Regulating Lobbyists: A Comparative Analysis of the United States, Canada, Germany and the European Union

Lobbying is central to the democratic process. Yet, only four political systems have lobbying regulations: the United States, Canada, Germany and the EU (most particularly, the European Parliament). Despite the many works offering individual country analysis of lobbying legislation, a twofold void exists in the literature. Firstly, no study has offered a comparative analysis classifying the laws in these four political systems, which would improve understanding of the different regulatory environments. Secondly, few studies have analysed the views of key agents—politicians, lobbyists and regulators—and how these compare and contrast across regulatory environments.
We firstly utilise an index measuring how strong the regulations are in each of the systems, and develop a classification scheme for the different 'ideal' types of regulatory environment. Secondly, we measure the opinions of political actors, interest groups and regulators in all four systems (through questionnaires and elite interviews) and see what correlations, if any, exist between the different ideal types of system and their opinions. The conclusion highlights our findings, and the lessons that can be used by policy-makers in systems without lobbying legislation.     

From the Cycle of Deprivation to Social Exclusion: Five Continues

One important aspect of Tony Blair's speech on social exclusion, given to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in York on 5 September 2006, has been ignored-that its content was prefigured by Sir Keith Joseph, in his famous 'cycle of deprivation' speech, on 29 June 1972. This article seeks to explore these continuities over the past thirty-four years, tracing similarities and differences between the two speeches. Moreover, it also reflects on the earlier Joseph speech and subsequent Research Programme, to see where government policies on social exclusion might lead. The article argues that while earlier writers have acknowledged the intellectual debt that New Labour owes to Joseph, and noted similarities between current policy approaches to child poverty and earlier debates about transmitted deprivation, recent moves on social exclusion mean that these continuities are now more striking than ever before.     

Sentencing

While there is nearly unanimous agreement among social scientists that the defendant's prior record is important in explaining the sentence imposed on the defendant, there is little agreement on the "best" or most appropriate measure of prior record to use in examining sentence disparity. This study provides an assessment of the utility of 11 commonly used measures of prior record. We find that the various measures are not interrelated highly and thus necessarily are not interchangeable. We also find that the measures of prior record affect sentence severity differently and that the relationships between these measures and sentence severity varies for black and white defendants.