Doubling Down: Inequality in Responsiveness and the Policy Preferences of Elected Officials

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference‐induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws that could disproportionately impact minority groups are also less likely to engage in nonpolicy responsiveness to minority groups. We conducted a field experiment in 28 US legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino and white constituents. If legislators supported voter identification laws, Latino constituents were less likely to receive constituency communications from their legislators. There are significant implications regarding fairness in the democratic process when elected officials fail to represent disadvantaged constituency groups in both policy and nonpolicy realms.     

Does User Co-Production of Public Service Delivery Increase Satisfaction and Trust? Evidence From a Vignette Experiment

Whereas it is assumed that involving users in the delivery of public services yields more positive evaluations of those services, this study shows that levels of satisfaction and trust are not necessarily positively affected by such user co-production. An experimental vignette design among students (n = 174) is used to analyze the differences concerning trust and satisfaction between co-produced and non-co-produced public services. In some cases, the results suggest, co-production actually leads to less satisfaction and trust. This might be explained by the self-serving bias, which states that co-producers take credit for success but blame service providers for failure.     

Effects of collaborative recall: Denying true information is as powerful as suggesting misinformation

We tested whether someone's ability to tell a good story, in terms of the Reality Monitoring (RM) tool, affects the way s/he judges the stories told by others. Forty participants (undergraduate students) wrote down two statements – one about activities they did 30 minutes ago, and the other about a past event. Subsequently, they rated the quality of a target statement written by someone else. We found that the tendency to provide a not so detailed or a very detailed statement was stable across the two statements the participants wrote. Furthermore, this tendency affected how they judged the target statements: The richer a participant's statements were compared to the target statement, the more critical the participant was in judging the target statement. These findings imply that RM is subject to biases which are related to individual differences. We discuss the implications of these findings for applying the RM lie detection tool in the field.     

Gender differences in violent offending: results from a multicentre comparison study in Dutch forensic psychiatry

ABSTRACT

The past two decades, a disproportionate growth of females entering the criminal justice system and forensic mental health services has been observed worldwide. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the background of women who are convicted for violent offenses. What is their criminal history, what are their motives for offending and in which way do they differ from men convicted for violent offenses? In this study, criminal histories and the offenses for which they were admitted to forensic care were analyzed of 218 women and 218 men who have been treated between 1984 and 2014 with a mandatory treatment order in one of four Dutch forensic psychiatric settings admitting both men and women. It is concluded that there are important differences in violent offending between male and female patients. Most importantly, female violence was more often directed towards their close environment, like their children, and driven by relational frustration. Furthermore, female patients received lower punishments compared to male patients and were more often considered to be diminished accountable for their offenses due to a mental illness.     

Identifying and measuring juror pre-trial bias for forensic evidence: development and validation of the Forensic Evidence Evaluation Bias Scale

Abstract

Previous research has provided support for the impact of juror pre-trial bias on judicial decision making, particularly in cases where the evidence presented at trial is of weak or ambiguous probative value. In an effort to identify whether a pre-trial bias for forensic evidence exists, the Forensic Evidence Evaluation Bias Scale (FEEBS) was developed and tested. The results of a principal components analysis suggested that two distinct constructs were being measured, corresponding to a pro-prosecution and pro-defence bias toward forensic evidence. In a second validation study, scores on these two subscales were compared with other existing juror bias measures (Juror Bias Scale and Belief in a Just World) and in a mock juror decision making task only the pro-prosecution subscale of the FEEBS predicted the perceived strength of forensic evidence. A partial mediation model is presented which explains the relationship between this bias and verdict preferences. The implications of this potential juror bias are discussed in the context of real juries, the CSI Effect (which refers to anecdotal claims that jurors are biased by the popularity of fictional representations of forensic science on television) and peremptory challenges, as well as future research directions.     

