When Do the Ends Justify the Means? Evaluating Procedural Fairness

How do people decide whether a political process is fair or unfair? Concerned about principles of justice, people might carefully evaluate procedural fairness based on the facts of the case. Alternately, people could be guided by their prior preferences, endorsing the procedures that produce favored policy outcomes as fair and rating those that generate disliked outcomes as unfair. Using an experimental design, we consider the conditions under which people use accuracy goals versus directional goals in evaluating political processes. We find that when procedures are clearly fair or unfair, people make unbiased assessments of procedural justice. When the fairness of a process is ambiguous, people are more likely to use their prior attitudes as a guide.     

Comment on Martin D. Abravanel's “Public knowledge of fair housing law: Does it protect against housing discrimination?"—Organize! the limits of public awareness in ensuring fair housing

Abstract

Public awareness may contribute to enforcement of fair housing law. But available resources would be more productively used if they were invested directly in more aggressive and innovative law enforcement activities. Emerging debates over land use practices, particularly those pertaining to sprawl and affordable housing, may create new avenues for fair housing activity. The overriding challenge for the fair housing community, however, is to organize an effective constituency that can demand greater attention to education, enforcement, or other actions to achieve fair housing goals.     

Where to Draw the Line? Is Efficiency Encroaching on a Fair Justice System?

The government is currently implementing an ambitious agenda of reforms to transform the justice system of England and Wales. The stated aim is to improve efficiency, primarily by utilising technology and bringing processes online where possible. The speed and ambition of the programme has led to concerns that the drive for efficiency is coming at the expense of ensuring a fair and effective justice system. This article suggests that the fundamental principles underpinning our justice system are at risk of being lost in the push for increased efficiency. It focuses on two specific proposals: increasing the use of video links, thus moving to virtual hearings as the default position for the majority of cases; and of automating the conviction process in certain criminal cases. It is argued that both proposals undermine the role of an independent judiciary in making fair and transparent decisions.     

Luck,opportunity and disability

This paper argues that luck egalitarianism, especially in the guise of equality of opportunity for welfare, is in tension with the ideal of fair equality of opportunity in three ways. First, equal opportunity for welfare is compatible with a caste system in employment that is inconsistent with open competition for positions. Second, luck egalitarianism does not support hiring on the basis of qualifications. Third, amending luck egalitarianism to repair this problem requires abandoning fair access to qualifications. Insofar as luck egalitarianism cannot support fair equality of opportunity, it cannot do justice to the claims of the disabled. Indeed, in the absence of fair equality of opportunity, disabled people are likely to be marginalized.     

Looking for a Jurisdiction for Somali Pirates

One of the surprising things about the resurgence of piracy in the Gulf of Aden is that there is not yet a clear standard of conduct when suspected pirates are eventually caught. There are many cases in which pirates have been released by the military navies that arrested them and other cases of excessive use of force. This article addresses the possibility of providing a fair trial to suspected pirates, also on the ground of new developments in establishing dedicated courts in states of the region. Judging suspected pirates presents a variety of problems associated to evidence collection, availability of witnesses and national laws to be applied. In spite of these difficulties, Western powers, which have invested so much in patrolling the Indian Ocean with their navies, have so far been unexpectedly reluctant to provide fair trials.     

Fair Housing After “Big Government”: How Tax Credits Are Reshaping the Legal Fight Against Racial Segregation

ABSTRACT

In June 2015, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 split decision, that facially neutral state policies and practices that unintentionally segregated minorities could violate the Fair Housing Act. This article draws on the Texas fair housing litigation to engage broader debates on fair housing as a legal framework, and its potential for disrupting or transforming patterns of structural inequality. Specifically, it examines how shifts in the ways that society designs and implements housing policies may encourage courts, advocates, and legal actors to think about fair housing issues in new ways. Moving beyond the emphasis on disparate impact, my findings elaborate on two mostly overlooked ways that LIHTC reshapes the legal battleground in the fight for fair housing, by opening contentious debate on (a) the state level of government, and (b) passive government administration of policies. I interpret these effects as unintended consequences of the gradual shift toward market-driven policies that allow officials to govern at a distance.     

Measuring the Financial Position of Municipalities: Numbers Do Not Speak for Themselves

There are several challenges facing someone who wants to know if a city's revenue structure is fair and reasonable. There are few generally accepted standards to use as benchmarks of financial condition, and there is no generally accepted methodology to assess relative financial position. This article reviews literature on financial position and condition, and then develops a methodological approach that creates a cohort of similar cities for benchmarking financial position, and then forming a basis for assessing financial condition. Based on a study of the financial position of a medium-sized city, the article offers lessons for practitioners and scholars.     

