The Strategic Logic of Credit Claiming: A New Theory for Anonymous Terrorist Attacks

In theory, terrorism is a political communication strategy for groups to convey their grievances and the costs of ignoring them. In practice, though, terrorist groups take responsibility for just a small portion of their attacks. Rather than getting credit for the violence, terrorist leaders generally deny their operatives committed it. This theoretical and empirical disconnect may explain why scholars have ignored the subject of unclaimed attacks despite these being the norm. With a mixed-methods research design, our study helps to fill this lacuna by proposing and testing a new theory to help account for variation in which attacks are claimed.     

RNICE Model: Evaluating the Contribution of Replication Studies in Public Administration and Management Research

Replication studies relate to the scientific principle of replicability and serve the significant purpose of providing supporting (or contradicting) evidence regarding the existence of a phenomenon. However, replication has never been an integral part of public administration and management research. Recently, scholars have called for more replication, but academic reflections on when replication adds substantive value to public administration and management research are needed. This article presents the RNICE conceptual model, for assessing when and how a replication study contributes knowledge about a social phenomenon and advances knowledge in the public administration and management literatures. The RNICE model provides a vehicle for researchers who seek to evaluate or demonstrate the value of a replication study systematically. The practical application of the model is illustrated using two published replication studies.     

Legislative Transparency and Credit Risk

Open governance requirements are designed to improve accountability, which implies that transparent governments are more trustworthy stewards of their publicly invested power. However, transparency may also reduce institutional effectiveness and inhibit political compromise, diminishing the capacity to manage resources responsibly. We assess empirical support for these competing perspectives in the context of American state legislatures, many of which have become exempt from state sunshine laws in recent decades. We leverage variation in the timing of these legislative exemptions to identify the effect of removing transparency in a crucial governing institution on investors’ risk perceptions of states’ general obligation bonds. Our analysis of these data during the period 1995–2010 suggests that removing legislative transparency reduces state credit risk. We conclude that while openness in government may be normatively desirable, shielding legislative proceedings from public view may actually be better for states’ debt repayment capacity, improving their overall fiscal health.     

The social sub-optimality of competitive elections

One of the common normative assumptions about elections is that competitive elections are inherently good, and non-competitive elections are problematic. This paper challenges that assumption. At the level of individual elections, competitive elections produce either sub-optimal results or trivially optimal results, but competitive elections are never uniquely optimal. In aggregation, competitive elections for a set of offices are inherently sub-optimal. From a procedural perspective, the circumstances in which competitive elections are appropriate are rare, and from a diagnostic perspective, we cannot conclude that there are problems in the electoral system based on a lack of competition. In the context of social choice theory, competitive elections are not inherently good.     

The relative electoral impact of central party co-ordination and size of party membership at constituency level

Over the past decade, clear evidence has been produced showing that effective constituency campaigning in British general elections can lead to better electoral performance. This evidence has challenged the received wisdom that only national campaigning is significant and that efforts at local level are meaningless rituals. Denver et al. have focused on the role of the national parties in strengthening local campaigns in target seats; Seyd and Whiteley, by contrast, have stressed the importance of local party membership. This article attempts to assess the relative electoral impact of national party co-ordination and constituency party membership and suggests that the impact of these two factors varies by party.     

Socioeconomic change and suicide: a time-series study from the Republic of Ireland

This ecological study examined the association between seven socioeconomic indicators (GDP, unemployment rate, female labor force participation rate, alcohol expenditure, marriage rate, percentage of births outside of marriage, and indictable crime rate) and total, male, and female rates of suicide and suicide plus undetermined death in Ireland during the period 1968-2000. Analysis of the data expressed as absolute values showed highly significant associations between the socioeconomic indicators and the total, male, and female suicide rates. However, these associations were explained by the strongly trended data. The trended nature of the data was removed by using year-to-year differences. Analysis of the first-differenced data showed that none of the socioeconomic indicators was associated with the total, male, or female suicide rates with the exception of indictable crime, which had a significant independent effect on the female suicide rate (coefficient = 2.0, p < .01) but not on suicide plus undetermined death. This study highlights the need to use econometric methods in time-trend analyses, the lack of age-sex specific exposure data in this area, and the challenge of understanding trends in suicide in their socioeconomic context.