Accountability, New Public Management, and the Problems of the Child Support Agency

This paper seeks to evaluate the accountability of Next Steps Agencies through the medium of a case study of the Child Support Agency (CSA). The CSA was widely considered to offer a substandard service to its customers. It was the subject of multiple reports by the House of Commons Social Services Select Committee, the Select Committee on the Parliamentary Commissioner, and the Public Accounts Committee. In addition, these committees had at their disposal internal reports from an adjudicator and the Child Support commissioner. The interlock between internal and external machinery for accountability is also considered.     

Parliamentary Question Times: How Legislative Accountability Mechanisms Affect Mass Political Engagement

Over time, people have been losing interest in politics. Some believe this to be one of the largest challenges facing democracy today. What causes some citizens to be more engaged than others? This paper argues that national-level political institutions are important in shaping the tone of political debate between election campaigns. Some countries have regular, accessible debates between political leaders; in others the debate is rarer and harder to follow. Parliamentary question time (QT) is a prominent forum for regular elite-level debate, and QTs featuring open, accessible debate should help induce citizens to engage with politics by providing them with an information-laden political spectacle. The data show that these open QTs are associated with higher levels of political knowledge, partisanship, and turnout.     

Private Power, Public Interest: An Examination of Search Engine Accountability

As information becomes a critical commodity in modern society,the issue is raised whether the entities that manage accessto information, that are tools for public discourse and democracy,should be accountable to the public. The Internet has transformedhow we communicate, and search engines have emerged as managersof information, organizing and categorizing content in a coherent,accessible manner thereby shaping the Internet user's experience.This article examines whether search engines should have publicinterest obligations. In order to answer this question, thisarticle first examines comparative public interest regulatorystructures, and the growing importance of the Internet to publicdiscourse. Then examined is how the algorithmic designs andmanual manipulation of rankings by search engines affects thepublic interest without a sufficient accountability structure.Finally, the values necessary to a public interest frameworkare suggested.     

Police Accountability and the Media

This article explores First Amendment theory and the role of the media in generating police accountability through public understanding of police organizations. We argue that free speech theory can and should look beyond "abridgment" issues and raise questions about the civic responsibility of the press to inform the public about key governmental institutions. The media's concern with crime news, we found, vastly overshadows its coverage of the police us a complex, in-teresting, and expensive governmental agency. Reporting about police institutional patterns and policies contributes more toward fulfilling First Amendment values-not only that of "checking" police excesses, but of facilitating the goal of enlightened citizen participation in local government.
Those who won our independence believed…that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject.     

Public Mass Murderers and Federal Mental Health Background Checks

The litany of public mass murders, from Aurora, Newtown, Charleston, Las Vegas, and Parkland to less well‐known incidents that occur yearly, has focused national attention on federally mandated mental health background checks of prospective gun purchasers. The call has been to put more gun‐disqualifying mental health records into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System database to prevent “deranged” murderers from buying guns and running amok. Our study examines whether increasing the robustness of the mental health background database will likely prevent potential public mass murderers from buying guns. Building on research that shows that serious mental illness contributes little to the risk of interpersonal violence and, further, that few persons with serious mental illness acquire gun‐disqualifying mental health records, we examine whether public mass murderers are among the small percentage of those with serious mental illness who do have gun‐disqualifying mental health records. Using a large sample of 106 US offenders who used a firearm to commit a public mass murder from 1990 to 2014, we find that half of the offenders had a history of mental illness or mental health treatment but that less than 5 percent had gun‐disqualifying mental health records. Implications of these findings and recommendations for further research are discussed.     

论“公共利益”的立法定义及其判定问题

"公共利益"是个非常重要的法律概念,但要科学地制订立法定义却有一定理论难度。要克服这种困难,应采用分散立法的思路和"递归定义"的模式。这样,在《物权法》领域可将"公共利益"界定为:"兴办公共事业的需要,实现国家规划的需要,以及其他由人民政府建议、同级人民代表大会审议通过、并报上级人民政府批准的客观需要。"此外,还应充分研究"公共利益"的判定问题,以便建立从立法定义到社会实践的桥梁和司法保障体系。     

社会转型与广东公安现代化问题研究要论

社会转型是改革开放以来社会主义现代化建设所表现出来的典型特征。从这一视角研究公安现代化,即是从总体特征上把握公安现代化。从社会转型研究广东公安现代化问题,是一种以公安现代化的典型个案来把握公安现代化的本质。这种研究具有理论和实践双重意义。在理论上,它可以深入把握公安现代化遵循的基本规律,丰富和发展公安学基础理论;在实践上,对公安现代化本质和规律的把握,可以为公安现代化实践的自觉开展提供必要的理论参考,尽量少走弯路。     

