Public satisfaction with the South Korean Police: The effect of residential location in a rapidly industrializing nation

Recent years have witnessed growing research interest in citizen perceptions of the police. This was likely the result of the community policing movement, which sought to strengthen ties between citizens and the police, as well as to concerns about the legitimacy of the police. Most of this research focused on police agencies in the United States, and little research had been conducted on citizen perceptions of the police in Asian countries. This study sought to fill this void through an analysis of citizen perceptions of the police in South Korea. To address these issues, telephone interview survey data gathered from 11,500 randomly selected citizens were obtained in the rapidly industrializing country, South Korea. Several sets of multiple-regression models were estimated to assess the effect of urbanization, demographics, evaluations of police services, and perceived corruption on citizen satisfaction with police. The results suggested that citizens in small to mid-sized cities and large urban cities were less satisfied with police than were residents of rural areas. In addition, age, evaluations of police service, and perceptions of corruption were related to citizen satisfaction. The results were discussed in comparison to previous research in Asia and the United States and other Western countries.     

Multinational-firm responses to an Asian-crisis comeback: evidence from European transnationals

Abstract

Despite many predictions to the contrary, the Republic of Korea (ROK) is currently one of the countries with most pro-American attitudes. We investigate what is behind the extraordinary resilience in US popular standing in an allegedly least likely setting. Using survey data from 2002 and 2007 and a novel methodology, Classification and Regression Tree models, we test whether US standing is: (1) a matter of interests, i.e. a reward that the USA receives because it either provides security or international public goods; or (2) whether it is a matter of image, i.e. the recognition that the USA is a role model to emulate. We find that across a large number of predictors, the Korean public mostly liked the USA because they liked American ways of doing business, which gives support to the image hypothesis. Security interests played a secondary role in shaping US standing, while the provision of international public goods had no impact in the popular assessment of the USA in the ROK.     

Estimating the impact of an integrated CCTV program on crime

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Prior research has identified that CCTV cameras play some role in deterring crime in public places. However, increasingly, CCTV surveillance is being...     

Political Corruption and the End of two-party system after the May 2015 Spanish Regional Elections

The autonomous elections held on 25 May 2015 took place simultaneously in 13 of the 17 Spanish autonomous communities (CCAA), leading to the most profound change in the autonomous party system seen in Spain in the last 20 years. A significant number of Spanish citizens hold the two main parties—the PP and the PSOE—responsible for being unable to solve their economic problems and for having pursued their austerity policies and containment of social expenditure to the extent of giving rise to the greatest inequality experienced in Spanish society in history. Furthermore, and as important as the economic crisis, support for the new parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos, has been linked to the emergence in Spanish public debate of party regeneration and the corruption scandals that tainted the main parties and most institutions in the years prior to the elections on 25 May 2015.     

Professor Skinner's Visions

Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics , Volume I: Regarding Method . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics , Volume II: Renaissance Virtues . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skinner, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics , Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.     

For better? For worse? Humanitarian aid in conflict1

Humanitarian aid should be judged against international humanitarian law (IHL), which gives civilians certain basic rights, including protection in armed conflicts. Aid agencies should consider the various side-effects of their interventions, in order to assess the net impact and decide whether to work in any given situation. They have no responsibility to provide aid where the net impact is negative, or to those who violate international law. If governments fail in their responsibilities to protect civilians, this does not give aid agencies the responsibility of filling the vacuum; but it does mean that they should campaign for governments to act. Current Northern debate on support for the citizens of countries in conflict is usually expressed in terms of charity, rather than a response to what people are doing for themselves. Aid agencies should help to change this.     

Corporations in Court: Big Business Litigation in U. S. Federal Courts, 1971–1991

This article provides an overview of federal litigation involving the largest 2,000 U. S. corporations over the period 1971–91. Reporting from a unique data set of the authors'construction, it finds that althugh the aggregate volume of business litigation grew during the 1970s and early 1980s, it has actually been declining in recent years in all major categories of cases; business-related litigation is heavily concentrated, with an extremely limited number of business "mega-litigants" accounting for most of the activity; this concentration is particularly evident in tort, with the result that the tort trend line outside the concentration is actually flat or declining; a good deal of the growth in litigation outside the tort area can be attributed to business itself; and big business wins overwhelmingly, as plaintiff and defendant, in cases that involve it. The general applicability of these findings is limited by the data's restriction to federal court litigation and the structure of the Integrated Federal Court Data Base from which the authors'data set was constructed. This granted, the report is by far the most comprehensive treatment of U. S. big business litigation to date, and its findings are strikingly at odds with the premises of much current policy discussion.