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Transitional justice and international criminal justice: a fraught relationship?

By Naomi Roht-Arriaza

What is the key, and often fraught, relationship between transitional justice (TJ) and international criminal justice (ICJ)? How, if at all, do the two fields fit together: do they coexist, create synergies, occupy the whole space, or simply inhabit parallel universes? It has long struck me that people focusing on one or another of these fields often don’t engage with the other, or do so in unproductive ways. Several, often conflicting, viewpoints co-exist and tie these fields together with an interplay of broad and narrow, local and global.

For transitional justice practitioners, the 1980s and 90s saw a conception of TJ based, first, on the cardinal importance of trials to combat impunity, reestablish the rule of law, and provide satisfaction to victims. Other TJ measures were pale substitutes for trials. Trials were, therefore, the sine qua non or essential element of transitional justice – without trials everything else was incomplete at best and a sham at worst.

As the independent value of other measures like truth commissions and reparations became clear, international criminal justice was declared a subset of transitional justice. In this view, TJ involves a set of ways of coming to terms with past atrocities, and trials – either international or using international law – are just one. Thus, there is a need for coherence, coordination, integration, and joint planning of different mechanisms. Trials are a necessary but not sufficient condition for transition.

As international criminal justice gained prominence, especially in the context of the beginnings of the International Criminal Court (ICC), transitional justice advocates and practitioners grew concerned that ICJ was taking over the entire TJ space, sucking resources and talent out of other kinds of potential measures. ICJ was an imposition on TJ. Peter Dixon and Chris Tenove argue that ICJ dominates other, more localized, forms of TJ, which lack the ability to mobilize a globalized justice discourse.

As critiques of the ICC’s actions and proposals for grounded, “bottom-up” kinds of transitional justice embedded in cultural practices and norms multiplied, international criminal justice was conceived of in opposition to TJ. Researchers argued that ICJ was not only irrelevant but harmful to overall processes of social reconstruction. The African Union (AU) picked up (genuinely or not) on this critique, casting ICJ efforts as a form of Western neo-colonialism, demonstrated by the ICC’s exclusive focus on Africa.

The Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. The seat of the International Court of Justice. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The opposition between transitional justice and international criminal justice was often framed as one of local versus global dynamics. The global discourses around justice translate differently (and often poorly) in a local space. In a new article, Felix Ndahinda explores the ways in which the ICC prosecution of Jean-Pierre Bemba has adopted a discourse around the “Banyamulenge” that contributes to exacerbating stereotypes and discrimination against Tutsi-related ethnic groups in the region. From the perspective of local political and sectarian dynamics, Michelle Burgis-Kasthala finds that the International Criminal Tribunal was simply one more player, and a politically colored one at that. However, these local-global dynamics are not static: they change over time, as do our evaluations of their outcomes.

From the other end of the looking glass, some international criminal justice practitioners see transitional justice as basically referring to anything done to deal with past crimes or rights violations that does not involve a trial, especially a trial in an international venue. Thus, TJ can be a precursor of ICJ, as when, in the standard narrative, truth commissions should discover the truth, opening political and evidentiary space for subsequent trials. Or, in a variation on this theme, TJ can be an adjunct to ICJ, filling in the gaps and complementing the central role of ICJ. Conversely, international criminal justice, by expanding its purview to encompass areas like reparations and creating a court-generated historical record, can become an alternative to transitional justice. Jens Iverson, for example, posits that the field exhibits doctrinal and practical confusion due to the conflation of three ways of thinking: TJ, ICJ and jus post bellum (JPB).

For some practitioners of international criminal justice, the proper relationship between the two justices is on parallel tracks. The larger transitional justice agenda is, in this view, irrelevant to ICJ. This view also posits that ICJ and TJ are on different timelines, and that the application of ICJ does not depend on the existence or culmination of a transition.

Part of the distance between these two forms of justice has to do with the particularities of international criminal justice that make it different than other forms of transitional justice. For one thing, its adherence to the forms and values of the criminal law. For Kate Cronin-Furman, for example, the criminal law supplies the goals of ICJ, especially the goal of general deterrence. She takes up how general deterrence might work in cases of systemic crime, using studies from criminology and political science regarding the organizational characteristics of insurgents and militaries. In some cases, this view may be a bit myopic. Louise Chappell sees this myopia in considering the operation of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor’s decisions on preliminary investigations and complementarity through the lens of gender.

Finally, central to both international criminal justice and transitional justice discourses is the role of victims/survivors.  However, the two discourses often fall short in practice. Mariana Pena and Gabriela Carayon, for example, find that while there is great potential, the ICC’s victim participation provisions to date have not adequately provided for the needs of victims. They conclude that, as the Assembly of State Parties considers reforming the process, “[l]istening to victims’ concerns and integrating their views in judicial proceedings is indispensable for justice to succeed. Trials in a distant town thousands of miles away will have little relevance for victims and affected communities if they are not adequately recognised as a constituency whose interests are at the heart of the justice process.” Amen, although the “how” to do this remains at best uncertain.

Naomi Roht-Arriaza is Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law.  She teaches and writes widely on transitional justice and international criminal law, and is the author of Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice and The Pinochet Effect, and co-author of The International Legal System (6th Ed.).

