Cost–benefit analysis: New foundations on shifting sand

New Foundations of Cost–Benefit Analysis, by Matthew Adler and Eric Posner, represents the most ambitious and credible effort to date to build a solid theoretical defense of the use of cost–benefit analysis (CBA) in evaluating government regulation. In this review, three cost–benefit “skeptics” offer their reactions to this ambitious and important book. We note its virtues – its humility, its scrupulousness, its open‐mindedness. We also explore its vices. If preferences are to be “laundered,” is it intellectually defensible to remove the bad but not consider adding the good? Does Adler's and Posner's welfarism really play the limited role they suppose, or does it risk “crowding out” other important deontological and distributional values? If CBA is merely a decision procedure that provides an imperfect proxy of welfare – the moral criterion we really care about – how do we know that the proxy it provides in practice will actually be accurate enough to be useful? Isn't this at bottom an empirical question that cannot be answered by this thoroughly theoretical book? If CBA is no more than an imperfect proxy for welfare, then alternative imperfect decision procedures may perform better in the real world.     

Regulation by generalization

Both criminal and regulatory laws have traditionally been skeptical of what Jeremy Bentham referred to as evidentiary offenses – the prohibition (or regulation) of some activity not because it is wrong, but because it probabilistically (but not universally) indicates that a real wrong has occurred. From Bentham to the present, courts and theorists have worried about this form of regulation, believing that certainly in the criminal law context, but even with respect to regulation, it is wrong to impose sanctions on a “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” theory of governmental intervention. Yet, although this kind punishment by proxy continues to be held in disrepute both in courts and in the published work, we argue that this distaste is unwarranted. Regulating – even through the criminal law – by regulating intrinsically innocent activities that probabilistically, but not inexorably, indicate not‐so‐innocent activities is no different from the vast number of other probabilistic elements that pervade the regulatory process. Once we recognize the frequency with which we accept probabilistic but not certain burdens of proof, probabilistic but not certain substantive rules, and probabilistic but not certain pieces of evidence, we can see that defining offenses and regulatory targets in terms of non‐wrongful behavior that is evidence of wrongful behavior is neither surprising nor inadvisable.     

Infinitely repeated contests: How strategic interaction affects the efficiency of governance

Contests over the scope and strength of regulation and governance are commonplace – and commonly repeated. The same players vie for the same government prize year after year: for example, environmental standards, government contracts, research grants, and public good provision. The open question is whether more rents are dissipated in repeated regulatory contests than onetime competitions. This question matters for regulation and governance because societies should design policies to waste the fewest scarce resources. According to some, the answer is “no”, but others say “yes”– more resources are wasted when people compete repeatedly for the same government prize. Herein, we use two game theoretic equilibrium concepts to help untangle the answer. Our results suggest non‐myopic contestants are more likely to behave as partners than rivals – provided the context is relatively sterile. Several common complications help break up the tacit partnership, including a disparity in relative ability, a shrinking prize, and additional players.     

Regulatory capabilities: A normative framework for assessing the distributional effects of regulation

This paper develops the normative concept of “regulatory capabilities.” It asserts that nobody – individuals, groups, or entities – should be subjected to a regulatory regime without some freedom to determine its nature. Self‐determination in this context means the ability to accept or reject a regulatory regime imposed by others or to develop viable alternative approaches. We use the term “regulatory capabilities” to capture the importance of enabling conditions for regulatory self‐determination. This is particularly important in the transnational context where private, hybrid public–private, and public actors compete for influence, shape domestic regulation, and, in doing so, limit the scope for democratic self‐governance. In short, this paper seeks to contribute to the general debate on the normative foundations of and the requisite conditions for transnational regulation and governance.     

Secularism vs. Post-Secularism: A Critical Examination of Cooke’s Post-Secular Alternative

In recent work, Maeve Cooke has criticised Jürgen Habermas’s post-metaphysical model in order to motivate an alternative “post-secular” conception of the state, which involves the replacement of the “institutional translation proviso” with the “nonauthoritarian reasoning requirement”. I provide a qualified defence of the Habermasian model by arguing that it does not lead to the kind of negative consequences regarding legitimacy and solidarity Cooke attributes to it. This, in turn, means that Cooke’s proposal for the secular foundation of political authority on a post-secular basis is insufficiently motivated. In the process, I argue that the point of departure for the debate about religion in the public sphere shared by both Habermas and Cooke – the picture of the “total” religious citizen – should be rejected because it presupposes an overly simplistic view of religions and religious identities.     

Building European Union capacity to manage transboundary crises: Network or lead‐agency model?

