COMMUNITY ACCOUNTABILITY,MINORITY THREAT,AND POLICE BRUTALITY: AN EXAMINATION OF CIVIL RIGHTS CRIMINAL COMPLAINTS*

A growing body of evidence shows that minorities are disproportionately the targets of police brutality, but important theoretical questions about the causes of that inequity remain unanswered. One promising line of research involves structural‐level analyses of the incidence of police brutality complaints; however, existing studies do not incorporate variables from alternative theoretical explanations. Drawing on the community accountability hypothesis and the threat hypothesis, we tested the predictions of two prominent structural‐level explanations of police brutality in a study of civil rights criminal complaints. The study included cities of 150,000+ population (n = 114). The findings reveal that two community accountability variables—ratio percent Hispanic citizens to percent Hispanic police officers and the presence of citizen review—were related positively to police brutality complaints, partially supporting that perspective. Two threat hypothesis measures of threatening people—percent black and percent Hispanic (in the Southwest)—were related positively to complaints, as predicted. The relative degree of support for the two hypotheses is assessed.     

Judicial Procedures as Instruments of Political Control: Congress's Strategic Use of Citizen Suits

Citizen suit provisions, which give proregulatory interests access to the federal courts, can be used by Congress to increase the courts' role in regulatory policy. I analyze 284 environmental regulation bills reported favorably out of committee and show that committee support for citizen suits is a function of the committee's policy goals and the political context in which the bills are generated. These findings indicate that Congress deliberately uses judicial procedures as instruments of political control and that scholars examining judicial policymaking must include legislative goals in the list of explanatory factors.     

Hedge Funds, the Deutsche Börse Affair and Predatory Anglo-American Capitalism

Boardroom trouble at Deutsche Börse, the company that operates Germany's main stock market, has recently provoked an important debate about competing capitalist models. Werner Seifert, Deutsche Börse's ousted Chief Executive, was eager to portray himself as the innocent victim of aggressive Anglo-American investors who had bought into his company but failed to understand its traditional operating ethos. In this, he was ably supported by key figures within the ruling Social Democratic Party, who, in order to shore up the party's core support, had increasingly come to blame overseas hedge funds for the development of German corporate governance models which prioritised profits over jobs. I review the SPD's structural reading of the Deutsche Börse affair, whilst comparing it to an alternative interest-based reading. The latter allows me to focus more closely on the issue which, more than any other, led to Seifert's downfall: his refusal to bow to the expressed interests of his own shareholders by pressing ahead, against their wishes, with a hostile bid for the London Stock Exchange. Seifert's eventual removal foreclosed the possibility of an integrated London-Frankfurt stock market and, somewhat ironically given the SPD's response to the affair, as a consequence it also prevented the entry of London's highly capitalised institutional investors into the German market for corporate control. The actions of Deutsche Börse's overseas shareholders might still be seen as evidence of a predatory Anglo-American capitalism. However, their successful removal of Werner Seifert may well have been responsible for temporarily keeping other financial predators at bay.     

Mapping EU agencies as political entrepreneurs

The European Union relies on decentralised agencies to implement important transnational regulations, such as certifying the safety of medicines. However, the authority of these agencies does not have ‘hard’ legal status and crucially depends on disseminating ideas and information effectively: what can be termed ‘political entrepreneurship’. This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the political entrepreneurship of EU agencies by constructing a conceptual typology of entrepreneurial strategies. Drawing conceptually on transnational public administration, a new database is constructed of the ‘entrepreneurship’ of 33 EU agencies in 2014 based on their media communication activities, face‐to‐face networking in workshops and collaborations, and knowledge dissemination and ‘learning’ exercises. This is mapped against the political salience of agencies in the European Parliament and media. The mapping exercise shows four types of entrepreneurial strategies covering the population of EU agencies: technical functional, insulating, network‐seeking and politicised. The typology is validated through semi‐structured interviews in 11 EU agencies, showing the core characteristics of each type of strategy. The article concludes by arguing that this typology provides an important addition to existing categories of EU agencies based on autonomy and accountability, and advocates a future research strategy examining the interaction between agencies’ entrepreneurial strategies and the expectations and reactions of stakeholder audiences.     

Chinese Oppression in Xinjiang,Middle Eastern Conflicts and Global Islamic Solidarities among the Uyghurs

Individuals in Xinjiang are not merely passive recipients of state representations and policies; they are also agents capable of finding subtle means of self-representation. These symbolic oppositions are necessarily fluid: they emerge, adapt and disappear in response to the changing political environment. Currently, some individuals are demonstrating symbolic resistance to the state through the vehicle of Islam itself: a return to the mosque and orthodox religious practice. This article explores the nature and source of the current Islamic renewal in Xinjiang, conceived (though not exclusively) as a vehicle of symbolic opposition to perceived Muslim oppression at national and global levels. In discussing the international dimension, I explore the role played by imported Islamic materials, pilgrimage, study abroad, and, above all, the national and global mass media.     

The Birth and Rebirth of the Liberal Democrats

This article tells the story of the Liberal Democrats from the final days of the Liberal/SDP Alliance to the general election of 1992. Drawing on the author's roles as an MP and as chair of the party's communications operations, it examines the factors that contributed to the party's troubled birth in 1988, and gives an insider's view on how the party survived to grow in the years after 1990. Key issues include the branding of the party and the development of its policy of paying for improvements to education through increasing income tax. It also lays stress on the importance of the party's activist base and its central campaigns expertise in not only surviving in local elections, but also in securing key by-election victories.     

Books: International Relations

D. Allen and A. Pijpers (eds), European Foreign Policy-Making and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1984)
Sydney D. Bailey (ed.), The Making of Resolution 242 (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985
David Howard Bain, Sitting in Darkness, Americans in the Philippines (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984
C. Coker, The Future of the Atlantic Alliance (London, Macmillan, with the Royal United Services Institute, 1985)
C. Rose, Campaigns Against Western Defence (London, Macmillan, with the Royal United Services Institute, 1985)
G. R. Berridge and A. Jennings (eds), Diplomacy at the UN (London, Macmillan, 1958)
John Burton, Global Conflict: The Domestic Sources of International Crisis (Brighton, Wheatsheaf Books for The Center for International Development, University of Maryland, 1984)
B. J. C. Kercher and D. J. Moss (eds), Shadow and Substance in British Foreign Policy 1895–1939 (Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 1984)
D. Holloway and J. M. 0. Sharp (eds), The Warsaw Pact (London, Macmillan, 1984)
W. R. Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East 1945–1951: Arab Nationalism, The United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984)
Brian Murphy, The World Wired Up: Unscrambling the New Communications Puzzle (London, Comedia, 1983)
Steve Smith (ed.), International Relations: British and American Perspectives (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, in association with the British International Studies Association, 1985)
I. Wallerstein, The Politics of the World Economy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984)