The International Journal of Transitional Justice has just published a 2013 special issue: The Role of International Criminal Justice in Transitional Justice, which explores the key, and often fraught, relationship between transitional justice and international criminal justice and the changing range of goals, applicability, methods and techniques of both fields.

The International Journal of Transitional Justice publishes high quality, refereed articles in the rapidly growing field of transitional justice; that is the study of those strategies employed by states and international institutions to deal with a legacy of human rights abuses and to effect social reconstruction in the wake of widespread violence.

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The unknown financial crisis of 1914

By Richard Roberts

The mounting diplomatic crisis in the last week of July 1914 triggered a major financial crisis in London, the world’s foremost international centre, and around the world. In fact, it was the City’s gravest-ever financial crisis featuring a comprehensive breakdown of its financial markets. But it is virtually unknown. The reason is straightforward: it is simply absent not only from general texts but also from most of the specialist literature.

The financial markets took the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on 28 June in their stride. After all, the diplomatic crises of the previous three summers had been defused. But Austria’s presentation of an ultimatum to Serbia on Thursday 23 July transformed perceptions of the risk of a major European war. This “Minsky moment” triggered a scramble for cash. Continental stock exchanges were deluged with selling orders and banks besieged by depositors. They closed their doors. Governments mobilised for war and imposed drastic controls to safeguard their banking system and national finances.

The week beginning Monday 27 July saw the breakdown of the City’s foreign exchange and discount markets, and culminated in the closure of the London Stock Exchange on Friday 31 July. It stayed shut for five months. Long queues formed at the Bank of England of people changing Bank notes for gold sovereigns. It looked like a run on the Bank was underway. And it was believed that a run on the banks had begun.

David Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the financial crisis in 1914.

There had been no pre-war planning for such a crisis. Time was bought by the declaration of an unprecedented four-day Bank Holiday. During the break, at 11 pm on Tuesday 4 August, Britain went to war. The initial emergency containment measures were massive infusions of liquidity by the central bank plus a hike in the discount rate from 3 per cent to 10 per cent, following established crisis management doctrine. Then came novel policy measures: a “general moratorium” on contracted payments (which allowed banks to refuse to pay out deposits), and the introduction of hastily printed small denomination currency notes issued by the Treasury (not the Bank of England). When the banks reopened on Friday 7 August there was no run. The crisis had been contained.

Had worst fears been realised – mass failures among City financial firms and the banks requiring state bail-outs — the crisis might have assumed the magnitude and prominence of a financial catastrophe. But that did not happen in Britain. Hence there was no downfall of a major financial institution or prominent individual depriving the crisis of an iconic victim. The reason was massive and unprecedented state intervention. But that looked like wartime controls rather than financial crisis resolution.

The financial crisis of 1914 was also a global crisis. More than 50 countries or colonies experienced bank runs and asset crashes. For six weeks during August and early September every stock exchange in the world was closed, with the exception of New Zealand, Tokyo and the Denver Colorado Mining Exchange. The financial crisis of 1914 was an extraordinary and unique moment in global economic history.

Reinhardt and Rogoff’s quantitative study of financial crises identifies 10 countries as experiencing a financial crisis in 1914 (their list is significantly incomplete). The other major international banking crises they identify in the period 1800-2008 are: 1907, 8 countries; 1931, 20 countries; 1997-2001, 18 countries in Asia and Latin America; and 2007-08. So the financial crisis of 1914 ranks as one of the top five international episodes of banking crisis, making its obscurity all the more mystifying.

As regards qualitative surveys of financial crises, the best-selling text, Kindleberger and Aliber, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises makes no mention of it. Presumably because it was not a “proper” financial crisis in the sense of Kindleberger’s “Anatomy of a Typical Crisis” model with his series of build-up stages. Anna Schwartz does mention it, but ranks it as one of her “pseudo-crises”.

In its day, however, the financial crisis of 1914 was a very real and alarming episode as reflected in the press and in official and bank records. Several participants left crisis diaries that provide vivid testament. It also features in some general diaries and in contemporary novels. Keynes, who was marginally involved, published three journal articles on it in 1914. And three journalistic accounts appeared in 1915. But thereafter very little. The reason, presumably, is because the financial crisis was overshadowed by the diplomatic crisis and then the military conflict, of which it was collateral damage. Plainly, the existential struggle was more important and dramatic than the financial disintegration. Every political, social, cultural, and economic dimension of life was in crisis in summer 1914: there was nothing especially notable about the financial sector being in trouble.

Richard Roberts is Professor of Contemporary History at the Institute of Contemporary British History at King’s College London. He has held fellowships at Downing College, Cambridge, Princeton University, and the Bank of England. He specialises in financial history and is author of many publications in this field including histories of City investment bank Schroders (1992) and consortium bank Orion (2001). His contemporary studies Wall Street (2002) and The City (2008) are published by The Economist. His new book is Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914.

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Image credits: Portrait of David Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1911), by Christopher Williams. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Buzzword shaming

By Mark Peters

I recently wrote about the proliferation of the lexical formula “X-shaming,” launched by slut-shaming and body-shaming and taken to preposterous extremes by words such as filter-shaming and fedora-shaming. Everywhere you look, someone is talking about shaming. The hyphen is optional, but the topic is increasingly mandatory.

