all the German daily newspapers that handle letters to the editor independently. The versions differed in the subject matter of the letter, the chancellor Angela Merkel versus the main challenger Martin Schulz, and in the evaluation of this subject, positive versus negative. The experiment was designed to test for three different types of media bias: political bias, negativity bias, and incumbency dominance. We find no political bias in the decisions to print letters, and no statistically significant negativity bias. We do observe incumbency dominance: letters about the chancellor were 40% more likely to be printed.     

Ma Rainey’s phonograph

This essay engages a series of performance routines by the blues artist Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, as a way of critiquing the epistemological tenets of sound reproduction technology. Between 1923 and 1925 Gertrude “Ma” Rainey carried out an elaborate quasi-burlesque performance routine in which she sang while hidden inside a giant phonograph; this routine precisely references and troubles the legacy of black sounds and bodies and their conflicted forms of capture andembodiment through sonic technologies. I think about how black sounds and bodies have been rendered as documentary objects within sonic and visual performance contexts and how this history is both referenced and complicated in Ma Rainey’s performances. I argue further that Rainey’s performance illustrates how sonic technologies always require, what I term black documentary embodiment, through the sonic and the visual. To this end I illustrate how reducing black art to an evidentiary object was central to the phonograph’s material and epistemological construction. In addition to analyzing Rainey’s performance I briefly engage the contemporaneous visual culture of the blues as a means to trace the legacy of black documentary embodiment within a longer visual-sonic tradition.     

Dominant party cohesion in comparative perspective: evidence from South Africa and Namibia

Africa's proliferation of dominant-party regimes is often regarded as an obstacle to democratization. Scholars and practitioners therefore face the task of understanding how and why constitutionally legitimate challenges to dominant party rule occur. This article asks: why do some presidential succession crises act as a catalyst to dominant party fragmentation when others do not? It argues that minority factions are more likely to defect from a dominant party when they have (1) been marginalized by the majority faction and (2) confidence in their mobilizational capacity. Factional purging is in turn traced to autocratic leadership and party under-bureaucratization, whilst high levels of factional self-confidence are linked to crises of dominance and the weakness of extant opposition parties.     

Eu merger control and the compatibility test:a review of recent developments

The compatibility test contained in Article 2 of the Merger Control Regulation (MCR) is at the very heart of EU merger control, for it determines whether a concentration with a community dimension is deemed compatible or incompatible with the common market. Incompatibility can lead to prohibition of a concentration, although this is rare. The paper reviews the recent developments to the conditions of the test itself as well as the analytical methods employed to determine compatibility. Concerning the former, the new foreseeable dominance interpretation, put forward by the European Commission and made law by the Court of First Instance (CFI), is explored. This new variant of the dominance condition is important on its own right but it is also of major interest because of the explicit legal requirement placed on the Commission to assess the future likelihood of abusive behaviour by the merging parties in its prospective analysis. This is not the case with the original dominance compatibility condition. The unexpected but important clarification by the CFI of the notion of substantial part of the common market, as contained in the express wording of the compatibility test, is also commented upon. Concerning the determination of compatibility, the Commission's controversial employment in certain conglomerate concentrations of the range effects of competitive harm theory is examined, as is the need to take cognisance of merger specific efficiencies when determining if a merger increases societal welfare. The EU is making progress toward such an efficiencies assessment as part of the compatibility determination. EU merger control – and hence the compatibility test – do not exist in a vacuum. The EU has played a major role in shaping the new multilateral architecture and its goal of increasing international convergence in competition matters. This in turn has led the EU to rethink the nature of the compatibility test. For example, it has sought to evaluate the dominance condition of the compatibility test with the substantial lessening of competition (SLC) approach used by some other regulators, like the US. The paper concludes by looking at a fundamental issue that has arisen from recent CFI judgements and the GE/Honeywell merger: the competence of the Commission, or more accurately the Merger Task Force (MTF), to carry out the compatibility determination. Proposals are outlined so as to ensure that the Commission's prospective analysis in a concentration case meets the requisite legal standard. It is essential for this standard to be met if EU merger control is to remain credible. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.