Is medical care different? Old questions, new answers

This paper examines whether changes in medical markets may be making them more like other markets. The emergence of HMOs and other managed care systems appears to have increased the consumer's potential ability to make better comparative judgments about the price and quality of medical care, and also seems to have made medical care more like other goods. However, the evidence that medical care is a "reputation good" suggests that it is, in this respect, different from other goods. Finally, the social concerns about medical care use necessarily make medical care different.     

Is health care different? Popular support of federal health and social policies

Over the past several years there has been a striking increase in policy-makers' attention to health care reform. This paper explores whether there has been a corresponding shift in popular attitudes and identifies factors that may have changed these attitudes. The first part of the analysis relies on survey data collected between 1975 and 1989 to estimate a set of regression models, relating support for federal involvement in health care, antipoverty programs, and general domestic policies to a set of sociodemographic characteristics.... The second part of this study explores motivations that might account for these patterns. We identify a half dozen ways in which health care may be viewed as "different," that is, more or less appropriate for federal action. Analysis of survey data from 1987 suggests that there are relatively small differences in the attitudes and perceptions that motivate support for federal health initiatives, relative to federal domestic policies in general. However, there are more striking differences between health programs and more overtly redistributive policies.... We suggest that the growing support for federal intervention in health care, relative to other social policies, is in part an inadvertent by-product of ideological positions popularized during the Reagan and Bush administrations. We draw from these results some predictions about the course of the ongoing debate over federal health policies.     

Do different types of incubators produce different types of innovations?

Incubators are heterogeneous but there is a lack of understanding of the variety of innovation involved. We use four archetypes of incubator discussed in the literature (basic research, university, economic development and private incubator) and analyze their generation of different types of innovation (product, technological process and organizational innovation) during a 4 years period (2005–2008). In a sample of 80 incubators, we find that incubatees in some types of incubators are more prone to generate product and technological process innovations than those hosted in other types.     

What Is Neutrality?

This paper reinvestigates the question of liberal neutrality. We contend that current liberal discussions have been dominated—if not hijacked—by one particular interpretation of what neutrality could imply: namely, exclusive neutrality, aiming to exclude religious and cultural expressions from the public sphere. We will argue that this is merely one among several relevant interpretations. To substantiate our claim, we will first elaborate upon inclusive neutrality by formulating two supplementary interpretations: proportional neutrality and compensatory neutrality. Second, we will argue that inclusive proportional neutrality is the most appropriate interpretation in many contexts. Our discussion highlights the fact that some political disputes should not be seen in terms of the antithesis between liberal neutrality and illiberal alternatives but, instead, as a clash between various valid but incompatible interpretations of what liberal neutrality may imply.     

Is linking communicating?

File-sharing sites such as the Pirate Bay which provide an index of searchable bit torrent files or some type of list or catalogue of links to massively copyright infringing content (whether for streaming or downloading) have raised the question whether the providers of these links are infringing the “communication to the public” right. In these cases there are two potential infringers 1) the person who has uploaded the work without the authorisation of the copyright owner (and the uploading is likely to infringe the reproduction right) and 2) the person who sets the link to the uploaded work. This article is concerned with the liability of the person setting the link.     

Is Secularism Neutral?

This article argues that secularism is not neutral. Secularization is a process, the secular state is a structure, whereas secularism is a political philosophy. Secularism takes two main forms: first, a “benevolent” secularism that endeavours to treat all religious and nonreligious belief systems even‐handedly, and, second, a “hostile” kind that privileges unbelief and excludes religion from the public sphere. I analyze the European Court of Human Rights decision in Lautsi v Italy, which illustrates these types. The article concludes that secularism as a political philosophy cannot be neutral, and the secular state is not neutral in its effects, standpoint, governing assumptions or treatment of religious truth claims.     

Are convenience DNA samples significantly different?

In this paper, the issue of whether DNA databases collected by different convenience sampling methods are significantly different statistically is investigated. Testing the null hypothesis that the population probability or frequency distributions of DNA profiles under different sampling methods are the same is of interest in this investigation. Some statistical analyses are conducted on the single-locus VNTR databases collected from different sources by the Hong Kong Government Laboratory. The bootstrap, Monte Carlo simulation and significance tests including the Pearson's chi-squared, likelihood ratio, and Kolmogorov-Smirnov two-sample statistics are employed for testing the hypothesis. The results are promising that no probability values of the tests are smaller than 5%. In other words, there is not enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis at the 5% level, which provides more confidence for using the VNTR reference databases commonly collected by convenience sampling.     

Is the medicine right?

Is asking the Better Regulation Agenda (BRA) to answer the same preconditions it requires for any regulatory action a proper treatment? Does any assessment of the agenda necessarily imply a thorough definition of the costs and the benefits deriving from its application or is it enough to provide a few key insights to perform it? Is the BRA really so ideological, deriving from “a liberal analytical framework that considers no regulation/state intervention” as the preferred option? Is regulatory quality an issue that “cannot realistically be solved”? Does the principle of subsidiarity as a policy objective need some revision? Several questions come to mind when reading a very thought‐provoking article that is very critical of the BRA but that in the end recognises some of its main qualities.     

What Is Transnational Law?

Is it important to conceptualize transnational law and “map” it as a new legal field? This article suggests that to do so might help both juristic practice and sociolegal scholarship in organizing, linking, and comparing disparate but increasingly significant types of regulation. To explore the idea of transnational law is to raise basic questions about the nature of both “law” and “society” (taken as the realm law regulates). This involves radically rethinking relationships between the public and the private, between law and state, and between different sources of law and legal authority. Taking as its focus Von Daniels's The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective and Calliess and Zumbansen's Rough Consensus and Running Code (both 2010), the article considers what approaches may be most productive, and what key issues need to be addressed, to make sense of broad trends in law's extension beyond the boundaries of nation‐states.     

Is Incumbency Advantage Gendered?

Do incumbents have an electoral advantage and if so, do these advantages differ across gender? In this study, I estimate the electoral advantages enjoyed by incumbents in 10 Canadian federal elections, across 3059 ridings, from 1990 to 2021. Using a regression discontinuity design, I compare men and women who have very narrowly won or lost elections on three different indicators: propensity to run again, probability of winning the next election, and vote share. I find that women incumbents are just as likely to run again in subsequent elections as men incumbents. However, women who lose an election appear to be more likely to quit politics compared to men who lose an election. I do not find clear incumbency effects for probability of winning at the next election and vote share.     

Is the Japanese diet consensual?

The institutional design of the Japanese Diet is commonly believed to necessitate interparty accommodation and to make the legislative process more ‘viscous’ than it appears. This common belief about the Diet is challenged by examining the Constitution, the Diet Law, the House Rules, and parliamentary practices with special attention to agenda setting procedures. It is argued that the ‘unanimity norm’ is less binding than commonly recognised. By applying the criteria proposed by Döring, this paper compares the Diet with western European parliaments, and shows that it ranks relatively high in terms of the ruling majority's ability to control the legislative agenda. Although the post‐war Diet is modelled on the legislative process in the US Congress, it is critically important to keep in mind that the constitutional principle of the Diet follows the fusion of power in the British parliament. The picture that emerges from the analysis is in strong contrast to the traditional image of the Japanese Diet and sheds new light on the majoritarian foundation of the Diet.