Maybe it’s my Catholic school education, but I can’t stop thinking about shaming. Though I pooh-poohed the overuse of shaming in Slate, the lexicographer in me can’t help but enjoy—and record—the giddy explosion of terms. So here’s a bunch of recent coinages I found since writing that article.

Some of these name an ugly action, like poor shaming. Others are meant to be jokes, like ghost shaming. Many are unintentionally funny, like celebrity shaming. A few require a little explanation, like reductive shaming: this term was applied to a journalist who was taking the shocking, audacious stand that people should vote. I think apathy shaming would be a better term, but it wouldn’t be half as whacked.

All these terms are part of a trend that is broadening the lexicon at a rapid pace. I hope you enjoy them, and I encourage you to use them in your tweets and rants.

aperture shaming


“Baha! Oh, and just so you know, my aperture is pretty much always open. Because I’m that kind of girl, and I don’t need to apologize for it, thank you… (No aperture shaming here.)


(Oct. 1, 2013, Pintester)

book shaming


“Though you may be terrified to admit it, we all have deep, dirty secrets we’d rather not share with others … No, not those! I’m talking about book shaming, the latest way to reveal things you might have denied otherwise.”


(Oct. 21, 2013, Vox Magazine)

butt shaming


“Many of the VMAs’ 5 million-plus viewers took to Twitter and Instagram after she left the stage, and used the hashtag #Mileyasssmallerthan to show and describe everything that can easily replace her non-existent backside. According to US Weekly, Miley’s team is officially ‘freaking out.’ Welcome to the butt shaming of Miley Cyrus.”


(Aug. 26, 2012, The Bookbox)

celebrity shaming


Jones fired off a series of celebrity-shaming tweets this week, complete with the hashtag “#stopactinglikewhores.”


(Oct. 22, 2013, CBS New York)

creamer shaming


“Definitely, considering I seriously heard someone talking about creamer shaming at a coffee shop the other day.”


(Oct. 21, 2013, Vanessa Boom Twitter)

fish shaming


“Fish shaming – I attack fish that come near my eggs…”


(Oct. 22, 2013, We Know Memes)

fit-shaming


“Maria Kang, a very fit mom of three, is accused of ‘fit-shaming’ women in a Facebook photo she shared, and now refuses to apologize for.”


(Oct. 16, 2013, The Hollywood Gossip)

geek girl shaming


“’Fake’ Gamer/Nerd Girls and Why Geek Girl Shaming Needs To Stop”


(Oct. 10, 2013, Linksaveszelda)

ghost shaming


“Ghost shaming. Guys, it’s an epidemic — people shaming ghosts, ghosts shaming people. Okay, this one isn’t a real reason per se, but I do sincerely love the idea of a real haunted house where the ghosts feel offended by all the naked humans up in there home.”


(Sept. 23, 2013, The Gloss)

human shaming


“Remember Dog Shaming and Cat Shaming? Now it’s time for Human Shaming! Want to participate?”


(Oct. 8, 2013, Sad and Useless)

leggings shaming


“Cut The Leggings-Shaming, Already”


(Oct. 24, 2013, Bust)

mom shaming


“This Week in Tabloids: The Mom-Shaming of Kim Kardashian Has Begun”


(Oct. 9, 2013, Jezebel)

poor shaming


“Poor-shaming is the notion that people are destitute because we haven’t sufficiently stigmatized their misfortune—enough.”


(Aug. 1, 2013, Tina Dupay)

reductive shaming


“Keller @ Large: The ‘Reductive Shaming’ Of Those Who Don’t Vote”


(Sept. 26, 2013, CBS Boston)

salad shaming


“But now, I would like to discuss a different kind of salad shaming, even though you had not heard of any kind of salad shaming until this very moment.”


(Oct. 14, 2013, The Gloss)

senator shaming


“Senator shaming, debt fixes and other reader opinions about Shutdowngate”


(Oct. 21, 2013, Dallas News)

short shaming


“Short-Shaming: Fashion’s Dirty Little Secret”


(Oct. 21, 2013, Huffington Post)

tip shaming


“Have you ever been accused of ‘tip-shaming?’”


(Aug. 8, 2013, Canada.com)

trailer park shaming


“It sounds to me like the Establishment is looking down on people who live in mobile homes and making them feel ashamed. So I would like to come out against trailer park shaming.”


(Sept. 24, 2013, Salon)

Shame on!

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, and language columnist for Visual Thesaurus. He also writes the Best Joke Ever column for McSweeney’s. Read his previous OUPblog posts on topics such as the language of Batman and Arrested Development.

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Polling accuracy: a Q&A with Kai Arzheimer and Jocelyn Evans

By R. Michael Alvarez

Polling data is ubiquitous in today’s world, but it is is often difficult to easily understand the accuracy of polls. In a recent paper published in Political Analysis, Kai Arzheimer and Jocelyn Evans developed a new methodology for assessing the accuracy of polls in multiparty and multi-candidate elections. Based on the work reported in their paper, “A New Multinomial Accuracy Measure for Polling Bias,” I posed a number of questions to the authors regarding their methodology and the general question of how the accuracy of polling data can easily be assessed.

