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Lay or commonsense accounts of the origins of criminal behavior may play a key role in sustaining a strong public appetite for harsh criminal justice policies and undergird large black-white differences in opinion in this domain. Using data from the nationally representative Race, Crime, and Public Opinion project's 2001 survey, the authors develop an explanatory mode typology for accounts of involvement in criminal behavior These include both individualistic and structural accounts of behavior in addition to a mixed-mode category. The authors identify key differences in the demographic and sociopolitical bases of the attributional types and find significant race differences in these attributional types. Attributions strongly affect how individuals wish to see public policy respond to the problem of' crime and explain a small but significant fraction of the black-white difference in crime policy views. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

Lay or commonsense accounts of the origins of criminal behavior may play a key role in sustaining a strong public appetite for harsh criminal justice policies and undergird large black-white differences in opinion in this domain. Using data from the nationally representative Race, Crime, and Public Opinion project's 2001 survey, the authors develop an explanatory mode typology for accounts of involvement in criminal behavior. These include both individualistic and structural accounts of behavior in addition to a mixed-mode category. The authors identify key differences in the demographic and sociopolitical bases of the attributional types and find significant race differences in these attributional types. Attributions strongly affect how individuals wish to see public policy respond to the problem of crime and explain a small but significant fraction of the black-white difference in crime policy views.

Here, Balazs takes a close look at the value of 'purity' in politics. He shows how a fascination with purity pervades various and quite distinct aspects of contemporary radicalism--be it a matter of environmentalism, ethno-racial allegiances, or moral judgments--and he traces a genealogy of the quest for purification as a factor in political discourse more broadly. The path from purity to purges is a short one. He wishes to briefly survey the religious, moral, and intellectual contexts of purity. No 'definition' of purity will be offered, as the main idea is to describe it as richly as possible, relying on historical understandings and some phenomenological observations. Certain characteristically political positions, views, and attitudes will be surveyed in a way that helps highlight some aspects of purity. Adapted from the source document.