In recent years, the European continent has witnessed a substantial number of “transboundary crises” – crises that cross geographical borders and affect multiple policy domains. Nation states find it hard to deal with such crises by themselves. International cooperation, thus, becomes increasingly important, but it is not clear what shape or form that cooperation should take. This article explores the growing role of the European Union (EU) in managing transboundary crises. More specifically, it reflects on the different ways in which the expanding contours of the EU's emerging crisis capacity can be organized. Using three “performative dimensions” – sense‐making, coordination, and legitimacy – the article discusses the possible advantages and disadvantages of a decentralized, network model and compares it with a more centralized, lead‐agency model. It concludes that the current network model is a logical outcome of the punctuated and fragmentary process through which EU crisis management capacities have been created. It also notes that the shortcomings of this model may necessitate elements of a lead‐agency model. Such “agencification” of networks for transboundary crisis management may well lead to a hybrid model that is uniquely suited for the peculiar organizational and political creature that the EU is.     

Of Two Minds,But One Heart: A Good “Gut” Feeling Moderates the Effect of Ambivalence on Attitude Formation and Turnout

Popular psychological accounts argue that successful candidates address their appeals to citizens’ “hearts” rather than their “heads.” Yet research on campaigns shows that candidates win elections by getting voters to think about particular issues—especially issues that create ambivalence in the minds of opposition supporters. This article helps to reconcile these “heart‐centered” and “head‐centered” accounts of preference formation during campaigns. An original experiment and ANES data analyses (1980–2004) show that a “good gut feeling” toward a candidate helps citizens to overcome the paralyzing effect of ambivalence on attitude formation and turnout. And, since turnout is most tenuous among those with lower income, this is where the effect is most pronounced. Since Democratic candidates rely disproportionately on support from these lower‐income voters, it is particularly important that they inspire positive affect among latent supporters.     

What is Issue Competition? Conflict,Consensus and Issue Ownership in Party Competition

Empirical assessments of issue competition lack both conceptual precision in the use of the concept of “policy issue”, and sufficient studies integrating both salience and positional perspectives. This article specifies an operational definition of a “policy issue” suited for the analysis of issue competition in the electoral arena and beyond, and proposes a typology of electoral issues that takes into account the two sides of issue competition – the decision to address an issue, and the adoption of a diverging or similar position on it. This typology allows distinguishing proprietal, consensual, blurred and conflictual issues. The framework is illustrated with an analysis of EU-related issues in the electoral manifestos of British, French and German parties. This source did not enable us to identify any blurred issue, but our exploratory study delivers several conclusions regarding the other issue types. Proprietal issues appear to be marginal, indicating that parties tend to devote attention to the same issues and that issue ownership is highly contested. We further observe a primacy of consensus in EU-related discourses, especially among governing parties.     

Deictic use as a threshold for imaginative thinking: a Peircean perspective

This investigation traces the ontogeny of the use of “I” and how its symbolic use promotes imaginative thinking. Peirce's triadic system is contrasted with Vygotsky's binary system to highlight the import of Thirdness in characterizing the ontogeny of person deictics within conversational roles. Person deictics, such as “I”, are first indexes. Later when their social function/meaning is apprehended, they serve as symbols as well; still later they are used psychologically in self to self monologues, and acquire distinctive interpretants when used unconventionally. Early indexical uses of “I” are non-symbolic – “I” referring to self only absent recognition of conversational roles. “I” is employed symbolically when its referent shifts and when its invariant meaning (speaker) is apprehended. Person deictics enhance the emergence of imagination when the symbolic use transcends their inter-psychological regulation through human to human conversation to their intra-psychological function in self to self discourse. Extension of functional roles (speaker/listener) to dolls/puppets (in representational play scenarios) constitutes an extended use of the symbolic function because inanimates cannot assume conversational roles; and such use triggers the association of different interpretants to the category of deictic use. The symbolic use of “I” as speaker facilitates apprehension of self as object, which is a major determinant of when in ontogeny children extend the use of person deictics from Dynamic to Final interpretants.     

Congressional committees as users of analysis

Structural arrangements in the Congress work against the use of analysis, but newer developments, such as growth in staff professionalism and activity of the congressional support agencies, tend to promote it. Interviews with committee staff show that they are aware of much analysis, use it primarily for political advantage, but that they also take it seriously as warning of problems and as guidance on particular issues. Staff value information more when they know and trust its source and understand its political motivations. The use of analysis to reconceptualize problems is not much in evidence, perhaps because such “enlightenment” takes place elsewhere and filters into the Congress through informal channels.     