Civil Rights,Federalism, and the Administrative Process: Favorable Outcomes by Federal,State, and Local Agencies in Housing Discrimination Complaints

Some theorists argue that cooperative intergovernmental relations are critical to policy implementation in the United States. This assertion is explored in the context of fair housing enforcement by comparing favorable administrative outcomes in fair housing complaints at the federal, state, and local levels from 1989 to 2004. What conclusions can be drawn from this systematic comparison of intergovernmental enforcement in one policy area over an extended period of time? First, cooperative federalism works well in fair housing enforcement. Second, of special significance, state civil rights agencies resolve complaints in favor of complainants nearly as often as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and localities sometimes do so even more frequently.     

Membership, Fair Play, and Political Obligation

In recent years a number of theorists have maintained that the obligation to obey the law is best conceived and justified as an associational obligation. Not consent or utility or fair play but membership is the source of political obligation. These theorists are wrong, I argue, but they are wrong in interesting and illuminating ways. For an examination of the advantages and disadvantages of the membership account of political obligation underscores the merits of a rival account of obligation grounded in the principle of fair play.     

Proportional representation: An empirical evaluation of single-stage,non-ranked voting procedures

Rapoport, Felsenthal and Maoz (1988) have proposed three alternative methods to discern the fair proportion of seats that a party in a representative assembly ought to receive as a function of voters' preference orderings. All three methods assume that the ratio between the number of voters preferring party i over j to the number of voters preferring party j over i can be tested for consistency, and, if sufficiently consistent, can be appropriately scaled to discover the proportion of seats each party ought to receive. Using these methods as standards, we use exit-poll data gathered during the 1985 elections to the general convention of the Israeli General Federation of Labor (Histadrut) to examine the extent to which plurality- and approval-voting procedures provide a fair allocation of seats. The findings indicate that: (a) all three methods yield sufficiently consistent matrices of preference ratios; (b) the plurality- and the approval-voting procedures yielded significantly different proportional representations; (c) the proposed proportion of seats according to the three aggregation methods fall midway between the proportion of seats that the plurality and the approval procedures allocate. We discuss practical implications of these findings. Requests for reprints should be sent to: Professor Amnon Rapoport, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Davie Hall 013A, Chapel Hill, NC 27514.     

Fair treatment,fair play? The relationship between fair treatment perceptions,political trust and compliant and cooperative attitudes cross-nationally

Obtaining citizens’ voluntary compliance with political decisions is a fundamental democratic challenge. Fair treatment by public officials plays a key role in theoretical and empirical studies on citizens’ compliance and cooperation. Yet it is unclear whether citizens within different societies react to (un)fair treatment in the same way. Using multilevel structural equation modelling and multilevel regression analysis on the European Social Survey 2010–2 (N = 52,458), this article shows that perceptions of fair treatment by police officers are associated with higher levels of trust in political institutions and in turn stronger compliant and cooperative attitudes of citizens in 27 countries. Yet the link between perceptions of unfair treatment and institutional trust is stronger in countries in which fair behaviour is more prevalent. While fair treatment is often considered to be a universal norm affecting citizens in a uniform way, this article sheds light on important cross-national variations.     

The Fair Housing Act Today: Current Context and Challenges at 50

ABSTRACT

As is true for most legislation, the Fair Housing Act (FHA) was a product of its time; the legislation’s content, and even passage, was formed by dominant issues in housing markets and the country at that time. The context shaped the goals of the FHA and the strategies and tools employed under its auspices. Fifty years after the passage of the FHA, much of that context has changed. This commentary argues that changes in the context not only raise new fair housing challenges and create new gaps in our knowledge, but also may necessitate a fresh look at fair housing strategies and tools if they are to be effective at achieving the goals of the act. This commentary begins with a brief background on the FHA itself, the social context at the time of its writing, and its main goals. Next it lays out a few key changes in housing markets relevant for fair housing, highlighting challenges they may create and where research could be of greatest value. It then considers challenges arising from threats to two specific U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) fair housing rules seen by many as critical fair housing tools. The commentary ends with two examples of a “refresh,” where current context has shaped, or reshaped, a strategy to address today’s fair housing challenges.     

Is the allocation of voting power among EU states fair?

It has often been claimed that the current allocation of votes among EU states is not fair. In this paper we verify this assertion by carrying out an evaluation of the distribution of power among the member states. The results show that the current distribution of votes for the qualified majority does not lead to a fair distribution of power whatever definition of the EU is considered. It can not be claimed however that the current voting process has a systematic bias in favor of certain states. We also present a simple method to derive voting weights which lead to a fair allocation of power.     

