The determinants of democracy: a sensitivity analysis

Public Choice - Numerous studies—operating with diverse model specifications, samples and empirical measures—suggest different economic, social, cultural, demographic, institutional and...     

Disclosure of child sexual abuse: expressed emotions and credibility judgments of a child mock victim

Both lay persons and professionals believe that the emotions displayed by a child witness during disclosure of sexual abuse are a factor of importance when judging the child's credibility. Unfortunately, not all children display emotions according to expectations, leading to misjudgments, and possible miscarriage of justice. In the present study, we examined how lay people's credibility judgments were influenced by a child's displayed emotions during the disclosure of sexual abuse. Participants (n?=?119), viewed video recordings of a mock police interview of an 11-year-old child actor disclosing sexual abuse, displaying one of four emotional expressions (angry, sad, neutral, and positive). Results showed that participants were strongly influenced by the emotions displayed; in particular, the display of strong negative emotions (anger) or positive emotions during disclosure significantly reduced judged credibility. The credibility ratings predicted the participant? judgments of the defendant's guilt and the willingness to pass a guilty vote in a hypothetical trial.     

Economic aid to post-conflict countries: a methodological critique of Collier and Hoeffler

In the past five years, research sponsored by the World Bank on the economic aspects of civil war1 ?1. The project was titled the Economics of Political and Criminal Violence. View all notes under the research directorship of Oxford economist Paul Collier has had an extraordinary influence on the subsequent study of violent conflict and civil war and on international policy. The research project has now turned its attention to the problem of countries emerging from civil war and what Collier and his co-author, Anke Hoeffler, call ‘a first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process.’2 ?2. First reported in a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper circulated in October 2002, their article, ‘Aid, Policy, and Growth in Post-Conflict Societies,’ the paper was in 2003 posted on the website of the Centre for the Study of African Economics, Oxford University until it was published in 2004 in the European Economic Review. There are some minor differences between the two versions of their work, but the conclusions are identical. In the present article, the paper version will be referred to as Collier & Hoeffler (2003) and the published version as Collier & Hoeffler (2004). View all notes Building on the influence of their earlier research and the lively interest currently in knowledge about and policy on post-conflict strategies, this work is likely to be equally influential on research, thinking, and policy. It is all the more important, therefore, to subject the research to critical examination before it becomes established as conventional wisdom. This note reports one such attempt to analyze some major methodological problems with the study and argues that the research cannot sustain the conclusions they draw or the resulting policy recommendations.     

The micro–macro link in deliberative polling: science or politics?

In this article, we critically examine the question of how to link the ‘micro’ of deliberative mini-publics with the ‘macro’ of the democratic system. To explore this puzzle, we relate to EuroPolis, a transnational deliberative experiment that took place one week ahead of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. The main argument is that although the scientific design of deliberative polls is a necessary condition for the fulfilment of the criteria for equal participation and informed opinion-making of selected citizens (the micro-dimension), this does not necessarily translate into a democratically representative and legitimate proxy for the broader political constituency (the macro-dimension). This problem is potentially exacerbated in deliberative settings that cut across domestic political cultures and nationalized public spheres.     

Conservation and Development: Justice,Inequality, and Attitudes around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park

ABSTRACT

Do national parks promote development in their immediate surroundings? And is local development instrumental in the success of conservation goals? We investigated allocation of opportunities and burdens around a national park in Uganda. Our findings suggest that direct benefits from conservation and development projects may promote distributional justice by compensating for park-related damages, but are too limited in their coverage to impact development. Indirect benefits related to transportation, health, education, and security affect a far greater segment of the population. Furthermore, the benefits of conservation tend to increase local economic inequality. Contrasting tendencies in terms of distributional justice and economic equality can partly be explained by the human geography of national parks and this geography must be taken into account if broad development goals are to be achieved. Improved local attitudes towards the park seem to have resulted from a complex of effects rather than any single development initiative.     

Labour-Intensive Jobs for Women and Development: Intra-household Welfare Effects and Its Transmission Channels

We examine the welfare impacts of poor women getting low-skilled jobs and find large positive income, consumption and poverty effects at household and individual levels. However, the women workers, their husbands and oldest daughters reduced their leisure, but the women to a much larger extent. Investigating the transmission mechanisms suggests that the impacts did not only go through income effects, but also through a bargaining effect. Getting the job improved the bargaining power of the wife through several mechanisms, which in turn added substantially to the positive impact on household consumption.     

In the Spotlight: Analyzing Sequential Attention Effects in Protest Reporting

During waves of contention, international media attention can be of crucial importance for activists and protest participants. However, media attention is a scarce resource and the competition over news coverage is high. While some emphasize the agenda-setting power of news outlets and argue that receiving coverage is determined by factors outside the protest movement, others suggest a dynamic relationship between media attention and activism where social movement organizations are assumed to have some agency to make it to the news. In this article, we contribute to the latter and analyze how protest can endogenously trigger more coverage. Building on insights from communication science, we argue that widely covered protests attract media attention and temporarily lower the selection threshold for subsequent incidents. Using fine-grained data on anti-regime protest in all authoritarian countries between 2003 and 2012, we find robust empirical evidence for this hypothesis. We also show that this effect becomes weaker and eventually disappears with increasing spatial and temporal distance from a highly salient event. These findings are important for research in contentious politics, since they allow us to gauge the extent to which protest activity on the ground may under certain circumstances be overreported in the media.