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Sociology

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  • 21 Mar 2025
    Daniel P. Mears, Mark C. Stafford

    Getting Deterrence Right:  Theory, Research, and Policy on the Punishment of Crime

    Deterrence has long served as a justification for legal punishment of crime.  The logic?  Fear of punishment will cause individuals, groups, organizations, and the like to reduce their criminal activity, or, better yet, not to engage in it at all.  The idea goes back millennia, but was not formally articulated until the eighteenth century, first […]

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  • 30 Oct 2024
    Richard Ned Lebow, Ludvig Norman

    WEIMAR: LESSONS ABOUT LESSONS

    The German Weimar Republic lasted a mere fifteen years, from the end of the First World War to Hitler’s dictatorship in 1933. It nevertheless became the paradigmatic historical event shaping political thinking about fragility and robustness in the postwar West. Weimar is routinely invoked in scholarly writings, op-eds, and political commentary to make sense of […]

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  • 4 Apr 2024
    Nilson Ariel Espino

    A Different Take on Ideological Polarization

    One of the most common explanations for our divided world is that we are all very different from each other, and that getting along is thus correspondingly difficult.  The world is a very diverse place, we tell ourselves, so agreements are difficult to come by.  The best we can do is to keep the communication […]

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  • 20 Mar 2024
    Lynette J. Chua, Mark Fathi Massoud

    Embracing Positionality in Research

    “The law is reason, free from passion.” This statement, attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, suggests that judges, lawyers, and scholars must examine the law objectively, without succumbing to the influence of personal emotions or experiences. But might our emotions, experiences, and identities actually influence how we approach the law? And, if so, is there […]

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  • 22 Jan 2024

    China’s New Wealth: Connections, Trust, Gender, and Crisis

    When I was growing up China was one of the world’s poorest countries; today its economy is the largest in the world when measured by purchasing power parity. How did this transformation occur? This is a big question. Part of the answer is in the switch from a planned to a market economy – and […]

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  • 9 Jan 2024
    Patrick Rafail, John D. McCarthy

    The Tea Party Insurgency and the Great Recession:

    It Was the Economy, Again, Stupid! The Great Recession, a global economic crisis that began in 2007, generated extensive protest of varying intensity and form in nations around the world. The typical fiscal response to the Great Recession in European states, dubbed austerity, consisted of severe budgets cuts to social safety nets. Austerity programs were […]

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  • 22 Sep 2023
    Brian H. Bix

    Agreements in Our Family Lives

                Many of our interactions with other people are structured by formal or informal agreements:  we agree to work for a company for a set wage, we pay other people to fix our car or to dry-clean our clothes, we agree to meet a friend for lunch, and spouses and neighbors may take turns picking […]

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  • 27 Feb 2023
    Wendy J. Schiller, Kaitlin Sidorsky

    Guns and Domestic Violence: Why Federal Laws Fail to Keep Women Safe

    Tausha Haight, her five children and her mother were all shot to death in January 2023 by her husband, whom she had filed for divorce from just weeks earlier, and who had been investigated for child abuse two years before that. Less than a month later, Linda Robinson and her son Sebastian were murdered by […]

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