Public Perceptions of Child Pornography and Child Pornography Consumers

Understanding the public’s perceptions of child pornography helps identify gaps in awareness and knowledge, impacts legislative decision making, quantifies stigmatization, and provides a baseline for identifying differences between lay and offender populations for clinical purposes. This research provides a comprehensive public survey assessing these issues. An Internet-based sample of 524 adults (mean age = 47 years, 51% female) within the USA were asked about their understanding and beliefs related to child pornography and individuals who view child pornography. The questions covered three topic areas—general perceptions of child pornography, endorsement of child pornography beliefs, and opinions related to the legality of various forms of child pornography as well as the decision making related to sentencing and sex offender registration for child pornography consumers. The research found that the public viewed these offenses as more severe than most other crimes and that there was an overestimation by the public of risks related to recidivism and contact offending. Additionally, the research found that there was support for most of the current sentencing guidelines in the USA, including sex offender registration, and that there was limited support for treatment over incarceration.

Faith and Politics at the State Level

This chapter describes legislator faith beliefs based on their evangelical or liberal multilayered moral worldviews. These views are not merely tools that are used but symbolic boundaries by which preferences are molded, values are shaped, and political perspectives are informed. Contributing to these ideological differences is the changing religious landscape in America. These opposing visions represent deep cultural divisions that influence state legislative decision-making, especially for members of the LGBTQ community.

The Use of Faith in Legislative Decision-Making

In recent decades, same-sex marriage has emerged as a national political issue. As a result, state legislators have sponsored and passed statutes on an array of issues directly related to this topic. This chapter investigates how faith influences an individual legislator's political judgment in the early stages of decision-making related to sponsored bills. The findings suggest that even while legislators' partisanship and ideology largely structure decision-making, conservative Protestant legislators are more likely to respond to threats by sponsoring a bill when issues involve morality.

Legislative Decision-Making and Same-Sex Marriage

This chapter will focus on the debate over same-sex marriage. This unprecedented societal evolution began in 1990, when three same-sex couples applied for marriage licenses from the state of Hawaii. They were refused and challenged the state's decision. Although the battle in Hawaii began in court, it ended in the state legislature, spreading from there rapidly across the nation. Legislators responded to the promotion of same-sex marriage by sponsoring and passing bills claiming it contravened their faith-based principles.

4. The Council of the European Union:

The Council is an institution of day-to-day policymaking in which the interests of member state governments are represented by cabinet ministers who meet, according to their policy portfolio, in different Council configurations and within the Eurogroup. According to the Treaty of Lisbon, the Council has a dual mandate. It acts as a legislative organ as well as an executive and policy-coordinating institution. This dual role is reflected in the organization and meeting practices of the different Council configurations. Those groupings of ministers dealing primarily with executive decisions and policy coordination tend to meet more often and are regarded as being more senior than those formations of the Council which engage predominantly in legislative decision-making. As a legislative institution, the Council has increasingly acquired features of an upper chamber in a bicameral separation of powers system, working in tandem with the European Parliament. In contrast, Council decision-making relating to executive issues and policy coordination in important policy domains, such as economic governance and foreign policy, is closely aligned with the European Council. In these areas, the Council can be considered to constitute, together with the Commission, a collective EU executive.

The prevalence of petty bribery as a principle of establishing a criminal prohibition for its commission

Numerous changes in the criminal law associated with the emergence of new norms providing for responsibility for criminal liability inevitably raise the question of the validity of criminalization. Its positive solution is possible only if the new criminal law prohibition is established in accordance with the principles of criminalization, one of which is the relative prevalence of the act. The article is devoted to the assessment of the prevalence of petty bribery in order to determine the correctness of the legislative decision to establish independent criminal liability for this crime (Article 2912 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The main method of research is a statistical method that allows us to establish the prevalence of bribery in the amount not exceeding 10 thousand rubles at the time of the adoption of this legislative decision, and also during the period of validity of article 2912 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the share of the analyzed crime in the structure of bribery and corruption offences. In addition, the author analyzed 120 sentences of courts for petty bribery. As a result of the research, the author concludes that petty bribery is a fairly common offence in the structure of both bribery and corruption crimes, which indicates its public danger and the validity for the criminal prohibition of its commission. It was established that the establishment of a separate norm on liability for petty bribery allowed law enforcement agencies focusing the efforts to counteract bribery in the amount of more than 10 thousand rubles.

Legislative Decision-Making

Chapter 4 examines the logic used by moderates in determining how to vote on legislation. Using interview data from six retired senators, Chapter 4 examines the pressures they face, both within the chamber with party leadership and outside the chamber with constituents and interest groups. While conventional wisdom would dictate that moderates vote only for legislation that they find palatable, and vote against all else, using data collected by Project Vote Smart capturing the issue positions of many senators, we see that all too often this is not the case—centrists get “railroaded” by leaders and vote with the majority, even when the legislation goes against their stated position. Using voting decisions on key votes and publicly stated positions by senators, the chapter then creates a logic model that illustrates how moderates decide how to vote on legislation.

The Purpose of Punishment in the Science of Criminal Law

Despite a centuries-old debate among scientists from different countries, the question about the purposes of criminal punishment remains relevant. The criminal legislation of the Soviet period was inconsistent in formulating the purposes of punishment and repeatedly changed the list of purposes and their wording, therefore, in the criminal law doctrine there were long and fruitless discussions on this issue. They have not stopped to this day, although the current Criminal Code of the Russian Federation unambiguously proclaimed the purposes of punishment to be the restoration of social justice, the correction of the convicted person and the prevention of new crimes. The discrepancy between the purposes of punishment in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and the purposes of the execution of punishment in the Penal Enforcement Code of the Russian Federation to a certain extent interferes with a uniform interpretation of the purposes of criminal punishment. The paper proves the validity and comprehensive nature of the legislative decision and rejects the importance and possibility of legislative adjustment of the purposes of punishment or supplementing their list with the purposes of punishment, expiation, resocialization of the convict, his re-education, etc.

Agendas in legislative decision‐making

Despite the wide variety of agendas used in legislative settings, the literature on sophisticated voting has focused on two formats: the so‐called Euro–Latin and Anglo–American agendas. In the current paper, I introduce a broad class of agendas whose defining structural features—history‐independence and persistence—are common in legislative settings. I then characterize the social choice rules implemented by sophisticated voting on agendas with these two features. I also characterize the rules implemented by more specialized formats (called priority agendas and convex agendas) whose structure is closely related to the prevailing rules for order‐of‐voting used by legislatures. These results establish a clear connection between structure and outcomes for a wide range of legislative agendas.