Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Bizer et al (2002) suggest that there are basic underlying personality constructs such as the need for cognition and need to evaluate that can predict voter turnout. Levin (2003) suggests that this may not apply when minority groups are a majority. Social dominance orientation (SDO) theory (Pena and Sidanius 2002) suggests that national majority groups finding themselves to be a local minority will overrate themselves on self evaluation cognition and evaluation scales. It is a form of positive in-group bias (Brewer 1979). Findings from the 2002 and 2003 waves of the UTEP Voting Behavior Survey reveal that (1) the need for cognition and the need to evaluate are related to a social dominance orientation among the national majority/local minority; (2) that the effect is keyed to context – Whites in Mexico do not show the same SDO effects as Whites in the US; (3) the need for cognition has a large influence on the likelihood of voting among inexperienced voters in low-visibility/non-mobilized elections; and (4) the need to evaluate has a large influence on the likelihood of voting in higher-visibility/more mobilized elections.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Abstract: Little is known about how and why social-political contextual affects the motivational dynamics of individual protesters. We argue that group identification is the mechanism which ‘connects’ individual protesters to the mobilizing context: if people identify with a social movement organization, they adopt the reasons why the group acts: the more “the group is in me”, the more “I feel for us”, the more I incorporate the group’s motives. Previous research suggested an instrumental and ideology motive to collective action. Therefore we assume that my group identification makes me incorporate the instrumental and ideological motives of my group.
To test this reasoning a field study was conducted. Protesters were sampled in the act of protesting in two different demonstrations in two different town squares simultaneously organized by two social movements at exactly the same time against the same budget cuts proposed by the same government. But with one fundamental difference, the two movements (labor union and an anti-neo liberal alliance) emphasized different aspects of the policies proposed by the government. This natural experiment provided a unique opportunity to test how and why social-political contextual variation affects motivational dynamics.
The results revealed that the more protesters identified with an organization staging power-oriented protest the more they incorporated instrumental motives whereas the more people identified with an organization staging value-oriented protest the more they incorporated ideological motives. Thus the motivational dynamics of individual protesters are moderated by characteristics of the mobilizing context and group identification plays a crucial role in this interplay.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper develops a model of political tolerance in its application to abortion and homosexual marriage in the religious community assessing changes in political tolerance depending upon if these issue are framed in a social versus moral context.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Individuals who commit crime may be influenced by (1) individual factors such as impulsivity and low self-control, and (2) community characteristics such as neighborhood disadvantage and social disorganization. Accordingly, this paper will test an integrative theoretical framework in which an individual's decision to engage in crime is influenced by the interplay, or interaction, of his (or her) individual characteristics and the characteristics of the community in which he (or she) resides. Analyses will explore how a set of individual characteristics (primarily impulsivity) are related to offending in different neighborhood contexts (i.e., in neighborhoods that vary on structural characteristics such as neighborhood disadvantage, heterogeneity, and residential turnover, and social processes such as collective efficacy).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper aims at studying legal consciousness in cultural, and more precisely French, context, but also in peculiar institutional context. Indeed, if the culture, in which legal consciousness and legality are constructed, appears necessary to understand their hegemonic structure as well as their potentiality of resistance, one could raise the question of the importance of the institutional and power contexts and “domains” in which legal consciousness is analyzed (Engle, 1998; Silbey, 2005). Do workplace and employment relationships present some particularities for the constitution of legal consciousness? Are cultural and national dimensions so important to understand images and everyday uses of law?
These questions would be answered, first through a review of various studies analyzing legal consciousness at workplace (McCann, 1994; Gray, 2002; Hoffman, 2003; Edelman, 2003; Pélisse, 2004; Albiston, 2006; etc.), and second, on the ground of an empirical work in progress based on an exploration of conflicts at workplace in France.