Your recent Political Analysis article focused on an examination of the accuracy of polling data in multiparty contexts. In a nutshell, how does your methodology determine the accuracy of polling the multiparty context?

A decade ago, Martin, Traugott, and Kennedy proposed an accuracy measure that relates the proportionate strength of two parties or candidates in a pre-election poll to their actual performance on election day. In our article, we generalise this two-party approach for multi-party elections, and develop an index which summarises the individual party deviations of a given pre-election poll from the final result of the election. Any individual poll can now be given an overall accuracy score. We also show how this measure, B, can be calculated using standard statistical software, which we have made available through a Stata ado package. The package can be downloaded from the SSC archive (or simply be installed from within Stata (ssc install surveybias)).

How should your measure of polling accuracy be used, and how do you see it being applied in elections in 2014? Are there particular types of elections or settings where you believe that polling accuracy is most problematic?

Our aggregate measure of accuracy makes it very easy to compare the overall performance of pollsters, but it is also possible to focus on bias for or against specific parties. As well as so-called ‘house effects’ (see below), accuracy will be problematic if many small parties compete, if respondents are reluctant to reveal their support for candidates that are perceived as extremist, or if there are substantial campaign effects that swing the electorate’s mood. In the article, we demonstrate how the impact of these factors can be assessed using data on the 2012 presidential election in France as an example. Replication data and scripts for this analysis are available from the journal’s repository.

In May 2014, the 28 member states of the EU will hold concurrent elections for the European Parliament, so we expect a bumper crop of pre-election polls. We would like to encourage scholars to download our software, and to apply our measure in as many countries as possible. We would also encourage polling organisations to use the measure in assessing trends in their own polling accuracy – and perhaps that of their competitors.

What issues do you believe account for why some polls in multiparty contexts might be more or less accurate? Does accuracy vary depending on how samples are drawn, the ways in which respondents are contacted and interviewed, and does your measure aid in the understanding the relative accuracy of different polls?

In just about every democratic country in the world, some pollsters have a reputation for ‘leaning’ towards one party or even one political camp, resulting in lower overall accuracy. With our measures, it becomes possible to estimate the size and stability of these house effects. Moreover, house effects will often be the result of mode (e.g. face-to-face vs telephone vs online), non-random sampling, sampling over a very short period of time, or house-specific post-stratification strategies (the ‘secret formulas’ used to adjust raw polling data). If (if!) pollsters publish information on these methodological issues, they can easily be included in a model of polling accuracy, using B as the dependent variable.

How do you recommend that a consumer of polling data try to better understand the accuracy of a particular poll? Are there simple things that someone can look at in a poll report that might help them assess the accuracy of a poll?

Consumers should indeed look out for a number of simple things. Is the sample size sufficiently large (over 1000 respondents, as a rule of thumb)? Was the sample randomly selected, and what is the sampling frame – all eligible voters (good), some social or regional subgroup (bad), or even a convenience sample such as the subscribers of a website or magazine (useless)? Most pollsters have to rely on some type of multi-stage sampling (for example, they will sample municipalities first, then households within municipalities, then voters within households), but this results in larger sampling errors and therefore lower accuracy than simple random sampling. One final (hugely oversimplified) piece of advice: be wary of online surveys. In most countries, very few (if any) pollsters have the resources and expertise to draw truly representative online samples, relying instead on panel self-selection.

How will you be studying polling the in many elections throughout the world in 2014?

In due course, we would like to pool the numerous surveys for the 2014 European elections to test our new accuracy measure comparatively. But, as we’ve said, we would really encourage country-scholars to use the test on their respective national polls. Another future project is to look at the dynamics to individual polling organisations’ accuracy across consecutive elections in single countries, but this is by definition a long-term commitment. More immediately, we are about to look at the 2013 German Bundestag elections to assess more precisely the degree to which the polls anticipated the ruling CDU bonus and the FDP collapse, the effects of which have still not been resolved at the time of writing. Our respective country interests mean there will be no lack of elections in coming years to apply the B measure to!

Kai Arzheimer is Professor of Politics at the University of Mainz, Germany. He specialises in German and European politics and has published widely on the electoral base of the Extreme Right in Europe. Jocelyn Evans is Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds, UK. He works on voting behaviour in European democracies, and has published extensively on French elections, including forecast models of Far Right voting. Between 2006 and 2011, he was editor of the Hansard-OUP journal, Parliamentary Affairs. As well as working on measures of polling accuracy, Profs Arzheimer and Evans are currently working on modelling geospatial effects in elections, examining the relationship between voter-candidate distance and party choice. Their first analysis of these effects in the 2010 UK General Election recently appeared in Political Geography. Together they are the author of “A New Multinomial Accuracy Measure for Polling Bias” in the most recent issue of Political Analysis (available to read for free for a limited time).

R. Michael Alvarez is a professor of Political Science at Caltech. His research and teaching focuses on elections, voting behavior, and election technologies. He is editor-in-chief of Political Analysis with Jonathan N. Katz.