“If it doesn't make sense it's not true”: how Judge Judy creates coherent stories through “common-sense” reasoning according to the neoliberal agenda

This study examines the American court show Judge Judy. Drawing on both conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis, this paper aims to show how ideological assumptions about how to be a “good citizen” manifest themselves at a turn-by-turn level in the interactions on Judge Judy and how they contribute to the co-construction of a new version of events. The microanalyses reveal how Sheindlin's strategic use of “common-sense reasoning” sets up a context and characterization of the opposing litigants. Sheindlin reframes complex issues as simple black-and-white stories. These new stories have a plain narrative line without the contingencies of everyday life and with clearly moral and immoral characters allowing her to pass a judgment that only seems fair.     

广西边疆圩市流通现代发展研究

边贸是一个国家对外贸易的重要内容,广西有“祖国南大门”之称,是中国与东盟陆上最便捷的通道．圩市是农村商品流通的载体,边疆圩市是促进毗邻国家边贸的重要平台。发展边疆圩市有利于边民之间的交流与合作、友谊与团结,有利于边疆地区民族团结与稳定。流通现代化是促进圩市发展、边贸市场升级和转型以及解决边疆“三农”问题的有效途径。     

Home mortgage lending by applicant race: Do HMDA figures provide a distorted picture?

Abstract

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 (HMDA) was designed to further fair access to mortgage credit and requires lenders to report such information as location, loan amount, income, and race and sex for each application. However, race is missing in a significant proportion of applications taken by mail or phone. Given the widespread use of HMDA data by lenders, community groups, researchers, and regulators and the importance of mortgage lending as a public policy issue, the strengths and shortcomings of these data must be clearly understood.

The main findings are that reported approval rates by race are significantly overstated for refinance and home improvement loans, while home purchase loans are little affected. A review of trends in how race is reported and in the technology of mortgage lending indicates that missing data on race will become a bigger and bigger problem in the near future.     

How campaigns promote the legitimacy of elections

Why do people see elections as fair or unfair? In prior accounts, evaluations of the election depend on people's candidate preferences, where supporters of the winning candidate tend to call the election fair while those on the losing side feel it was unfair. I argue that perceptions of election fairness reflect not just the election outcome, but also the campaign process. Using a set of multilevel models and data from the 1996–2004 American National Election Studies, I explore the consequences of campaign experiences in shaping people's evaluations of the fairness of a presidential election. I find that as campaign competition increases, people are less likely to translate their feelings about the candidates into their evaluations of the election. Rather than alienating citizens, competitive campaigns mitigate the effects of prior preferences in a way that promotes the legitimacy of elections.     

Electoral accountability in the developing world

Do citizens of the developing world behave as economic voters? Do they blame and reward incumbent governments for their perceived economic performance? In addressing these questions, the current paper fills an important void left by the extant literature by adopting a large-n approach with the use of public opinion survey data and by focusing on emerging democracies of the developing world. The proposed analysis develops a series of incumbent support models to assess the impact of economic assessments. It relies on the use of public opinion survey data from countries of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia, and the Arab world. The paper contributes to the extant literature at the empirical, methodological, and theoretical levels. Empirically, it provides a unique and systematic account of the phenomenon through a large-scale comparative approach. Theoretically, it contributes to the debate on the value of economic voting to explain electoral behavior in the developing world. Methodologically, it shows that using presidential approval is a fair alternative to vote choice and that a full model specification is not absolutely necessary to estimating the economic effect.     

Survival of the Fairest: Examining HUD Reviews of Assessments of Fair Housing

ABSTRACT

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule, arguably the most significant federal effort in a generation to address place-based disparities in access to opportunity and to advance fair housing. In 2018, HUD suspended the rule, it said in part because of the resources it was expending to implement it and in part because of the large share of municipal plans that HUD determined had failed to meet the rule’s requirements. In this article, we present the first analysis of the fair housing plans that HUD did not accept, examining how municipalities failed to meet the rule's requirements, what those failures imply about advancing fair housing, and the extent to which HUD’s enforcement strategy was working before the suspension. Our analysis shows that HUD engaged in detailed reviews of municipalities’ Assessments of Fair Housing and provided constructive feedback. The most common issue with which municipalities struggled was setting realistic goals that would actually advance fair housing and creating measurable metrics and milestones to gauge progress. Several municipalities neglected to conduct thorough regional analyses or analyses of all relevant disparities in access to opportunity. Both shortcomings reflect broader challenges municipalities face in advancing fair housing, particularly in identifying strategies that address interconnected causes of disparities in access to opportunity and in building regional support to address those causes.