Centripetalism and Electoral Moderation in Established Democracies

Centripetal approaches to ethnic conflict management seek to promote inter-ethnic accommodation and moderation by making politicians dependent on the electoral support of groups other than their own base. There is an ongoing debate about the utility of such approaches, including which kinds of electoral systems can best promote moderate and centrist politics in deeply divided societies. Neglected in this debate, however, has been the experience of ethnically diverse established democracies utilizing centripetal electoral models. This article examines historical evidence from Australia, and recent natural experiments with subnational electoral reform in the United States, which lend support to centripetal claims that preferential, “ranked choice” or “instant runoff” voting can encourage electoral moderation and address political polarization.     

Subjected to Sanitation: Caste Relations and Sanitation Adoption in Rural Tamil Nadu

If solving the global sanitation crisis lies within Indian borders, then it is important to understand the influence of caste relations on sanitation building and usage. Our ethnography investigated three villages in rural Tamil Nadu where seven separate sanitation interventions had failed. The analysis indicates caste relations played a key role in the failed interventions by creating and reinforcing the means by which caste groups distinguished themselves from each other at the village scale. Issues of cleaning, access to subsidies, latrine design, and purity served to facilitate and limit the processes that enable the everyday, unequal relationships of caste.     

The "new" genetics: emerging medicolegal issues in the prenatal issues in the prenatal diagnosis of hereditary disorders.

Major advances in prenatal genetic diagnosis have occurred in the past few years which pose difficult challenges to the law. This paper raises questions relative to family history taking, genetic counseling, carrier detection, amniocentesis, and prenatal genetic studies, and also raises questions with respect to the rights and responsibilities of the patient, the fetus, the physician, and society in light of such modern advances. Law reform often occurs only after prior harm to an individual, family or group. Perception and delineation of the most important issues in this area should serve to stimulate the development of medicolegal guidelines and corrective legislation prior to the occurrence of a genetic tragedy.     

United we stand: Constituency homogeneity and comparative party polarization

We argue that party polarization is a function of parties' distances, their internal homogeneity, and their relative sizes. While existing measures in political science incorporate the first and last feature, party homogeneity is typically neglected. Since virtually all polarization measures in one way or another incorporate distance, we suggest a simple way to adjust distance measures for party homogeneity. We then examine levels and trends of polarization in nine OECD countries using a newly collected data-set which includes left–right party positions based on both expert and mass surveys.     

Differences in Neuropsychological Functioning Between Homicidal and Nonviolent Schizophrenia Samples

Few studies have compared performance on neurocognitive measures between violent and nonviolent schizophrenia samples. A better understanding of neurocognitive dysfunction in violent individuals with schizophrenia could increase the efficacy of violence reduction strategies and aid in risk assessment and adjudication processes. This study aimed to compare neuropsychological performance between 25 homicide offenders with schizophrenia and 25 nonviolent schizophrenia controls. The groups were matched for age, race, sex, and handedness. Independent t‐tests and Mann–Whitney U‐tests were used to compare the schizophrenia groups’ performance on measures of cognition, including composite scores assessing domain level functioning and individual neuropsychological tests. Results indicated the violent schizophrenia group performed worse on measures of memory and executive functioning, and the Intellectual Functioning composite score, when compared to the nonviolent schizophrenia sample. These findings replicate previous research documenting neuropsychological deficits specific to violent individuals with schizophrenia and support research implicating fronto‐limbic dysfunction among violent offenders with schizophrenia.     

Land use and forestry based CDM in scientific peer-reviewed literature pre-and post-COP 9 in Milan

This article explores the science-policy interactions between peer-reviewed literature and decisions and declarations on Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) projects in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) taken at Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings. The results are based on a literature analysis capturing 88 articles published from 1997 to 2005. By using a matrix search method and a structured reading form, the method and analysis focussed on whether issues of CDM and LULUCF were presented as ‘supportive of the inclusion of LULUCF’ and ‘critical of the inclusion of LULUCF’. A matrix search method and a structured reading form were applied. Of the 88 articles, 66% included discussions supportive to the inclusion of LULUCF. Forty-nine percent had a first author affiliated in natural sciences. Only 19% had first authors affiliated in developing countries while the same number for contributing authors was 38%. The results show no clear connection between scientific literature and decisions and declarations, but indicate that policymakers set the research agenda by declarations, while researchers feed the process up until decisions are made.