(Non)Regulable avoidance and the perils of punishment

Efforts to avoid punishment are generally deemed undesirable and therefore punished or otherwise regulated. In reality, however, not all avoidance efforts are punishable or regulable, at least not to the same degree. For practical or sometimes constitutional reasons, certain efforts to avoid punishment, such as non-creation of incrementing evidence or zealous criminal litigation, are non-punishable. This paper examines whether and under what conditions it is wise to deter avoidance efforts in a setting with multiple avoidance activities, some of which are non-regulable/punishable. The main results of this paper are that deterring certain avoidance activities does not necessarily: (i) decrease the extent to which offenders engage in avoidance activities; and (ii) more importantly, improve deterrence of the principal crimes. Normatively, then, it might be better to let certain punishable avoidance activities go unpunished or, more surprisingly, even to subsidize them. This calls into question recent responses by lawmakers after evidentiary fouls, such as those at Enron, WorldCom and HealthSouth, to stiffen penalties for obstruction of justice.

Correction to: Gender,Race, and Intersectionality in Campaign Finance

Political Behavior - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09693-y     

Get in line: Do part-time legislatures use sunset laws to keep executive agencies in check

Sunset provisions are clauses embedded in legislation that cause a piece of legislation or a regulatory board to expire on a certain date unless the legislature takes affirmative action to renew the legislation or board. Supporters and legislators offer several reasons why sunset laws are valuable and useful. An article by Baugus and Bose (2015), reported on the king-and-council model of Congleton (2001), suggests that sunset laws are a key tool legislatures use in asserting themselves against an executive branch that often dominates state government. We investigate this possibility using empirical analysis, which suggests that part-time legislatures, specifically, a form of part-time legislature referred to as hybrid legislatures, are more prone to use sunset legislation as a tool to keep the executive preferences in check.     

Do Social Rights Affect Social Outcomes?

While the United Nations and NGOs are pushing for global judicialization of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCRs), little is known of their consequences. We provide evidence of the effects of introducing three types of ESCRs into the constitution: the rights to education, health, and social security. Employing a large panel covering annual data from 160 countries in the period 1960–2010, we find no robust evidence of positive effects of ESCRs. We do, however, document adverse medium‐term effects on education, inflation, and civil rights.     

Connecting the Candidates: Consultant Networks and the Diffusion of Campaign Strategy in American Congressional Elections

Modern American political campaigns are typically conceptualized as “candidate‐centered” and treated as conditionally independent in quantitative analyses. In reality, however, these campaigns are linked by professional consulting firms, which are important agents of campaign strategy diffusion within the extended party networks of the contemporary era. To test our hypothesis that consultants disseminate campaign strategies among their clients, we analyze new data on U.S. House elections derived from Federal Election Commission records. Using spatial autoregressive models, we find that candidates who share consultants are more likely to use similar campaign strategies than we would otherwise expect, conditional on numerous explanatory variables. These results, which largely withstand an extensive series of robustness and falsification tests, suggest that consultants play a key role in diffusing strategies among congressional campaigns.     

The Strength of Strong Ties: University Spin-offs and the Significance of Historical Relations

This article investigates the relationship between universities and academic spin-offs, with special emphasis on the antecedent conditions of, and the nature of the linkages that the spin-offs form, as well as the means for sustaining them. The present research uses an instrumental case study approach, and is also an instance of a collective case study as four companies of various size and activities have been studied together. The preliminary results indicate that the network relations are characterized by a small number of strong ties to universities, with a high degree of trust and informality. Although fruitful for the transfer of complex knowledge, the strength of the ties also make them difficult to substitute, which may lead to problems as the spin-offs are highly dependent on continued basic research support. This may in turn lead to implications for policy at university, as well as higher levels.     

A Practical View of Strategies for Improving Federal Technology Transfer

While great strides have been made in increasing the awareness of the significance of technology transfer among policymakers and regulators, much still remains to be done. Budgetary problems will not be short-term, and it is likely that the next steps in improving technology transfer must be taken through existing channels. This paper examines strategies for improving technology transfer which might be taken within the federal laboratories themselves, as well as strategies to be followed by government policymakers and private firms. Also examined are alternative measures of technology transfer activity.