Facing the powers that be

Lobbyists, entrenched forces in congress and self-interested friends will try to stymie Clinton's efforts. A look at four key arenas of combat.     

Distributive and Procedural Justice in Seven Nations

The paper examines the impact of distributive justice and procedural justice variables on judgments in seven countries (Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Spain, and the United States). Subjects were presented with each of two experimental vignettes: one in which the actor unsuccessfully appeals being fired from his job and one in which the actor unsuccessfully goes to an employment agency to seek a job; they were asked to rate the justness of the outcome and how fairly the actor had been treated. The vignettes manipulated deservingness and need of the actor (distributive justice factors) and impartiality and voice in the hearing (procedural justice factors). Four hypotheses were tested: first, a distributive justice hypothesis that deservingness would be more important than need in these settings; second, a procedural justice hypothesis that the importance of voice and impartiality vary depending on the nature of the encounter and the forum in which it is resolved; third, because of their recent socialist experience, Central and Eastern European respondents make greater use of need information and less use of deservingness information than Western respondents; and fourth, that distributive justice and procedural justice factors interact. The distributive justice hypothesis is supported in both vignettes. The procedural justice hypothesis receives some support. Impartiality is more important in the first vignette and voice is more important in the second vignette. The interaction hypothesis was not supported in the first vignette, but does receive some support in the second vignette. The cultural hypothesis is not supported in either vignette. The implications for distributive and procedural justice research are discussed.     

NO place to hide: the unfeasibility of using an independent expert commission as a blame-avoidance mechanism in Westminster polities - the case of the Ontario Health Services Restructuring Commission

Abstract: The argument presented in this article is that the appointment of an ad hoc expert commission to carry out governance is unlikely to depoliticize difficult restructuring issues or to deflect blame from governments dealing with such problems in Westminster-style polities. Unlike in American-style presidential systems and parliamentary systems with proportional representation experiencing frequent minority governments, such commissions can never be truly independent as there are no serious checks on the government's ability to remake the agency, its mandate, its composition, nor even any barriers to the government's premature termination of an ad hoc expert commission's authority. When governments in a Westminster-style polity seek to establish the appearance that such a commission is an independent agency of governance they must work at cross-purposes to the basic rules for insuring accountability by giving such a body a very vague mandate. This will almost certainly lead to disputes between political actors and the commission over its powers and refocus blame on the government. The ministers of a government employing this strategy must also be extraordinarily careful so as not to engage in any activities that would undermine the ad hoc expert commission's already fragile claim to autonomy, otherwise the blame focused on the government will magnify even further. The difficulties involved in employing an ad hoc expert commission as a means to depoliticize decisions and as a blame-avoidance strategy for governments in Westminster-style polities are illustrated in the Ontario government's experience with the Health Services Restructuring Commission (hsrc).     

Thirty Years of Scholarly Influence in International Journals and Its Relation to the Most-Cited Scholars in Asian Criminology

Citation analysis provides a quantitative means of tracking the most influential scholars and works within a field. Despite this advantage, there is a dearth of research that provides more than a snapshot of influence over a relatively short time period. One exception is the citation analysis body of research conducted by Cohn and Farrington (1990, 2012), which has recently been expanded to include European (Cohn and Iratzoqui 2016) and Asian (Farrington et al. 2019) criminologies. The current paper presents a thirty-year analysis (1986–2015) of scholarly influence within four international journals (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, British Journal of Criminology, Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and Criminology), as well as an analysis of the Asian Journal of Criminology (AJC) over its first 10-year period (2006–2015). The main conclusions are that, while rankings over time are not generally consistent within journals, the most-cited scholars tend to remain highly ranked over time across the four main international journals. Furthermore, the most highly cited scholars in the four international journals were also highly cited in AJC. The most-cited works of the top scholars across all of the international journals, including AJC, covered four major areas, including developmental and life-course criminology, theoretical issues, statistics, and policy issues.

     

Who Are the Most-Cited Scholars in Asian Criminology Compared with Australia,New Zealand,North America,and Europe?

Asian Journal of Criminology - Asian criminology is a fast-growing area of criminological research, but its influence on the international criminological landscape is largely unknown. The current...     

An Integrated Model of Legal and Moral Reasoning and Rule-Violating Behavior: The Role of Legal Attitudes

Legal socialization theory predicts that attitudes mediate the relation between legal reasoning and rule-violating behavior [Cohn, E. S., & White, S. O. (1990). Legal Socialization: A Study of Norms and Rules. New York: Springer-Verlag]. Moral development theory predicts that moral reasoning predicts rule-violating behavior directly as well as indirectly [Blasi, A. (1980). Bridging moral cognition and moral action: A critical review of the literature. Psychological Bulletin, 88, 1–45]. We present and test an integrated model of rule-violating behavior drawing on both theories in a longitudinal study of middle school and high school students. Students completed questionnaires three times during the course of 1 year at 6-month intervals. Legal and moral reasoning, legal attitudes, and rule-violating behavior were measured at times one, two, and three respectively. Structural equation models revealed that while moral and legal reasoning were directly and indirectly related to rule-violating behavior among high school students, legal reasoning bore no direct relation to rule-violating behavior among middle school students. The implications for an integrated model of reasoning and rule-violating behavior are discussed.