Political Analysis chronicles the exciting developments in the field of political methodology, with contributions to empirical and methodological scholarship outside the diffuse borders of political science. It is published on behalf of The Society for Political Methodology and the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association. Political Analysis is ranked #5 out of 157 journals in Political Science by 5-year impact factor, according to the 2012 ISI Journal Citation Reports. Like Political Analysis on Facebook and follow @PolAnalysis on Twitter.

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Image credit: Closeup Of Hand Inserting Ballot In Box Over White Background. © AndreyPopov via iStockphoto.

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Polling accuracy: a Q&A with Kai Arzheimer and Joceyln Evans

By R. Michael Alvarez

Polling data is ubiquitous in today’s world, but it is is often difficult to easily understand the accuracy of polls. In a recent paper published in Political Analysis, Kai Arzheimer and Jocelyn Evans developed a new methodology for assessing the accuracy of polls in multiparty and multi-candidate elections. Based on the work reported in their paper, “A New Multinomial Accuracy Measure for Polling Bias,” I posed a number of questions to the authors regarding their methodology and the general question of how the accuracy of polling data can easily be assessed.

Your recent Political Analysis article focused on an examination of the accuracy of polling data in multiparty contexts. In a nutshell, how does your methodology determine the accuracy of polling the multiparty context?

A decade ago, Martin, Traugott, and Kennedy proposed an accuracy measure that relates the proportionate strength of two parties or candidates in a pre-election poll to their actual performance on election day. In our article, we generalise this two-party approach for multi-party elections, and develop an index which summarises the individual party deviations of a given pre-election poll from the final result of the election. Any individual poll can now be given an overall accuracy score. We also show how this measure, B, can be calculated using standard statistical software, which we have made available through a Stata ado package. The package can be downloaded from the SSC archive (or simply be installed from within Stata (ssc install surveybias)).

How should your measure of polling accuracy be used, and how do you see it being applied in elections in 2014? Are there particular types of elections or settings where you believe that polling accuracy is most problematic?

Our aggregate measure of accuracy makes it very easy to compare the overall performance of pollsters, but it is also possible to focus on bias for or against specific parties. As well as so-called ‘house effects’ (see below), accuracy will be problematic if many small parties compete, if respondents are reluctant to reveal their support for candidates that are perceived as extremist, or if there are substantial campaign effects that swing the electorate’s mood. In the article, we demonstrate how the impact of these factors can be assessed using data on the 2012 presidential election in France as an example. Replication data and scripts for this analysis are available from the journal’s repository.

In May 2014, the 28 member states of the EU will hold concurrent elections for the European Parliament, so we expect a bumper crop of pre-election polls. We would like to encourage scholars to download our software, and to apply our measure in as many countries as possible. We would also encourage polling organisations to use the measure in assessing trends in their own polling accuracy – and perhaps that of their competitors.

What issues do you believe account for why some polls in multiparty contexts might be more or less accurate? Does accuracy vary depending on how samples are drawn, the ways in which respondents are contacted and interviewed, and does your measure aid in the understanding the relative accuracy of different polls?

In just about every democratic country in the world, some pollsters have a reputation for ‘leaning’ towards one party or even one political camp, resulting in lower overall accuracy. With our measures, it becomes possible to estimate the size and stability of these house effects. Moreover, house effects will often be the result of mode (e.g. face-to-face vs telephone vs online), non-random sampling, sampling over a very short period of time, or house-specific post-stratification strategies (the ‘secret formulas’ used to adjust raw polling data). If (if!) pollsters publish information on these methodological issues, they can easily be included in a model of polling accuracy, using B as the dependent variable.

How do you recommend that a consumer of polling data try to better understand the accuracy of a particular poll? Are there simple things that someone can look at in a poll report that might help them assess the accuracy of a poll?

Consumers should indeed look out for a number of simple things. Is the sample size sufficiently large (over 1000 respondents, as a rule of thumb)? Was the sample randomly selected, and what is the sampling frame – all eligible voters (good), some social or regional subgroup (bad), or even a convenience sample such as the subscribers of a website or magazine (useless)? Most pollsters have to rely on some type of multi-stage sampling (for example, they will sample municipalities first, then households within municipalities, then voters within households), but this results in larger sampling errors and therefore lower accuracy than simple random sampling. One final (hugely oversimplified) piece of advice: be wary of online surveys. In most countries, very few (if any) pollsters have the resources and expertise to draw truly representative online samples, relying instead on panel self-selection.

How will you be studying polling the in many elections throughout the world in 2014?

In due course, we would like to pool the numerous surveys for the 2014 European elections to test our new accuracy measure comparatively. But, as we’ve said, we would really encourage country-scholars to use the test on their respective national polls. Another future project is to look at the dynamics to individual polling organisations’ accuracy across consecutive elections in single countries, but this is by definition a long-term commitment. More immediately, we are about to look at the 2013 German Bundestag elections to assess more precisely the degree to which the polls anticipated the ruling CDU bonus and the FDP collapse, the effects of which have still not been resolved at the time of writing. Our respective country interests mean there will be no lack of elections in coming years to apply the B measure to!

