A Globalized Conflict: European Anti-Jewish Violence during the Second Intifada

The globalization of the Arab–Israeli conflict during the period of the second intifada against Israel (from the autumn 2000 through at least the spring of 2005) has fostered anti-Jewish violence in Europe and throughout the world. With this globalized conflict as a context, this paper explores the effects of four explanatory factors on counts of anti-Jewish violence in 10 European countries. These factors are the relative sizes of a country’s Jewish and Muslim populations; how interpretations of the events in the Middle East mobilize the perpetrators; the unresponsiveness of bystanders; and the ambivalence of ordinary Europeans. Poisson multilevel models of the effects of these social structural and attitudinal variables suggest that all four factors contribute to violence. The violence counts include major attacks like shootings, knifings, bombings, and arson; and major violent incidents like vandalism and physical aggression without the use of a weapon. The views expressed in this paper are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of any organization to which I may be affiliated. I wish to thank Greg Maney and other reviewers of earlier versions of this paper for their helpful comments and Philip Gibbs of the SAS Institute for clarifying aspects of GLIMMIX.     

Equilibria in the spatial stochastic model of voting with party activists

Stochastic models of elections typically indicate that all parties, in equilibrium, will adopt positions at the electoral center. Empirical analyses discussed in this paper suggest that convergence of this kind is rarely observed. Here we examine a stochastic electoral model where parties differ in their valences – the electorally perceived, non-policy “quality” of the party leader. It is assumed that valence may either be exogenous, in the sense of being an intrinsic characteristic of the leader, or may be due to the contributions of party activists, who donate time and money and thus enhance electoral support for the party. Theorem 1 shows that vote maximization depends on balancing these two opposed effects. Theorem 2 provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence to the electoral mean when activist valence is zero. The paper then examines empirical electoral models for the Netherlands circa 1980 and Britain in 1979, 1992 and 1997 and shows that party divergence from the electoral mean cannot be accounted for by exogenous valence alone. The balance condition suggests that the success of the Labour party in the election of 1997 can be attributed to a combination of high exogenous valence and pro-Europe activist support.     

Measuring the Extent of Impact from Occupational Violence and Bullying on Traumatised Workers

Across the industrialised world, there is evidence that both the incidence and the severity of occupational violence and bullying are increasingly being reported over time. While there have been few substantive scientific studies in Australia, all the available evidence shows a similar increasing level of risk. It has long been assumed that those who suffer a physical assault during the course of violent events are more likely to be emotionally traumatised by the experience than are those who are merely threatened or bullied at work. However, there are no substantive data published to date. In this paper the authors aim to elucidate and quantify the extent of emotional injury/stress suffered as a result of different forms of occupational violence, based on empirical data collected during face-to-face interviewing of 800 Australian workers employed in the tertiary education, health and long-haul transport industry sectors. The authors conclude that the impact from more covert forms of occupational violence (such as bullying) can, in many instances, at least equal the emotional trauma following assaults on-the-job.     

Uniformity Requirement and Political Accountability

This paper discusses the fundamental hypothesis of policy uniformity under centralized decision making, which underlies Oates' famous decentralization theorem. The theorem has, in more recent times, come under pressure owing to the prediction that local public goods are provided to minimum winning coalitions rather than uniformly. The focus of this paper is on the impact of uniformity rules on political accountability. Using the concept of minimum winning coalitions, it is shown that the power of voters over politicians vanishes if election districts receive different levels of local public goods. However, the setting up of sufficiently strong uniformity rules means that voters regain power. According to Oates' theorem, uniformity is the main disadvantage of centralization but, according to the analysis undertaken in this paper, centralization without uniformity would be even worse.     

Electoral Balancing in Federal and Sub-national Elections: The Case of Canada

The major premise of this study is that in federal countries voters can balance and moderate national policy by dividing electoral support between different parties in federal and sub-national elections. We compare the non-concurrent federal and provincial elections in Canada to assess the balancing properties of sub-national elections. The balancing hypothesis implies that the federal incumbent party may suffer additional electoral losses in provincial elections. We use several statistical tests - ordinary OLS, fixed effect and unbalanced random effect cross-section time series - to analyze Canadian electoral data for the period of 1949-1997. All tests sustain that the incumbent party at the federal level loses votes in provincial elections.     

论警察介入和干预家庭暴力——若干国家和地区的经验及其对中国的启示

分析比较了美国、加拿大、英国和我国台湾地区警方干预家庭暴力的模式与经验,认为公安机关应当积极介入和干预家庭暴力,并在反对家庭暴力工作中发挥重要作用.文章主张我国应建立以公安机关为主体的多机构合作预防和制止家庭暴力的模式,并借鉴其它国家和地区警方干预家庭暴力的有益经验和做法,提出了探索警察防治家庭暴力的积极对策.     

Understanding responses to comedic advertising aggression: the role of vividness and gender identity

As the use of comedic aggression in advertising has become more frequent, questions about the boundary conditions of its effectiveness become more important. Issues related to the vividness of the aggression, unique audience responses, and legitimacy of the aggression are examined here as potential influences on the impact of comedic advertising aggression. Two experiments are reported that explore how reactions to comedic advertising aggression are influenced by components of vividness (concreteness – aggressive intensity, emotional interest – psychological distance), the audience's gender identity, and whether the aggression was provoked and justified. Feminine identity individuals in close psychological situations react quite negatively to advertising using the highest level of comedic aggression while masculine identity individuals actually prefer the most vivid aggression in some conditions. The response patterns become different for feminine and masculine identity individuals when the aggression is unprovoked and therefore less justified. The results provide guidance about the limits of using comedic advertising aggression.     

工作场所暴力问题的产生及预防

对工作场所暴力的探究及预防是一项新的研究领域,国外在这方面的研究开展得较早,近年来也获得了广泛的成果。文章从对工作场所暴力研究的提出、范围界定、多角度分类以及发生工作场所暴力事件的原因等方面对已有研究进行了综述,同时,总结各专业机构及企业组织提出的多种预防措