Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: What I aim to show in this paper is that there is a new religion taking the world by storm, one that can claim religious participants in every continent (excluding Antarctica), nearly every race, religion, gender, and class, and one that is not bound

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For over ten years, Maine has offered an innovative program to undergraduates called the Maine Public Policy Scholars Program. This program offers one student per year from each of the University of Maine System campuses the opportunity to work on a Maine policy issue of their choiceand learn both from other scholars and from an outstanding panel of Maine political figures and academics. This paper outlines the history of the program, how it works, shows how it matches many best practices in service learning, and speculates on how useful it might be as a model for other states.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Contemporary sentencing research has identified that sentencing outcomes are influenced by a constellation of factors. Steffensmeier and his associates (1998), for example, have found that young black males and young Hispanic males have been singled out by the courts and pay a punishment penalty that is greater than offenders in other race/ethnicity, gender, and age constellations. Using sentencing data from the Georgia Department of Corrections, this study examines the interplay of offender demographics on sentencing outcomes in Georgia.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Past cross-national research on women's representation in national legislatures has largely focused on Western Industrialized nations. Efforts to extend models that explain Western female participation to worldwide samples have met with mixed success. Through separate analyses of 38 high-income, 87 middle-income, and 63 low-income countries, I demonstrate that while we are fairly confident about the forces that differentiate high-income nations from one another, past models fail to explain variation across low-income samples. I then explore two sets of factors that may be more salient predictors of parliamentary participation in low-income nations: internal armed conflict and international linkages. Recent internal war is found to have a significant positive effect on women's participation in national legislatures cross-nationally. The relationship between international linkages and female parliamentary representation in more complex, with treaty ratification showing positive effects, while the increased presence of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) has slightly negative effects.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This essay outlines how a 10-term search protocol for use in comprehensively identifying articles with coverage of protest events in Spanish-language news media sources was developed for the Mexico Protest Event Database (MPED) project. Three dimensions of this process are discussed: The sources used and why these were chosen; methodological concerns and how an iterative procedure was used to determine whether to include or omit specific terms; and assessment of the effectiveness and efficiency of terms comprising the final search string using data on search hits and word counts for more than 18,500 articles that were produced and coded in the first stage of the development of the MPED.