Radical Distrust: Are Economic Policy Attitudes Tempered by Social Trust?

Social Indicators Research - Debates about the appropriate role of markets and governments are often shaped by sharply contrasting opinions. Based on individual data from the World Values Survey...     

(Home-)Schools of Democracy? On the Intergenerational Transmission of Civic Engagement

Where do individuals learn civic engagement? While voluntary associations are often seen as the breeding grounds for democratic skills and virtues, many preferences are learned by children in their family and thus passed on between generations. The present paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991–2008) for the UK to analyze the intergenerational transmission of civic engagement and political participation preferences. It finds that both voluntary associational count variables as well as frequency and strength measures of doing volunteer work and political party support are correlated between parents and their grown up children (i.e. after leaving the parental household), even when controlling for resources like socio-economic background. The intergenerational transmission is more pronounced with regard to triggering filial civic engagement, but frequency of parental engagement is less strongly transmitted. A robustness analysis suggests that peer influences (as measured by regional levels of civic engagement) do not drive the intergenerational transmission of civic engagement.

     

Techniques of disinformation: Constructing and communicating “soft facts” after terrorism

Informed by social media data collected following four terror attacks in the UK in 2017, this article delineates a series of “techniques of disinformation” used by different actors to try and influence how the events were publicly defined and understood. By studying the causes and consequences of misleading information following terror attacks, the article contributes empirically to the neglected topic of social reactions to terrorism. It also advances scholarship on the workings of disinforming communications, by focusing on a domain other than political elections, which has been the empirical focus for most studies of disinformation to date. Theoretically, the analysis is framed by drawing an analogy with Gresham Sykes and David Matza's (1957) account of the role of “techniques of neutralization” originally published in the American Sociological Review. The connection being that where they studied deviant behaviour, a similar analytic lens can usefully be applied to disinformation cast as “deviant” information.     

Nested exposure case-control sampling: a sampling scheme to analyze rare time-dependent exposures

For large cohort studies with rare outcomes, the nested case-control design only requires data collection of small subsets of the individuals at risk. These are typically randomly sampled at the observed event times and a weighted, stratified analysis takes over the role of the full cohort analysis. Motivated by observational studies on the impact of hospital-acquired infection on hospital stay outcome, we are interested in situations, where not necessarily the outcome is rare, but time-dependent exposure such as the occurrence of an adverse event or disease progression is. Using the counting process formulation of general nested case-control designs, we propose three sampling schemes where not all commonly observed outcomes need to be included in the analysis. Rather, inclusion probabilities may be time-dependent and may even depend on the past sampling and exposure history. A bootstrap analysis of a full cohort data set from hospital epidemiology allows us to investigate the practical utility of the proposed sampling schemes in comparison to a full cohort analysis and a too simple application of the nested case-control design, if the outcome is not rare.

     

Colonization and habitat selection of a declining farmland species in urban areas

Despite the accelerating global urbanization and its associated implications for wildlife and humans, we know little about the biology of urban ecosystems. Here, we investigated colonization and habitat selection of the European hare (Lepus europaeus), a declining farmland species, in urban areas in Denmark, using a combination of citizen science data and transect counts. Further, we estimated the population density of urban hares in Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city. Our results provide the first evidence that hares have established populations in urban areas, potentially in response to decreasing habitat quality in rural areas due to agricultural intensification. The hare density in Aarhus was ca. 8 hares per km², which is comparable to or slightly higher than hare abundance estimates from various pastural areas in Europe, suggesting that urban areas provide suitable habitat for hares. Hare habitat selection was generally associated with areas consisting of large lawns, such as high buildings and parks, which potentially provide high-quality forage throughout the year. Considering the increasing expansion of urban areas and deteriorating habitat quality of agricultural areas, urban planning that incorporates habitat requirements for wildlife could help to support urban animal populations, especially for species of conservation concern.

     

The Child Abuse Risk Evaluation Dutch Version (CARE-NL): A retrospective validation study

Abstract

The Child Abuse Risk Evaluation – Dutch version (CARE-NL) is a structured professional guideline for assessing the risk of all types of child abuse. The CARE-NL comprises 18 risk factors: eight Parental characteristics, three Parent-Child interaction factors, five Family factors, one Child vulnerability factor, and an extra factor for child sexual abuse risk. We examined interrater reliability and predictive accuracy of the instrument in a retrospective study at Advice and Reporting Centers on Child Abuse (ARCCA) in The Netherlands. The ARCCA files contained limited information on Parental risk factors, while parental characteristics, such as mental disorder and substance abuse, are the most important risk factors for (repeated) child abuse. On the other hand, the majority of the files included ample information on child and family characteristics. The CARE-NL could be reliably coded by trained raters and the predictive accuracy for out-of-home placement (AUC = .73) and placement of the child under court supervision (AUC = .78), at two years follow-up, was adequate. Use of the CARE-NL ensures that the assessment of the risk of child abuse focuses on the most important, empirically based risk factors in a structured and coherent way.     

Toward a Viable Progressive Third Party in 2020 and Beyond1

Creating a strong, influential third party has been an abiding aspiration on the American left, and were this goal to be achieved, it could be a great boon to subordinate groups in the United States. Yet widespread doubts persist, even among progressives that this is desirable, and especially that it is possible. Here, I briefly review compelling reasons for thinking otherwise; I then consider in some depth the potential for starting to build a viable left third party leading up to and after the pivotal 2020 election. In doing so, I go beyond the existing literature on third parties, which has yet to reflect systematically on progressive third party prospects in this period. Specifically, I assess how the emerging political environment may shape left third-party building, and I evaluate ongoing and developing attempts by key groups engaged in that effort. I find a distinct tension between conditions encouraging progressives to reform versus abandon the Democratic Party, and I identify one alternative party-building tendency that seems most able to exploit the latter impulse due to its already established electoral viability. Last, I highlight relevant questions that remain for activists hoping to create an effective national left third party.     

The Exploration Phase of Replication Strategies: The Role of Autonomous Action for Reverse Knowledge Flows

Replication strategies rely on the exploration of new knowledge. An important source of new knowledge is the transfer of unit level experience to headquarters, a process referred to as reverse knowledge flows. Such knowledge flows are fraught with difficulty as formal mechanisms often break down due to diverging business interests of unit and headquarters managers. This study brings together research on knowledge stickiness and autonomous action to provide a new avenue for understanding reverse knowledge flows. By drawing on an exploratory study of a franchise network, we provide an insight into how autonomous action reduces initiation stickiness but potentially increases implementation stickiness. Our analysis suggests that the role of autonomous action for reverse knowledge flows is moderated by unit managers’ resource expectations that emerge as a result of autonomous action. Exploring the interplay of autonomous action and knowledge stickiness provides new explanatory means for understanding reverse knowledge flows in replicator organizations.     

Labour Market Realism and the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees

The Global Compacts on Migration (GCM) and Refugees (GCR) include policy recommendations that aim to increase opportunities for legal labour migration, improve protections for migrant workers, and provide refugees with ‘complementary pathways’ to enhanced protection via labour mobility. This paper explains why there are large gaps between these policy recommendations and the labour market policies and realities in the countries that host most of the world’s migrant workers. These gaps between ideals and realities are likely to limit the effective implementation of the GCM/GCR recommendations on labour migration. More ‘labour market realism‘ is needed to incrementally but effectively improve protections for migrant workers.