Regulating business or policing crime? Tracing the policy convergence between taxation and crime control at the local level

Policing is commonly associated with street‐level crime, whereas regulation is instead associated with the complexities of business and market governance. However, this distinction has been questioned by recent research and it seems that the worlds of regulation and policing are tending to merge. Still, little is known about how this convergence is unfolding. By following the intersection of two international policy‐level processes – the financialization of organized crime and the upgraded monitoring of tax evasion – down to the level of organizational practice in the Swedish restaurant trade, this article contributes to an understanding of the institutional dynamic behind the recent convergence. At the same time, it discusses the conceptual relationship between policing and regulation, and the counter‐arguments that may be needed to overcome the distinction between the two. I specifically address the neglected issue of the differential social valuation of “crime” and “business,” and find that it is relativized by a common focus on unreported transactions.     

Is There a “Workable” Race‐Neutral Alternative to Affirmative Action in College Admissions?

The 2013 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin case clarified when and how it is legally permissible for universities to use an applicant's race or ethnicity in its admissions decisions. The court concluded that such use is permissible when “no workable race‐neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity.” This paper shows that replacing traditional affirmative action with a system that uses an applicant's predicted likelihood of being an underrepresented racial minority as a proxy for the applicant's actual minority status can yield an admitted class that has a lower predicted grade point average and likelihood of graduating than the class that would have been admitted using traditional affirmative action. This result suggests that race‐neutral alternatives may not be “workable” from the university's perspective.     

Developing a rhetorical analysis of racist humour: examining anti-black jokes on the Internet

Racist humour is frequently the subject of media and public debate in relation to issues of offence and acceptability. Despite this, little has been done to analyse it or its relationship to other forms of racism. I argue that an analysis of racist humour needs to account for the rhetorical structures of humour – to consider humour as a rhetorical device similar to metaphor or metonym – that has a persuasive potential. Using jokes from four US websites, the rhetorical aspects of humour are unpacked through the use of rhetorical discourse analysis and semiotic theories of humour. I then identify an important effect of racist humour. Zygmunt Bauman's ideas on the problem of ambivalence for dichotomous discourse and category formation are employed to argue that racist humour expresses racist dichotomies and has the potential, among others, to “hide” the ambivalence to which such dichotomies are prone. The article then considers the meaning and ambivalence of less severe racist joking.     

U.S. Tobacco Control: Public Health,Political Economy,or Morality Policy?

Tobacco control policy usually has been framed in terms of public health and political economy, but it also has been called a morality issue. Through a systematic historical analysis, this paper examines dimensions of morality policy and evaluates tobacco control in the United States for its fit with those characteristics. Moral concerns have been a part of tobacco control policy at certain times, first in the early twentieth century, and, more recently, since the mid‐1980s with the rise of “denormalization” of tobacco as a goal of some antitobacco organizations. Drawing from recent studies of other “morality” policy issues, it argues that tobacco control is a “blended” issue, one which can take on different dimensions depending on successful interest group framing. The adoption of Healthy Public Policy as a governmental goal has coincided with a movement toward a “secular morality” in the political culture, facilitating a broader appeal to the public.     

Comment on Scott A. Bollens's “In through the back door: Social equity and regional governance”

Abstract

The resurgence in regionalism is not coming about primarily because cities and suburbs see themselves as interdependent competitors in the global economy, as argued in Scott A. Bollens's “In Through the Back Door: Social Equity and Regional Governance.” Instead, enough communities are finding tax equity programs, land use measures, and cooperative governance in their own self‐interest to create gentle progress toward regional equity. However, regionalism lags in ending concentrated poverty and racial segregation because few civil rights organizations are raising these issues as fundamental to a regional agenda. The race issue is not being raised because of lack of understanding and because of competing visions on how to do it.     

How to humiliate and shame: a reporter's guide to the power of the mugshot

The judicial photograph – the “mugshot” – is a ubiquitous and instantly recognisable form, appearing in the news media, on the internet, on book covers, law enforcement noticeboards and in many other mediums. This essay attempts to situate the mugshot in a historical and theoretical context to explain the explicit and implicit meaning of the genre as it has developed, focussing in particular on their use in the UK media in late modernity. The analysis is based on the author's reflexive practice as a journalist covering crime in the national news media for 30 years and who has used mugshots to illustrate stories for their explicit and specific content. The author argues that the visual limitations of the standardised “head and shoulders” format of the mugshot make it a robust subject for analysing the changing meaning of images over time. With little variation in the image format, arguments for certain accreted layers of signification are easier to make. Within a few years of the first appearance of the mugshot form in the mid-19th century, it was adopted and adapted as a research tool by scientists and criminologists. While the positivist scientists claimed empirical objectivity we can now see that mugshots played a part in the construction of subjective notions of “the other”, “the lesser” or “sub-human” on the grounds of class, race and religion. These dehumanising ideas later informed the theorists and bureaucrats of National Socialist ideology from the 1920s to 1940s. The author concludes that once again the mugshot has become, in certain parts of the media, a signifier widely used to exclude or deride certain groups. In late modernity, the part of the media that most use mugshots – the tabloid press and increasingly tabloid TV – is part of a neo-liberal process that, in a conscious commercial appeal to the paying audience, seeks to separate rather than unify wider society.     

