Judicial Decision Making and International Tribunals: Assessing the Impact of Individual,National, and International Factors*

Objective. The objective of this article is to explain judicial decision making at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia by analyzing the impact of individual, national, and international factors. Methods. We use regression and probit analysis of data on the verdicts and sentences handed down by the judges. Results. We find that international factors best explain judicial decision making, especially regarding sentencing. Conclusions. International tribunals and courts are becoming increasingly important and prevalent and it is critical that scholars better understand how their judges make decisions.     

‘Subjects,Participants, Collaborators’

Existing accounts of new war have not actively engaged with feminist analysis. Protest masculinity is suggested as an alternative explanatory framework to conventional explanations of violence in new war. To explore the intersection between masculinity and new wars the example of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front has been investigated. The article concludes that masculinity is an essential cause to the creation of new war and to the form that new war takes once it has originated.     

Exiting the Drug-Addict Role: Variations by Race and Gender

Our paper explores race and gender variations in the processes of exiting a “drug-addict role” and in creating a “recovering-addict role” within the ideological constraints of 12-Step programs. Our method is qualitative and features in-depth interviewing with 45 currently abstinent drug addicts from the 12-Step programs of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and Narcotics Anonymous (N.A.) in the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area as well as a residential and out-patient treatment program in mid-Michigan. Our respondents' exit processes typically began with doubts about the drug addict role followed by an often long and dynamic period of seeking alternatives to it without giving up drugs and alcohol completely. In some cases, however, participation in a new role initiated doubts about an existing one. Contrary to extant research, turning points or epiphanic moments in existing roles were not always identified. Most importantly, however, we found many differences by race and gender in what comprised the exit process. Gender socialization, cultural diversity, and the history of race relations in the United States help to explain this diversity.     

What Can Decision Analysis Do for Invasive Species Management?

Decisions about management of invasive species are difficult for all the reasons typically addressed by multiattribute decision analysis: uncertain outcomes, multiple and conflicting objectives, and many interested parties with differing views on both facts and values. This article illustrates how the tools of multiattribute analysis can improve management of invasive species, with an emphasis on making explicit the social values and preferences that must inform invasive species management. Risk assessment protocols developed previously for invasive species management typically suffer from two interacting flaws: (1) separating risk assessment from risk management, thus disrupting essential connections between the social values at stake in invasive species decisions and the scientific knowledge necessary to predict the likely impacts of management actions, and (2) relying on expert judgment about risk framed in qualitative and value-laden terms, inadvertently mixing the expert's judgment about what is likely to happen with personal preferences. Using the values structuring and probability-modeling elements of formal decision analysis can remedy these difficulties and make invasive species management responsive to both good science and public values. The management of feral pigs in Hawaiian ecosystems illustrates the need for such an integrated approach.     

The gendered division of labor and family outcomes in germany

The literature on the predictors of the division of household labor continues to expand, but the effect of this division on family outcomes has not been explored. Using the German SocioEconomic Panel (N= 628), I analyze the effect of men's participation in housework and child care on the likelihood of second birth and divorce. Fathers' greater relative child‐care time increases couples' odds of second birth, attenuating the negative effect of mothers' employment. Husbands' relative housework time is insignificant in predicting second birth or divorce among couples with at least one child, but increases the likelihood of divorce among childless couples. This is evidence that the division of domestic labor affects family outcomes, but effects differ depending on the outcome and presence of children.     

