A Second Republic for Italy?

Radical change in the representative dimension of Italy's political system was expected to bring a transition to a 'Second Republic' in Italy. That has not happened. Nevertheless, after three consultations using the new parliamentary electoral system, studies focusing on the 'input' side of Italian politics are beginning to agree that substantial change has occurred. It is, however, too early to identify the extent of change in public administration and centre–local government relations, whilst even in parliament it is argued that consensual decision-making continued at least into the late 1990s. The impact of party system change on policy-making has thus been shown to be less direct than many expected, providing rich material for research into the relationship between institutional and policy change. Nevertheless, institutional change continues, particularly with regard to the decentralisation of government, and some studies suggest that this is the key to Italy's political transformation, rather than electoral reform or even change in the form of government. Still, the election of Italy's first right-wing majority government in 2001 may yet bring change in parliamentary practice and policy-making more generally.     

Proportional representation and attitudes about politics: results from New Zealand

PR systems often are credited with producing more equitable outcomes between political parties and encouraging wider social group representation than majoritarian systems. Theory suggests that this should instill greater trust, efficacy, and faith in the political system. We assume that citizens disadvantaged by majoritarian rules (political minorities) will have a relatively greater shift toward positive attitudes about democracy following a transition from a majoritarian system to proportional representation. We employ panel data from the 1993–1996 New Zealand Election Study (NZES) to test hypotheses about the effects of electoral system change on attitudes about governmental responsiveness, trust in government, and political efficacy. We find that there is a general shift in mass opinion toward more positive attitudes on some measures of efficacy and responsiveness. Political minorities display a greater shift toward feelings of efficacy than other voters.     

Training in the Strategic Use of Evidence technique: Improving deception detection accuracy of American law enforcement officers

The Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) approach is a framework for planning and executing suspect interviews with the aim of facilitating judgments of truth and deception. US law enforcement officers (N = 59) either received training in the SUE approach or did not. Each officer interviewed a mock suspect (N = 59) who had either committed a simulated security breach or had completed a benign task. The officers who received SUE training interviewed in line with the training: They questioned the suspect systematically, withheld the evidence and critical case information until after questioning, and relied on statement-evidence inconsistency to detect deceit. Consequently, SUE-trained interviewers achieved a higher deception detection accuracy rate (65%) compared to untrained interviewers (43%).