“从事公务”问题刍议——由医生利用处方权收取回扣行为定性问题引发的思考

国家机关或者国有公司、企业、事业、人民团体的正式职员 ,不论是从事组织、领导、监督等公共事务的管理工作 ,还是从事具体的业务、技术或劳务工作 ,只要是代表国有单位 ,以国有单位名义行事 ,并由国有单位承担其行为的法律后果 ,就是代表国有单位从事公共事务 ,就是国家工作人员。     

Holding to Account a Possible European Public Prosecutor Supranational Governance and Accountability Across Diverse Legal Traditions

The Lisbon Treaty provides a legal basis for the Member States of the European Union (EU) to establish a European Public Prosecutor (EPP) with competence to prosecute, in the courts of the Member States, crimes against the financial interests of the Union. Article 86 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, provides that the Member States may unanimously, or through flexible cooperation where nine Member States agree, establish such a European-level prosecution body, with the possibility for its powers to be extended by unanimity to include serious crime having a cross border dimension or affecting more than one Member State. Within the legal traditions of the Member States, means of holding prosecution authorities to account vary considerably. Probably the strongest form of accountability exists in the civil law tradition of Member States that permit appeals to judicial bodies for decisions not to prosecute, which contrasts with the traditional common law reluctance to even give reasons for not prosecuting. Similarly, the ways in which prosecution authorities interact or overlap with police functions, and thus with general mechanisms of police and/or bureaucratic accountability, differ. Some of the particular features of EU cooperation suggest additional accountability issues, notably, questions concerning competence spill-over and problems of remoteness. This paper seeks to address how to conceptualise governance and accountability of a possible EPP outside of the context of a trial (the latter entailing a type of open legal accountability that can be studied in its own right) and including the question of the definition of competences.     

关于预防和减少公安信访的思考

全国公安机关开展的“开门接访”活动对于依法处理积留的信访问题起到了显著的效果,但要从根本上解决公安信访问题,关键是要加强公安法制建设,完善监督机制,规范公安执法活动,大力整治公安民警在执法活动中存在的突出问题,从源头预防和减少公安信访问题的发生。     

Accountability in the Regulatory State

Accountability has long been both a key theme and a key problem in constitutional scholarship. The centrality of the accountability debates in contemporary political and legal discourse is a product of the difficulty of balancing the autonomy given to those exercising public power with appropriate control. The traditional mechanisms of accountability to Parliament and to the courts are problematic because in a complex administrative state, characterized by widespread delegation of discretion to actors located far from the centre of government, the conception of centralized responsibility upon which traditional accountability mechanisms are based is often fictional. The problems of accountability have been made manifest by the transformations wrought on public administration by the new public management (NPM) revolution which have further fragmented the public sector. In this article it is argued that if public lawyers are to be reconciled to these changes then it will be through recognizing the potential for additional or extended mechanisms of accountability in supplementing or displacing traditional accountability functions. The article identifies and develops two such extended accountability models: interdependence and redundancy     

公共空间运用大规模监控的法理逻辑及限度——基于个人信息有序共享之视角

为应对现代化进程中的社会风险,安抚公众对风险的恐慌情绪,公共空间大规模监控随之诞生,并迅速在现实社会和网络空间中全面运用。公共治理不能取安全保障而舍隐私保护,公共空间大规模监控的运用并非以牺牲隐私权为代价,而是在保障安全法益的同时兼顾隐私法益的保护。在此既保障安全,又保护隐私的法理念下,公共空间大规模监控的运用体现了风险治理从个人本位走向社会本位的转变趋势,并促进了个人信息保护从自主支配到有序共享的逻辑转换。为寻求安全保障与隐私保护之间的平衡路径,在公共空间合理运用大规模监控措施,就必须加强信息收集、存储、使用的阶段性控制,建立个人信息合理使用制度,实现个人信息的有序共享。     

Accountability in the Internet of Things

Accountability of governing bodies in the Internet of Things (IoT) is of major importance and requires a partly different approach than applied in the (general) Internet. Improving accountability makes the implementation of new general principles necessary in order to provide for a stable and foreseeable legal framework on which businesses can rely. In particular, standards need to be introduced that hold governing bodies accountable, information should be made more readily available and beneficiaries of accountability must be able to impose some sort of sanction on the accountable in case of non-compliance. Improving accountability by creating such framework also supports the betterment of security in the Internet of Things.     

我国行政问责制的实践反思

行政问责制是建设责任政府、法治政府、民主政府和效能政府的重要保障。自2003年＂非典＂之后,我国政坛掀起了一场迅猛的＂问责风暴＂,取得了一大批问责成果,然而,在实践过程中却凸显出一系列亟待解决的问题。因此,必须完善行政问责制度,以确保政府部门及官员真正做到有权必有责、用权受监督、违法受追究,由此建立起廉洁、高效的责任政府和服务型政府。