Explaining “Pain and Suffering” Awards: The Role of Injury Characteristics and Fault Attributions

The present research explored factors thought to affect compensatory awards for non-economic ham (pain and suffering) in personal injury cases. Experiment 1 showed that the nature and severity of the plaintiffs injury had a strong effect on perceptions of the extent of harm suffered and on award amounts. The parties' relatively active or passive roles in causing the injury affected assessments of their degree of fault, but perceived fault had little influence on awards. Experiment 2 replicated with more varied cases the strong impact of injury severity on harm perception and on awards for pain and suffering. In both studies, the disability and the mental suffering associated with injuries were stronger predictors of awards than were pain and disfigurement.     

Discovering the Dark Side of Power: The Principal’s Moral Hazard in Political-Bureaucratic Relations

Principal agent (PA) is among the most prominent concepts for analyzing the relationship between politics and bureaucracy. Nonethelesss, the inherent bias of PA scholars to attribute moral hazard almost exclusively to the agent, usually referred to as “bureaucratic drift”, requires re-examination. Building on the spare literature in which moral hazard of the principal is considered, this paper provides empirical evidence for a neglected aspect of the PA concept. Three cases of German regulatory agencies responsible for drug control, financial services and rail safety are analyzed in critical situations which were largely perceived as bureaucratic failures. The analysis reveals that a good deal of these failures, ranging from negligence to suppressing crucial information, has to be attributed to the political principal. This is called the dark side of power because the intention is to shift blame or to dodge political responsibility. Turning conventional PA reasoning upside down, the conclusion is that the principal’s moral hazard should be considered more routinely as a potential explanation for political-bureaucratic interactions.     

The Two-Way Street: Government Shaping of Community-Based Advocacy

The interaction between government and community-based advocacy organisations is becoming complex and highly structured. While some analysts seek to explain such interplay within neo-Marxist or public choice frameworks, we argue the relationship is best understood as a two-way street, full of tensions but neither a conspiracy against the public interest nor part of a larger design to deradicalise social movements. Drawing on a wide range of Australian examples, but focusing in particular on peak women's and ethnic communities' organisations, we explore how social movements have been able to exert independent influence on the policy agenda.     

Alcohol: The gateway to other drug use among secondary-school students

The stepping-stone theory of progression into drug use is examined, based on the alcohol and other drug use of over 27,000 seventh-through eighth-grade students in New York State. The data show that students do not use illicit drugs unless they also use alcohol. White, black and Hispanic students all tend to initiate the use of drugs in the following order-alcohol, marijuana, pills, and hard drugs. Among blacks and Hispanics, pills are not as important a transition between marijuana and hard drugs as they are among whites. Cigarettes form an important step between alcohol and marijuana use for younger students, particularly for females. Since alcohol serves as the gateway to all other drug use, prevention approaches that control and limit alcohol use among adolescents may be warranted.He received his Ph. D. in Psychology for the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1976. His research interests are the social and psychological correlates of drinking.She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1983.     

From motherhood to sisterhood: Attitudes of australian women MPs to their roles

Women have entered Australian parliaments in increasing numbers over the past decade and now form over 9 per cent of MPs. Whether their presence will make any difference to the public agenda depends largely on how they view their roles and accountabilities. This study, based on survey and other evidence, suggests that Australian women MPs fall largely into three categories. termed here mothers, individualists and sisters. Historically the first women to enter parliaments were the mothers, and today there are still a number of women MPs who see their primary responsibility as defending the home and family. During the 1960s the individualists appeared, who believed that gender should be irrelevant in politics. Today, by far the largest group of women in Australian parliaments are the sisters, with a feminist orientation towards their roles. Their impact on the public agenda, in particular the setting up of mechanisms for monitoring the differential impact of public policy on women and men is summarised. While these women have indeed made a difference, they are still largely excluded from key economic policy-making arenas. This in turn has undermined some of the legislative and policy gains which have been made. The lack of bipartisanship on status of women issues also threatens the long-term future of feminist achievements.