Suchergebnisse

This paper explores the extent to which the social background of judges affects their sentencing behavior. An analysis of data on felons convicted in Georgia suggests that background has little direct bearing on sentencing outcomes. Instead, it conditions the weight judges attach to legally relevant and social background factors. Expectations about the role of the judge's age, religion, prior prosecutorial experience, and local background received mixed support. Older judges were selectively more punitive than their younger colleagues, but they did not direct this punitiveness toward disadvantaged offenders. Nor was there evidence that male judges were paternalistic toward female offenders. Baptist and Fundamentalist judges also sentenced more punitively, but they were not more likely than other judges to discriminate against black or disadvantaged offenders. Rather, they appeared to hold white and older offenders to a higher standard of behavior. Former prosecutors were selectively punitive and applied the law more uniformly than nonprosecutors. Local judges appeared to be more responsive to public demands for incarceration and sentenced more particularistically. These results illustrate the importance of considering judicial background in conjunction with case attributes, and they underscore the need for research that increases our understanding of judicial background as a conditioner of differential treatment during sentencing.

Legislatures are arenas where diverse policy preferences are honed into practical policy proposals. Given that legislative membership is a result of free democratic elections, there is an assumption that the attitudes and opinions of MPs are representative of the population as a whole. Thus, pre-legislative bargaining is founded on an unbiased sample of public opinion. However, considerable opinion incongruence exists between citizens and the political elite in many systems, potentially undermining this ideal democratic starting point for legislative business. Candidate-centred voting systems offer the potential to remedy this disconnect. While citizens tend to emphasise personal characteristics as an explanation for vote choice in one of the most candidate-centred systems in existence, PR-STV, the disconnect of opinion congruence between citizens and elites persists. This paper finds that citizens' emphasis on MPs' personal characteristics when choosing representatives causes significant opinion congruence between citizens and elites on a demographic basis, particularly for under-represented groups such as the women, younger citizens and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, but aggregate congruence is undermined by the lack of demographic diversity among MPs.

Current interpretations of the judicial process have assigned a consistently important role to the impact of the soc & pol'al backgrounds of the judges on their decisions. Such inquiry has added an important new dimension to judicial studies, but it has yet to provide us with an adequate description of the 'conversion' process by which the values of the judges are translated into policy outcomes. A second deficiency of current studies is that they picture the impact of background derived variables as relating only to dissensus on a particular court; ie, diff's in voting patterns are explained as the function of diff background experiences. But it seems as if a good case can also be made for the impact of background experiences on consensus as well. Concepts such as 'conversion' & 'consensus' cannot be adequately accounted for by focusing exclusively on the individual judge. A better perspective can be obtained by examining a whole 'case situation' in which each judge plays a part. In this manner one can better examine all the variables which appear to affect the decision-making process. IPSA.

The scope of this article, founded on a nationwide survey in Denmark, is first to describe the social characteristics of families with a child placed outside home, and, further, to examine whether differences in regard to the parents' social background are correlated with different placement courses. A range of hypotheses on the correlation between social background and the course of placement are examined. It appears, for example, that children from low‐resource families come into contact with the social system earlier, and are placed outside the home at an earlier age than children from high‐resource families. Low‐resource children are more often placed in foster care, and are more often subject to contact restrictions. The article discusses whether these differences reflect a socio‐cultural discrimination. Secondly, a discussion is raised whether the supportive measures available are adequate in relation to the serious problems of the families concerned.