Global governance of training standards in an outsourced labor force: The training double bind in seafarer license and certification assessments

The shipping industry is among the most globalized of all industries and is characterized by complex modular supply chains, including a largely outsourced labor force of “just‐in‐time” casualized workers from developing countries and the transitional East European states. Despite long‐standing efforts by international bodies to standardize and regulate the education and training of seafarers, variations in practices and standards persist. Employers exercise contradictory influences on education and training providers, on the one hand demanding the urgent provision of more recruits (encouraging corner‐cutting), and on the other complaining about the poor quality of recruits received (urging crackdowns on poor quality providers and more rigorous examinations) – the training double bind. This paper reflects on these issues through the study of the problematic use of computerized assessments in seafarer examinations, drawing upon findings from a study involving research in six different case study countries providing maritime labor and interviews with stakeholders.     

Compliance costs,regulation, and environmental performance: Controlling truck emissions in the US

When explaining regulatory policymaking and the behavior of regulated business firms, scholars have supplemented economic models by emphasizing the role of public‐regarding entrepreneurial politics and of normative pressures on firms. This article explores the limits of such entrepreneurial politics and “social license” pressures by examining regulation of emissions from diesel powered trucks in the US. We find that the economic cost of obtaining the best available control technology – new model lower emissions engines – has: (i) limited the stringency and coerciveness of direct regulation of vehicle owners and operators; (ii) dwarfed the reach and effectiveness of the governmental programs that subsidize the purchase of new less polluting vehicles; and (iii) elevated the importance of each company’s “economic license”– as opposed to its “social license”– in shaping its environmental performance. The prominence of this “regulatory compliance cost” variable in shaping both regulation and firm behavior, we conclude, is likely to recur in highly competitive markets, like trucking, that include many small firms that cannot readily either afford or pass on the cost of best available compliance technologies.     

Riding the Wave: World Trade and Factor‐Based Models of Democratization

Studies of “waves” of regime change, in which large numbers of countries experience similar political transitions at roughly similar periods of time, though once popular, have fallen from favor. Replacing the “third wave” arguments are several competing models relating domestic social structure—specifically, the distribution of income and factor ownership—to regime type. If any of these distributive models of regime type is correct, then global trade has an important explanatory role to play. Under factor‐based models, changes in the world trading system will have systematic effects on regime dynamics. Trade openness determines labor's factor income and ultimately its political power. As world trade expands and contracts, countries with similar labor endowments should experience similar regime pressures at the same time. We propose a novel empirical specification that addresses the endogeneity and data‐quality problems plaguing previous efforts to examine these arguments. We investigate the conditional impact of the global trading system on democratic transitions across 130 years and all of the states in the international system. Our findings cast doubt on the utility of factor‐based models of democratization, despite their importance in fueling renewed interest in the topic.     

Development and planning of sustainable airports

Air transport is considered an important part of the transportation infrastructure and it has a great impact on urbanisation as well as long‐term economic growth. Airports significantly add to local economy and facilitate a country's integration into the global economy and also provide social benefits to the society. However, together with the socioeconomic benefits, airports adversely affect to the surrounding environments, ecology and society. Some of the main concern, that is, emission from aircraft, noise while take‐off and landing of aircraft, land use, waste disposal and energy consumption, are raised with respect to airport's functioning which requires the attention of the regulatory authorities. The authorities to find the balance approach for the development of airports and to minimise the unfavourable consequences. Therefore, the efforts to be made to develop the “sustainable airports”. “Sustainable development” practises in the airports, improves the social, financial and operational benefits of the airport and also lessen the negative impacts on the environment. After understanding the concept of “Sustainability”, next challenge is to make airport sustainable. The main objective of the article is to find, how to make airport sustainable, when it is called that the airport is a “sustainable airport”. After reviewing the relevant literatures, it may be concluded that “sustainable airports” can be developed by incorporating the sustainability concept in to the airport planning and then taking care of the airport sustainability issues and barriers and airport sustainability components, that is, policy making, commerce, social responsibility, environmental and service quality.