Kai Arzheimer is Professor of Politics at the University of Mainz, Germany. He specialises in German and European politics and has published widely on the electoral base of the Extreme Right in Europe. Jocelyn Evans is Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds, UK. He works on voting behaviour in European democracies, and has published extensively on French elections, including forecast models of Far Right voting. Between 2006 and 2011, he was editor of the Hansard-OUP journal, Parliamentary Affairs. As well as working on measures of polling accuracy, Profs Arzheimer and Evans are currently working on modelling geospatial effects in elections, examining the relationship between voter-candidate distance and party choice. Their first analysis of these effects in the 2010 UK General Election recently appeared in Political Geography. Together they are the author of “A New Multinomial Accuracy Measure for Polling Bias” in the most recent issue of Political Analysis (available to read for free for a limited time).

R. Michael Alvarez is a professor of Political Science at Caltech. His research and teaching focuses on elections, voting behavior, and election technologies. He is editor-in-chief of Political Analysis with Jonathan N. Katz.

Political Analysis chronicles the exciting developments in the field of political methodology, with contributions to empirical and methodological scholarship outside the diffuse borders of political science. It is published on behalf of The Society for Political Methodology and the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association. Political Analysis is ranked #5 out of 157 journals in Political Science by 5-year impact factor, according to the 2012 ISI Journal Citation Reports. Like Political Analysis on Facebook and follow @PolAnalysis on Twitter.

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Image credit: Closeup Of Hand Inserting Ballot In Box Over White Background. © AndreyPopov via iStockphoto.

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A conversation with Dr. Andrea Farbman on music therapy

With the American Music Therapy Association’s Annual Conference this weekend, we asked Andrea Farbman, Executive Director of the American Music Therapy Association; Dr. Sheri Robb, editor of Journal of Music Therapy; and Dr. Anthony Meadows, editor of Music Therapy Perspectives, to tell us about the profession of music therapy in a three-part series.

For nearly four decades, Dr. Andrea Farbman has worked in disability and arts advocacy, legislative policy analysis, and non-profit management. Her career with the American Music Therapy Association (National Association for Music Therapy at the time) began in 1988 and this year she is celebrating 25 years with the association. Under her tenure as Executive Director, AMTA has distinguished itself as a leading advocate for music therapy throughout the world. We sat down with Dr. Farbman earlier this year to discuss the music therapy profession and the AMTA journals Journal of Music Therapy and Music Therapy Perspectives.

Andrea Farbman discusses the growth and development of music therapy from its first uses for traumatized soldiers during World Wars I and II:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Andrea Farbman discusses the partnership between Oxford University Press and the American Music Therapy Association:

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A forum for authoritative articles of current music therapy research and theory, Journal of Music Therapy, seeks to advance research, theory, and practice in music therapy through the dissemination of scholarly work. The journal publishes all types of research, including quantitative, qualitative, historical, philosophical, theoretical, and musical concerning the psychology of music, applied music therapy techniques, perception of music, and effects of music on human behavior. Journal of Music Therapy is an official publication of the American Music Therapy Association. For readers inside and outside the profession of music therapy, Music Therapy Perspectives seeks to promote the development of music therapy clinical practice through the dissemination of scholarly work. Focusing on clinical benefits of music therapy, the journal strives to serve as a resource and forum for music therapists, music therapy students and educators, and those in related professions. Music Therapy Perspectives is an official publication of the American Music Therapy Association.

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Nose to nose with Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy

By Karen Harvey

Venturing into new areas of research can be exhilarating. But it can be incredibly daunting when the subject boasts a concentration of great scholarship and formidable expertise. In my case, the decision to embark on the subject of Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy, meant taking a step not just into a new subject but a new discipline: from history to literature.

‘Laurence Sterne’ by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1760), NPG 5019 © National Portrait Gallery, London (provided under Creative Commons license)

I had simply not ‘got’ Tristram Shandy when I read it as a teenager. Ironically, I recall my overriding response as impatience: I just wanted the author to get on with the story. Returning to the novel years later I had an epiphany. I was working on a large project about men and the eighteenth-century home, reading the vast array of documents written by men in their domestic spaces, documents about themselves, their families, their histories, their houses, and a store of miscellaneous topics. Wasn’t this what Tristram was struggling to do?

Exploring Sterne’s own manuscripts proved to the most exciting part of this research. We already know a great deal about Laurence Sterne. But these manuscripts tell us something new about the man and his writing. References in Arthur Cash’s two-volume biography led me to Sterne’s parish registers at the University of York’s Borthwick Institute. Sterne’s very first attempt at completing the parish register as a new vicar for Sutton on the Forest is audacious. Unlike any of the vicars who came before him, he begins by writing his own name in large letters: ‘The Revd. Mr. Lau:rence Sterne’. But then he falters. The next three lines are scored out. Why? We can just make out that Sterne has entered a burial. Unfortunately, this is the baptism section of the register. A discouraging start, to be sure.

Sutton Register PR. SUT/F.2 (1665–1806): f.21 verso. Reproduced with permission from an original in the Borthwick Institute, University of York.

