Political Science

This short blogpost discusses the challenges that climate justice and indigenous peoples groups have faced throughout the first week of negotiations at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 21st Conference of Parties (UNFCCC COP21) held in Paris from November 30 until December 12, 2015.

Intersectionality has gone global. The application and adoption of the concept cuts across disciplinary and territorial boundaries. How can intersectionality inform the work of social justice in the 21 st century? This essay focuses on the practical implications of intersectionality for social movements. First, this essay reviews prominent definitions of intersectionality, identifies a series of tenets, and presents a brief history of the notion of intersectionality. Second, the essay reviews extant explanations of solidarity. This review ends with a proposal for enacting solidarity that is viable for articulating intersectionally-conscious forms of solidarity—intersectional solidarity—suitable for scholars of global politics.

The nature and frequency of voter fraud figure prominently in many ongoing policy debates about election laws in the United States. Policy makers frequently cite allegations of voter fraud reported in the press during these debates. While recent studies find that voter fraud is a rare event, a substantial segment of the public believes that voter fraud is a rampant problem in the United States. It stands to reason that public beliefs are shaped by news coverage of voter fraud. However, there is very little extant academic research on how the news media, at any level, covers allegations or documented cases of voter fraud. This paper examines local newspaper attention to voter fraud in each of the 50 states during the 2008 and 2012 US elections. The results show that local coverage of voter fraud during the 2012 elections was greatest in presidential swing states and states that passed restrictive voting laws prior to the 2012 election. No evidence that newspaper attention is related to the rate of actual voter fraud cases in each state was found. The findings are consistent with other studies indicating that parties and campaigns sought to place voter fraud on the political agenda in strategically important states to motivate their voting base ahead of the election.

... Coordinators were RW Gable (US) and Jose V. Abueva (Philippines); team members were Dong-suh Bark (Korea), Harry J. Friedman (US), Gabriel Iglesias (Philippines), Glenn D. Paige (US), Amara Raksasataya (Thailand), Fred W. Riggs (US), SP Siagian (Indonesia), and JF ...

Research regarding prevention strategies for Hispanic youth stress the importance of family interventions because of the particular importance of family as a protective factor within the Hispanic community. Starting in 1995, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention conducted the National Cross-Site Evaluation of High Risk Youth Programs, a 5-year drug and alcohol prevention study with a sample of approximately 10,500 youth, including nearly 3,000 Hispanic youth. Youth were surveyed regarding their alcohol use patterns and risk and protective factors, with several measures of family relationships, including family connectedness, family supervision, and parental attitudes toward their child's alcohol use. Analyses indicate that family factors are highly linked to alcohol use among Hispanics, particularly among Hispanic females. Longitudinal growth curve analyses indicate that improving the connections that young Hispanic females have to their parents can have positive long-term effects on delaying or reducing their alcohol use.

The National Cross-Site Evaluation is a large multisite evaluation (MSE) of 48 substance abuse prevention programs, 5,934 youth participating in programs, and 4,539 comparison youth programs. Data included a self-report questionnaire administered at 4 points in time, detailed dosage data on over 217,000 program contacts, and detailed site visit information. In a pooled analysis, the programs did not demonstrate significant positive effects on a composite outcome measure of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use in the previous 30 days. However, disaggregated analyses indicated that 1) sites in which comparison groups had strong opportunity to participate in prevention programs suppressed observed effects; 2) youth who had already started using before they entered programs reduced use significantly more than comparison youth who had started using; and 3) both males and females who participated in programs significantly reduced use relative to comparisons, but in very different patterns. Combining these patterns produced an apparent null effect. Finally, programs that incorporated at least 4 out of 5 effective intervention characteristics identified in the study significantly reduced use for both males and females relative to comparison youth. The lessons produced by this study attest to the value of MSE designs as a source of applicable knowledge about prevention interventions.

... Aptly termed "natural" or-ganizations by Victor Thompson, informal organizations were typically seen as a means of protecting and promoting the interests of the individual against the artificial-system demands of the formal bureaucracy.2 By the 1950s, when scholars began ...