The urban household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900–2000: Patterns of family formation in a turbulent century

Starting from census data on co-residence and household composition, the authors analyse principles of family organisation and family formation in twentieth-century urban Russia and the Soviet Union. The article uses an adapted version of the classification of households developed by Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel to study variation in household structure for successive population censuses. Changes in this variation between cross-sections are explained with the help of additional quantitative and qualitative data and are linked to the fundamental demographic, social and economic shifts which took place in Russian society in the course of the twentieth century. The article finds a family system characterised by a tendency towards nuclear family formation, but incorporating a fairly stable element of household extension. Co-residence of three generations was both an answer to a perennial housing problem and offered important advantages in the sphere of childcare and care for the elderly. Variation and fluctuation in household structure are found to be most pronounced during the turbulent first half of the century. After a period of stability during the post-war decades of Soviet rule, post-Soviet transformations provoke new changes.     

Network strategies of nineteenth century Hesse-Cassel emigrants

Between 1820 and 1930 over 5 million Germans emigrated to overseas destinations, most to the U.S. By the 1850s the number of German migrants living in the U.S. was large, a consequence partly of cumulative causation. I provide evidence for the dramatic increase in networks by using micro-level data for the German principality of Hesse-Cassel in the mid-nineteenth century. A conservative measurement of network relationships finds that after 25 years almost half of them were related to a previous family member from the same village. Migrants who used family networks tended to move in small units. Usually only a few years separated networked family members, but some links lasted over a decade. Women were unlikely to start a network but more likely than men to travel to the U.S. Within some families, migrants switched from continental destinations to the U.S., perhaps due to the failure of the 1848 March Revolution.     

Gender differences in the dispersal of children in northern Sweden and the northern USA in 1850

In the course of time families disperse and kin relationships change. In this study gender differences in spatial dispersion of adult children from their fathers were investigated in two areas of the world in 1850: the Skellefteå region in northern Sweden and the northern part of the USA, both largely rural populations. The results from the Skellefteå region where data on both genders were available were used to estimate gender differences among a native born population in the northern USA where women were often not followed in the sources after marriage. Most adult children resided in the same place as their fathers, but the distances separating relatives were greater in the USA. However, the proportion of adult sons living in the same locality as their fathers was the same in both. More daughters than sons were located elsewhere in Skellefteå and probably also in the USA. Although sisters in Skellefteå joined each other in places separate from their parents, men lived in patrilineal clusters to a greater extent than women due, in part, to patrilineal inheritance and virilocal marriages. Various reasons for these patterns are discussed and their implications for kin networks discussed.     

The true servant: Self-definition of male domestics in an Italian city (Bologna, 17th–19th centuries)

Some historians have classed as servants only people living with their masters; some have excluded farm servants; some have included married domestics living with their own families. The archive of the Bolognese Confraternity of San Vitale, also known as Università dei Servitori, is analyzed in this article to show how one group of servants defined a “true” servant. Their solution was to exclude from their association people who performed what they deemed “filthy” tasks. They also excluded women, giving us a particular insight in the history of gender and masculinity. In their view, the “true” servants were bourgeois (and locally born) men rather than lower class (migrant) women who are often identified as the stereotypical servants. Moreover, most members of the association were married, they had their own families in Bologna and did not always live with their masters. This makes possible the analysis of married male servants living with their own families, a category of servant that has received less attention than life-cycle servants.     

The legal possibilities of Antwerp widows in the late sixteenth century

This article assesses the ability of widows and other women in Antwerp to act independently of men to defend their economic interests and those of their children. Consideration is given to both legal norms and actual practice in a number of different areas including writing wills, making marriage contracts, managing financial assets and pursuing claims and defending themselves in the civil courts. Analyses of these issues indicate that widows in Antwerp enjoyed in practice a greater degree of independence than was available to widows in many other parts of Europe, despite their weaker position in law.

Particular attention is given to the role in Antwerp of women merchants whose position freed them from male control and supervision. It is argued that their favored status did not derive from the desire of the authorities to protect the interests of their male relatives or to advance the economic interests of these women. Rather their legal freedom is seen as reflecting acknowledgement of the importance of their business activities and the wish to safeguard the interests of their customers who could pursue claims against the woman merchant in the event of a dispute.