Hair loss and electability: The bald truth

This study probes one particular component of the well documented linkage between personal appearance and impression formation by investigating the extent to which and the mechanisms through which bald and balding men are underrepresented in high elective office. Study 1 compares the prevalence of hair loss among governors and members of Congress, on the one hand, and the general public, on the other, and concludes that officeholders are much more likely to have a full head of hair than would be expected of men of their age. Study 2 poses an experimental test of voter bias against bald and balding candidates by presenting voters in a simulated congressional race with materials depicting otherwise identical candidates in either their natural bald or balding condition or wearing a professionally fitted hairpiece. No voter bias against bald or balding candidates is apparent, a finding that suggests that the causal mechanism underlying underrepresentation of bald and balding men is not voter bias.Ugly is a field without grass, a plant without leaves, or a head without hair (Ovid, quoted by Klenhard, 1986, p. 11).Politics represents an area of public life in which the effects of appearance may lead to very important social consequences and in which the idea of special privilege for the pretty is particularly repellent (Efran and Patterson, 1975, p. 352).The authors thank Judee Burgoon, Michael Burgoon, and Carol Sigelman for useful comments and suggestions, and Brandt Baker, Henry Ewbank, Jeff Gardner, Henry Kenski, Dan Singer, and David Williams for their assistance with this project.     

Deviance,Rule-Breaking and Male Dominance in Conversation

Previous research on dyadic interaction indicates that cross-sex conversations (male-female) are characterized by more frequent interruptions than same-sex conversations. More specifically, males consistently tend to interrupt their female co-conversationalists. Survey data from three student samples suggest that normative definitions reflected in perceptions of interruption are inconsistent with the empirical distribution of rule-breaking observed by conversational researchers. These results provide some strategic insights into the problematic distinction between deviance and rule-breaking that has been central to labeling theory.     

Some responses to economic change in Scottish farming and crofting family life, 1900–25

Our investigation of some of the processes involved in the emergence of ‘the modern family’is based on evidence from oral histories conducted with people who grew up in Scottish farming and crofting families in the early decades of the century. After showing how peasant and capitalist modes of production shaped both family structures and strategies for getting a living, we examine some of the ways in which the encroachments of the cash economy helped create new forms of gendered inequalities. Our discussion concludes with an analysis of recent papers concerned with the ways in which families are embedded in community life and the implications for long term change in authority structures.     

Discourses of community: challenges for social work

The ambiguity of community allows it to be a space for a vast range of imposed and 'organic' social reproduction functions, and an accessible site for meaningful collective action, but it also has the potential for disempowerment. The breadth of the concept of 'community' allows for it to be critiqued as ephemeral or as romantic fiction, but also used and exploited by government. It is because it retains such power to evoke reaction and contest that we need to understand the power that drives it, and the ideological purpose for which it may be used or misused. The notion of discourse immediately becomes useful. We can recognise competing discourses of community, and examine how they are used politically. We can recognise ways in which social work can engage with community discourses of empowerment rather than control. The article will explore a number of discourses and examine their usefulness for practice.     

Policy, Preferences, and Patriarchy: The Division of Domestic Labor in East Germany, West Germany, and the United States

Individual agency observed in the gendered division of laboris shaped by structural factors, but only recently has evidenceemerged that the effect of women’s resources varies systematicallyin its sociopolitical context. Here we use the 1994 InternationalSocial Survey Program to assess whether the relative effectof a proxy for women’s and men’s preferences—hallmarkof individual choice—varies as well across three countrieswith divergent historical policy approaches regarding the privatesphere. East German socialist policies required and supportedwomen’s employment; West German policy promulgated a malebreadwinner model, and U.S. policy primarily remains silenton the private sphere. The division of domestic tasks and relativestrength of individual preferences on shifting it vary by region.In the former East Germany the division of domestic labor ismore egalitarian and the effect of preferences is small butequal for the genders. In West Germany the division is moretraditional and preference effects are greater, but gender differencesin these are insignificant. The U.S. division of domestic taskfalls between the two German regions, and the gender differencein preference effects is the greatest, with U.S. men’spreferences predicting significantly more variance than do U.S.women’s. Consequently, allowing the market to dominatedoes not yield equal strength of preferences in the individual-levelmodels used to predict the division of domestic tasks. Thissupports the dual-system feminist claims that capitalism canexacerbate nonmarket patriarchal hierarchies.