Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Chinese Celebrities’ Political Signaling On Weibo, Dan Chen, Gengsong Gao

Political Science Faculty Publications

In China, celebrities can dominate public discourse and shape popular culture, but they are under the state’s close gaze. Recent studies have revealed how the state disciplines and co-opts celebrities to promote patriotism, foster traditional values, and spread political propaganda. However, how do celebrities adapt to the changing political environment? Focusing on political signaling on Weibo, we analyze a novel dataset and find that the vast majority of top celebrities repost from official accounts of government agencies and state media outlets, though there are variations. Younger celebrities with more followers tend to repost from official accounts more. Celebrities from Taiwan …

Social Policies And Center-Right Governments In Argentina And Chile, Sara Niedzwiecki, Jennifer Pribble

Political Science Faculty Publications

Latin America’s “left turn” expanded cash transfers and public services, contributing to lower poverty and inequality. Recently, right-leaning candidates and parties have begun to win back seats in the legislature, and in some cases have captured the executive branch. This shift has sparked debate about the future of Latin America’s welfare states. In this paper we analyze social policy reforms enacted by two recent right-leaning governments: Sebastián Piñera in Chile (2010-2014) and Mauricio Macri in Argentina (2015—). Contrary to neoliberal adjustment policies of the past, we find that neither Macri nor Piñera engaged in privatization or deep spending cuts. Instead, …

Slavery In Europe: Part 1, Estimating The Dark Figure, Monti Narayan Datta, Kevin Bales

Political Science Faculty Publications

The estimation of the “dark figure” for any crime (the number of actual instances of a specific crime committed minus the reported cases of that crime within a population) has primarily rested on the ability to conduct random sample crime surveys. Such surveys are based on the assumption that victims experience crimes that are discrete, time-bound, and of relatively short duration. The crime of enslavement, however, presents a special challenge to estimation because it is of indeterminate duration. This challenge is compounded by the fact that victims of slavery are also often isolated by the stigma linked to sexual assault, …

Neither Slavery Nor Involuntary Servitude, Monti Narayan Datta

Political Science Faculty Publications

The sex trade grabs headlines, but modern-day slavery takes many forms across the globe, spreading like a cancer in the 21st century. Scholars estimate that there are as many as 27 million slaves today; the majority are not in forced prostitution, but instead in other heinous forms of exploitation (though rape and/or other forms of torture are often tools of coercion).

Slavery permeates northern India, where children, to help pay off their family's exorbitantly high debts to corrupt local businessmen, hunch over in the dark for hours at a stretch as they weave carpets on looms until their small, delicate …

Social Policy And Redistribution: Chile And Uruguay, Jennifer Pribble, Evelyn Huber

Political Science Faculty Publications

In this chapter we ask two questions: First, we ask whether these governments, exemplifying best-case scenarios in Latin America, have embarked on a viable path toward a sustainable social democratic welfare state. Second, we ask whether and why they differ in their approaches and progress on this path, paying close attention to how the parties' organizational characteristics influence this variation. In their introduction, Levitsky and Roberts classify the left parties in Chile and Uruguay as an "institutionalized partisan Left," distinguished between an "electoral-professional" Left and a "mass-organic" Left. Uruguay's FA is an example of a mass-organic left party, while Chile's …

The Global Slavery Index, Monti Narayan Datta, Fiona David, Kevin Bales, Nick Grono

Political Science Faculty Publications

The Global Slavery Index report is published by the Walk Free Foundation (“Walk Free”). Walk Free is committed to ending all forms of modern slavery in this generation. Modern slavery includes slavery, slavery-like practices (such as debt bondage, forced marriage and sale or exploitation of children), human trafficking and forced labour, and other practices described in key international treaties, voluntarily ratified by nearly every country in the world.

Walk Free’s strategy includes mobilising a global activist movement, generating the highest quality research, enlisting business, and raising unprecedented levels of capital to drive change in those countries and industries bearing the …

Play Fair With Recidivists, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Retributivists thus face a difficult challenge. Either we must go against the social grain, and perhaps our own intuitions, by insisting that a criminal offense carry the same penalty or punishment no matter how many previous convictions an offender has accrued; or we must find a way to justify the recidivist premium. I shall take the second route here by arguing that recidivism itself is a kind of criminal offense. In developing this argument, I shall rely on Youngjae Lee's insightful analysis of "recidivism as omission." I shall complement his analysis, however, by grounding it in a conception of criminal …

Playing Fair With Prisoners, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Oddness aside, however, I think there is much to recommend the attempt to restore rehabilitation to a central place in the practice of punishment. Nor do I think that rehabilitation must displace retribution in that practice. Properly understood, the two aims are not only compatible but also complementary. If we are to understand them properly, though, we shall need to see them as components of a theory of punishment that is grounded in considerations of fair play. Such a theory also has the advantage of offering guidance with regard to other controversial matters of penal policy, such as the question …

Jean Hampton’S Theory Of Punishment: A Critical Appreciation, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Jean Hampton’s work first came to my attention in 1984, when the summer issue of Philosophy & Public Affairs appeared in my mailbox. Hampton’s essay in that issue, “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,” did not persuade me—or many others, I suspect—that “punishment should not be justified as a deserved evil, but rather as an attempt, by someone who cares, to improve a wayward person” (Hampton 1984, 237). The essay did persuade me, though, that moral education is a plausible aim of punishment, even if it is not the “full and complete justification” Hampton claimed it to be (Hampton 1984, …

Republicanism And The Foundations Of Criminal Law, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

This chapter makes a case for the republican tradition in political philosophy as a theory that can provide a rational reconstruction of criminal law. It argues that republicanism offers a reconstruction of criminal law that is both rational and plausible. In particular, it shows that republicanism can help us to make sense of three important features of criminal law: first, the conviction that crime is a public wrong; second, the general pattern of development of criminal law historically; and third, the public nature of criminal law as a cooperative enterprise. To begin, however, it explains what republicanism is and why …

Women And Welfare: The Politics Of Coping With New Social Risks In Chile And Uruguay, Jennifer Pribble

Political Science Faculty Publications

Women make up a disproportionate share of the world’s poor, and Latin America is no exception to this trend. Nevertheless, very few studies of social policy in the region have investigated why the gendered character of welfare provision varies across countries. This article addresses that question through a comparative historical analysis of Chile and Uruguay and concludes that variation in the gendered nature of each state’s social policy regime resulted from a two-step process. In the first stage, female labor force participation, the mobilizing capacity of women, and policy legacies differentiated the two countries, placing Chile on a less equitable …

Restitution, Punishment, And Debts To Society, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Of the many developments in the area of criminal justice over the last twenty years or so, the rediscovery of the victim may well be the most heartening. This rediscovery has produced both a new field of study, victimology, and a number of interesting programs and proposals that aim to redress the injuries suffered by the victims of crime. To this point, however, the rediscovery of the victim has not worked a fundamental transformation of our system of criminal justice. The question I wish to address here is whether it should do so.