Sterne’s marginalia and emendations are arguably as rich as his literary works. Some of these are positively Shandyesque. Though Sterne left a space for his or her name in the Sutton register, the entry for the poor child of George Willson, baptized on 11 September 1743, was never completed. We are reminded, of course, of Tristram’s thwarted naming. Clearly exasperated with the cost of updating the Sutton vicarage, Sterne’s account put the cost of doing up the rooms as ‘God knows what’. Sterne didn’t — or couldn’t — quite conform to the strictures of the genre in which he was writing as a vicar of the Church of England. The masterpiece Tristram Shandy resists the emerging conventions of the novel genre, too, while the eponymous hero Tristram struggles to hold the line of a narrative supposedly about his life and opinions but which becomes a somewhat messy family history at best. One feels the frustration of an individual battling it out with the conventions of a genre that has a life of its own.

Sterne’s self-portrait sketch in Sutton Register PR. SUT/F.2, 1665-1806: f1 verso of insert. Reproduced with permission from an original in the Borthwick Institute, University of York.

Yet if Sterne lacked the interest to complete the registers in a manner befitting a clergyman, he apparently had time to doodle. In the early pages of the Sutton register I discovered a sketch of a distinctive face in profile. It matches the many public images of Sterne. Moreover, we know that Sterne had a habit of drawing himself. A teenage school book of his included a sketch of a ‘curious, long-nosed, long-chinned face’, glossed with ‘This is Lorence’. And the sketch is flanked by several pages of signatures and autobiographical notes, many by Sterne. He had turned this book — the register of life-events that had served this parish for a hundred years — into his own book of memoranda, illustrated with a self-portrait.

Laurence Sterne by Louis Carrogis Carmontelle (c. 1762). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Is it fanciful to read Sterne’s preoccupation with noses in the novel as a reflection of his cognizance of his own large appendage? How useful is it to use the historian’s skills to posit the biographical elements of a work of literature? In my view, we learn more about Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy by situating it in this context of demanding manuscript genres and flawed manuscript practices. But for me there is another gain. This is an affectionately satirical portrait of men who struggled to do what was expected of them. This view from below or within is not found in conduct books and is hard to uncover in the private confessions of men. Yet I think I found it here, in these combined manuscript and printed works of the vicar-novelist Laurence Sterne.

Dr Karen Harvey is Reader in Cultural History at the University of Sheffield and a specialist in gender and eighteenth-century Britain. She is the author of ‘The Manuscript History of Tristram Shandy’, Review of English Studies (28 August, 2013) and The Little Republic: Masculinity & Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012).

The Review of English Studies was founded in 1925 to publish literary-historical research in all areas of English literature and the English language from the earliest period to the present. From the outset, RES has welcomed scholarship and criticism arising from newly discovered sources or advancing fresh interpretation of known material. Successive editors have built on this tradition while responding to innovations in the discipline and reinforcing the journal’s role as a forum for the best new research.

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                Related StoriesOral history goes transnationalAn interview with Barry B. Powell on his translation of The IliadMusic therapy research and evidence-based practice 

An interview with Barry B. Powell on his translation of The Iliad

Every generation and culture needs its own version of The Iliad — one that capture the spirit of the original for a contemporary audience, whether Alexander Pope’s rhymed verse of the 18th century or dense Dickensian prose of 19th-century translations. Barry B. Powell’s new free verse translation of The Iliad was written with the modern English speaker in mind, and with the idea that the language Homer uses was colloquial and accessible to his contemporaries. In the following videos, Powell explains why he set out to write such a translation, and looks at some of the challenges that come with translating one of the great works of literature.

Why Do We Need Another Translation of The Iliad?

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The Challenges of Translating Ancient Greek

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The Iliad: The Endurance of the Epic

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On why hearing The Iliad aloud is so important

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Did The Iliad create the Greek Alphabet?

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What’s Next for Barry Powell?

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Barry B. Powell is Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of a new free verse translation of The Iliad by Homer.

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Five things you didn’t know about Franklin Pierce

By Michael Gerhardt

There are few presidents more forgotten — and perhaps worth forgetting than — Franklin Pierce. To the extent he is remembered at all, historians and others dismiss him as a weak president who allowed strong-willed senators sympathetic to slavery interests to force him to take actions, which helped to provoke a near civil war in Kansas and bring the nation itself closer to the Civil War that formally broke out in 1861. Yet, there are at least five things that make remembering Pierce worthwhile.

First, he was not a weak president. Historians and others frequently get Pierce wrong. His problem was not that he was weak but rather that he was too strong. He came into the presidency as a Northern Doughface, which was meant that he was someone from the North (New Hampshire in Pierce’s case) that sympathized with pro-slavery forces. But he did not merely sympathize. At the urging of Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and a few others, Pierce decided to abandon his campaign pledge (which he repeated in his inaugural address) not to tinker with the Missouri compromise, which had restricted slavery in certain federal territories. Instead, Pierce wrote in his own hand the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was a federal law authorizing the territories of Kanas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether to adopt pro- or anti-slavery constitutions. Pierce did not stop there, however. Once the law went into effect, Pierce used every power he had as president to force slavery down the throats of the people of Kansas. Indeed, one popular cartoon of the era shows a grisly depiction of Pierce trying to do just that. His were not the actions of a weak man but of a stubborn one, who insisted until his dying day that abolitionists not slaveholders were responsible for the bloodshed in Kansas and the Civil War itself.

