Identifying the Source of Incumbency Advantage through a Constitutional Reform

This study provides one of the first causal estimates of both the personal and partisan incumbency advantages. Using data on six local elections taking place during the last 20 years in 278 municipalities in Portugal, it relies on a reform introducing mayoral term limits as a natural experiment that creates exogenous variation on the incumbency status of officeholders while holding the incumbency status of the party constant. A new methodology combining two quasi‐experimental methods, the regression discontinuity and the difference‐in‐discontinuities designs, allows for a credible estimation of the independent personal and partisan returns to incumbency. Results causally identify the personal effect as the driver of the incumbency advantage.     

Migration and Citizen Rights: The Mexican Case1

This article analyzes Mexican migration to the United States (US), as part of the South to North global migration, and focuses on the access of migrants to citizen rights from the perspective of the sending countries. Studies of citizenship and migration have mostly looked at receiving countries' policies; however, sending countries are also enacting laws that facilitate immigrants' access to rights. The study shows that the restriction of immigrant rights in the US has been paralleled by an extension of rights to emigrants by Mexico. These policies of the Mexican state include the rights to retain nationality when migrants nationalize overseas and the extension of citizen rights to the population abroad. The study describes the efforts on the part of the Mexican state to extend civic, political and social rights to non-resident nationals. It also reveals how the results of these efforts vary substantially, depending on the nature of each one of these types of rights.     

The Ethic of Diversity: Local Law and the Negotiation of Urban Norms

Toronto prides itself both on being diverse and on celebrating rather than merely tolerating diversity. Urban diversity has been studied by demographers, sociologists, and planners, but sociolegal analyses of the negotiation of diversity are scarce. The study described here has three elements: a study of the Toronto Licensing Tribunal, a challenge to the property standards by‐law, and a campaign to reform the rules governing street food. The key substantive finding of the research is that municipal legal processes, in a city that takes pride in its diversity, still work to effect and naturalize distinctly ethnocentric norms. The content of (some) norms is subject to revision but the normative power of law as such remains unchallenged. Methodologically, the article, inspired by Bruno Latour and Actor Network Theory, shows the usefulness of treating local legal processes as a series of networks in which nonhuman objects (such as weeds, courtroom Bibles, and hot dogs) can sometimes be protagonists of legal dramas rather than mere objects.     

No More! Women Reporting Intimate Partner Violence in Mexico

An analysis of the National Survey of Violence Against Women (2006) in Mexico was performed to estimate the prevalence and the associated factors of women suffering intimate partner violence (IPV) that report their aggressor by severity of violence. Women aged 15 years or older who reported IPV were analyzed by using logistic regression models. Prevalence of IPV was 33.33 %, 64.11 % of them were classified as non-severe violence (NSV) and 35.89 % as severe violence (SV). Women with SV reported the aggressor more often (24.69 % vs. 6.08 % of NSV). Variables associated with reporting the aggressor for both NSV and SV were having children living in the household, higher socioeconomic status, frequent alcohol consumption by the partner, and health personnel informing women that they were experiencing IPV. We can conclude that a low percentage of women reported IPV. Greater efforts should be made to empower women so they can effectively execute their right to live a life free of violence.     

Pulp volume quantification methods in cone-beam computed tomography for age estimation: A critical review and meta-analysis

The secondary dentin deposition that occurs after the tooth formation process results in a decrease in pulp cavity volume in adolescents and adults. The purpose of this critical review was to correlate pulpal and/or dental volume on cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) with chronological age approximation. A subobjective was to investigate which methodology and CBCT technical parameters would be most appropriate to evaluate this correlation. This critical review followed the PRISMA guidelines, and it was conducted by a search through PubMed, Embase, SciELO, Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane Library databases, as well as gray literature. Primary studies that used pulp volume, or pulp chamber to tooth volume ratio measured using CBCT were included. Seven hundred and eight indexed and 31 non-indexed records were identified. A qualitative analysis was performed including 25 selected studies with a total of 5100 individuals, age ranging from 8 to 87 years without sex predilection. The most used method was pulp volume/tooth volume. CBCT voxel size ranged between 0.09 and 0.5. Manual segmentation associated with threshold algorithms was used in most of the studies. Correlation between the pulp volume/tooth volume ratio was moderate: −0.66 for the upper central incisors, −0.59 for upper canines and −0.56 for lower canines. High heterogeneity was observed among the studies. It is concluded that pulp volume should be used with caution in age estimation. Evidence supports the preferable use of upper incisors with pulp volume/tooth volume ratio for age estimation. There is not enough evidence that voxel size interferes in age estimation by pulp volume.