Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The last decade has witnessed an outpouring of interest in children’s emotional and behavioral problems from media outlets, the medical profession, and allied mental health disciplines. Little scholarly attention has been given to how the diverse claims of these stakeholders are used by adults to construct a lay understanding of children’s mental health problems. Drawing on social constructionist and claims-making traditions, we analyze the competing frameworks that emerge in public discourse on children’s emotional and behavioral problems. Specifically, using vignette-based data from the 2002 General Social Survey’s National Stigma Study – Children Module, we conduct a latent class analysis of causal attributions for three types of childhood problems: daily trouble, ADHD, and depression. We then evaluate the predictors of those attributions, including characteristics of the child, whether respondents label the problem a mental illness, and respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics. We find that adults construct children’s mental health problems in a manner consistent with public frameworks. And, while socio-demographic characteristics do little to predict group differences, several interesting patterns emerge with regard to the characteristics of the child.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Traditionally the identification and apprehension of active serious offenders has relied on information from the public, the targeting of ‘known’ offenders and current knowledge of offending patterns. More recently, the method of offender self-selection has been offered as an additional identification tool, where certain minor infractions have been found to be ’triggers’ for uncovering serious criminality – self-selection because the individual has broken a law in the first place. This paper details a police operation – ‘Operation Visitor’ – focused on visitors to a young offenders institute, to explore whether minor offences committed – either whilst at, or en route to the institution – can be used as trigger offences to indicate serious criminality. One third of visitors caught offending had criminal histories, several considered serious active offenders.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The concurrence of holding democratic political attitudes with low levels of conformity to their behavioral prescriptions is conceptualized in the present study as constituting an incongruity or discrepancy of the political-self. The general theoretical argument presented within this paper is that the failure to meet the citizen performance expectations imparted by ones own participatory political attitudes serves as a potential source of negative self-evaluation. The specific research question motivating the present study is whether attitudes toward external political objects, such as politicians, can be and are employed by citizens as a means of addressing a self-discrepancy and defending against negative self-evaluation. To assess this question empirically, the 2006 United States Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy (CID) Survey was utilized to test the hypothesis that incongruent citizens will hold more distrusting attitudes toward politicians than congruent citizens. The findings of the survey analysis were that incongruent citizens were more extreme in their level of trust toward politicians, but that the sign and significance of this effect is moderated by right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). Incongruent citizens who scored low on a measure of RWA were found to be significantly more trusting of politicians than congruent citizens while incongruent citizens scoring high on RWA were significantly less trusting of politicians than congruent citizens. The paper concludes with a discussion of “motivated attitude acquisition” as well as the plausibility of utilizing RWA as a proxy for individual differences in the tendency to engage in defensive motivated reasoning, self-justification, and blame externalization.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: From February 1988 to 1994, ethnic Azeris and Armenians fought for control over the predominantly Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. The ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding region led to refugee flows of nearly 800,000 Azeris from the Nagorno-Karabakh region to other areas of Azerbaijan, and Armenians from other areas of Azerbaijan to either Nagorno-Karabakh or Armenia. Theoretically, ethnic warfare in the former Soviet states is hardly a surprising development - the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, in essence, the fact that "state collapse" occurred in all 13 successor states to the Soviet Union at the same time, might indicate that an opportunity had opened to ethnic groups or elite interests in these states. The loosening of Moscow's grip on these states, the political power shift from Moscow to local capitals, and the removal of Soviet troops, all provided conditions that favored insurgency or made insurgency more feasible. More remarkable, perhaps, are the other successor states that did not experience any organized ethnic violence. Repression of ethnic minorities has certainly occurred in many of these states; however, they have not experienced an actual civil war. What macro-level factors made the difference between war and peace in the former Soviet states? State collapse may be a necessary condition for ethnic violence, but it certainly does not appear to be a sufficient one. This paper is an investigation into the macro-level necessary and sufficient conditions that led some Soviet successor states to war. In order to investigate these conditions, I use Ragin's (2000) qualitative comparative analysis tools to compare a cross-national data set of former Soviet states to several rival hypotheses found in the violence literature, with a particular aim of establishing conjunctural causation. The former Soviet cases are particularly useful for this type of analysis; studying this region allows one to control for certain variables, including state collapse, new statehood, and previous occupation by another state, while benefiting from variation on the dependent variable (ethnic conflict). Many of the former Soviet states, particularly those in the Caucasus and Central Asia, straddle the North-South divide. Considered for many years to be "Northern" states due to their incorporation into the Soviet Union, these successor states now suffer from many of the ills found in those states traditionally considered "Southern": ethnic strife, increased poverty, and government instability are but a few traits these states have in common with their southern neighbors. Exploration of this region may not only answer more narrow questions about the fate of collapsed Communist states, but may also shed light on the causes, and potential cures, for some of the ills found in the South. This paper attempts to address one particular ill, namely, ethnic conflict.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores institutional foundations of agricultural protectionism in Japan, a country long recognized as resisting international pressures for opening up its rice market. While existing studies on the impact of political institutions on agricultural protectionism have primarily focused on incentives policy-makers face, we examine whether different electoral institutions provide farmers with differing incentives to mobilize votes for the party that furnishes protective measures for them. Specifically, we argue that farmers in Japan have stronger incentives to mobilize electoral support for the governing party in multi-member district systems than in single-member district systems. Our empirical findings corroborate this claim and provide implications for the recent gradual changes in Japan’s farm policies since the electoral reform in 1994.