Second, Pierce is the only American president to serve out a full term without a single change in his cabinet. Other presidents, including Lincoln, had difficult relations with their cabinets, but Pierce is unique for having assembled a relatively harmonious group as his cabinet. Thus, he was able to focus less on the infighting within his administration and more on the substance and implementation of the policies of his administration

Third, Pierce exhibited the human cost of the presidency. Nothing is more painful — and horrible — for a parent than losing a child. In fact, on their trip to Washington for the inauguration, the Pierce’s railcar fell down an embankment; and both Pierce and his wife watched helplessly as their son was crushed in front of their eyes. Pierce’s wife never recovered. She blamed Pierce’s ambitions for their son’s death. Pierce sought solace from religion throughout his presidency — and from the friendship of a few people, particularly Jefferson Davis.

Fourth, Pierce, with the help of his Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, began to modernize the army. They helped to secure civilian control of the army, upgrade standards for promotion, and improve the weaponry. Ironically, when Davis led the Southern confederacy during the Civil War, the army he faced was the one he had helped to equip.

Lastly, Pierce demonstrates the price a president plays for embracing the wrong side of history. Pierce’s stubbornness in defending slavery became his legacy, which thus became one that many people wanted to forget. Indeed, in the State Capitol of Kansas, streets heading west out of the downtown are named in order of antebellum presidents — with one exception. There is no Pierce street. After it took control of the State legislature, the Free Soil party wanted to bury Pierce’s memory. To the extent Pierce is remembered in Kansas, it is as the president Kansans most want to forget.

Michael Gerhardt is Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A nationally recognized authority on constitutional conflicts, he has testified in several Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and has published five books, including The Forgotten Presidents and The Power of Precedent. Read his previous blog posts on the American presidents.

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Image credit: Franklin Pierce. 1804-1869. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Music therapy research and evidence-based practice

With the American Music Therapy Association’s Annual Conference this weekend, we asked the Andrea Farbman, Executive Director of the American Music Therapy Association; Dr. Sheri Robb, editor of Journal of Music Therapy; and Dr. Anthony Meadows, editor of Music Therapy Perspectives, to tell us about the profession of music therapy in a three-part series.

By Dr. Sheri Robb

There is a saying in American English when a home is attractive to view from the sidewalk or edge of the road. That is, we say it has “curb appeal”. As an integral part of everyday life, music has great curb appeal. People value it and intuitively recognize the beneficial role music plays in daily life and well-being. But, when talking about music therapy, the conversation shifts beyond mere curb appeal — and becomes even more intriguing because the practice of music therapy requires the integration and application of theory, research, and clinical practice knowledge to meet the needs of the patients and families we serve.

As a profession dedicated to research and evidence-base practice, we continue to build foundational knowledge to advance the science and practice of music therapy. The elements of music — rhythm, timbre, melody, harmony, dynamics, and form — are the building blocks for music used in a therapeutic process. In the hands of trained, board-certified music therapists the building blocks of music are manipulated as part of specific interventions designed to address a variety of clinical needs and outcomes. The American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) defines music therapy as “the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional” (AMTA, 2013).

As a music therapist of 24 years, it has been an honor to work in a profession that values ethical standards of care within a defined scope of practice. Credentialed music therapists, including Board Certified Music Therapists, engage in lifelong learning through continuing education and participation in scholarship and research. I am also privileged to serve as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Music Therapy (JMT), which is owned by the AMTA.

Journal of Music Therapy is a forum for authoritative articles of current music therapy research and theory. Our mission is to advance research, theory, and practice in music therapy through the dissemination of scholarly work. We publish all types of research and strives to present a variety of research approaches and topics, to promote critical inquiry, and to serve as a resource and forum for researchers, educators, and clinicians in music therapy and related professions. Ultimately, JMT contributes to evidence-based practice, which according to the American Music Therapy Association, “integrates the best available research, the music therapists’ expertise, and the needs, values, and preferences of the individual(s) served” (AMTA, 2013). 

I am proud to be a part of AMTA and the rich history of our journals, and I look forward to exciting opportunities that will come as a result of AMTA’s partnership with Oxford University Press.

Dr. Robb is Associate Professor, School of Nursing, Indiana University. She is Coordinator for the Undergraduate Honors Program and is core faculty for the university’s Research in Palliative and End-of-Life Communication and Training (RESPECT) Center. Dr. Robb is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Music Therapy and a Board Certified Music Therapist with degrees in music therapy and early childhood special education. In 2009, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship awarded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in behavioral oncology and cancer control. In 2011, she was awarded a NIH career development award. Dr. Robb’s program of research focuses on the development and testing of music-based interventions to manage distress, improve positive health outcomes, and prevent secondary psychosocial morbidity in children/adolescents with cancer and their families.

A forum for authoritative articles of current music therapy research and theory, Journal of Music Therapy, seeks to advance research, theory, and practice in music therapy through the dissemination of scholarly work. The journal publishes all types of research, including quantitative, qualitative, historical, philosophical, theoretical, and musical concerning the psychology of music, applied music therapy techniques, perception of music, and effects of music on human behavior. Journal of Music Therapy is an official publication of the American Music Therapy Association.

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