A Closer Look at an Eye for an Eye: Laypersons’ Punishment Decisions Are Primarily Driven by Retributive Motives

According to recent research on laypersons’ punitive attitudes people’s sentencing decisions are primarily driven by a desire for retribution. The research designed to test this notion, however, can be criticized for suffering from several limitations. Three online-based studies were conducted with samples from Western Europe with the aim of replicating the findings of Carlsmith (J Exp Soc Psychol 42:437–451, 2006) in which participants’ punishment motives were inferred from their behavior in a process tracing task. In the present research, this approach was adopted and modified in order to provide a more conservative test for the notion that people mainly care about retribution. Although these modifications strongly influenced the overall pattern of results, retribution still was the most important punishment motive in all three studies.     

Preliminary trials of low volume AmpFlSTR Profiler Plus amplification using AmpliGrid (AG480F) slides

Low volume PCR using the AmpliGrid (480F) slide system can potentially enhance the generation of more complete profiles from trace samples, in addition to providing a more cost-effective alternative for typing standard samples. Based on our preliminary results, implementation will require a reasonable investment in optimisation and validation for the intended purpose.     

Mechanisms of environmental policy change in a federal system: The case of open federalism and the 2006–15 Harper government

Between 2006 and 2011, the Canadian Conservative government advocated the concept of ‘open federalism’ which sought to minimize the role of the federal government in areas falling under provincial jurisdiction. Environmental policy-making was particularly impacted with the passage of the highly contentious 2012 omnibus Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, commonly known as Bill C-38. This paper argues that environmental policy needs to ‘bring back federalism’ into their analysis. In order to do so, a mechanisms approach is employed and focuses on the role of both macro and meso level historical institutionalism mechanisms in explaining policy layering and policy dismantling during this period.     

Strategic Ignorance and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Critiquing the Discursive Segregation of UFOs from Scientific Inquiry

Since the late 1940s, a tenacious disconnect between popular interest and professional disinterest in unidentified flying objects (UFOs) has typified the controversy surrounding the subject. Numerous high-profile scientists have seen the topic of UFOs as an opportunity to denounce and rectify a popular, yet allegedly misguided, conviction—that some UFOs are physical anomalies indicating the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence—and thus to advance the explanatory authority of science. Rather than constituting rigorous, informed, and effective assessments, however, the ways in which many prominent scientists publicly address the UFO question often exemplify both the problematic “boundary-work” of scientific discourse in this area and, more specifically, the role that logical fallacies can play in the rhetorical construction of scientific authority in public domains. Through a critical discourse analysis, this article argues that ignorance of UFO phenomena is socially and discursively constructed in ways that are conducive to the public faces of individuals and institutions. More broadly, it suggests that the rudimentary standard of science communication attending to the extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) hypothesis for UFOs inhibits public understanding of science, dissuades academic inquiry within the physical and social sciences, and undermines progressive space policy initiatives.     

Black Disembodiment in the Age of Ferguson

One of the more striking features of the Black Lives Matter movement against racialized police brutality has been the focus on violence inflicted on “black bodies.” On one hand, the language of “black bodies,” as opposed to simply “black people” or “black personhood,” makes the issue of racial violence more visceral and immediate to white audiences otherwise indisposed to perceive black pain as a moral problem. On the other hand, it represents a theoretical challenge to dominant understandings of pain, suffering, and individuality based on liberal subjectivity. Exemplifying both of these aspects, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent work, Between the World and Me, provides a deep philosophical reflection on the moral and political problem of “black disembodiment.” This article tracks the theme of disembodiment in Coates’s book by foregrounding the role that feminist theories of embodiment play in his exploration of the contemporary black condition in America.     

How can we better align private security with the public interest? Towards a civilizing model of regulation

How can we better align private security with the public interest? This question has met with two answers in the literature on private security regulation, one seeking to cleanse the market of deviant sellers, the other to communalize the market through the empowerment of buyers. Both models of regulation are premised upon a limited neoclassical economic conception of how market transactions map onto the public interest. This article makes the case for a new model of regulation, one that seeks to civilize the market. Drawing upon the insights of economic sociology, our model regards the market for security as a moral economy in which commodity and non‐commodity values jostle and collide. On this basis, we propose a regulatory architecture where buyers and sellers are cast not only as economic actors but also as moral actors, revealing new avenues through which to encompass private security within the democratic promise of security.     

Neglected challenges to evidence-based policy-making: the problem of policy accumulation

Claims for evidence-based policy-making are motivated by the assumption that if practitioners and scholars want to learn about effective policy design, they also can. This paper argues that this is becoming more and more challenging with the conventional approaches due to the accumulation of national policy portfolios, characterized by (a) a growing number of different policy targets and instruments, that (b) are often interdependent and (c) reformed in an uncontrolled way. These factors undermine our ability to accurately relate outcome changes to individual components within the respective policy mix. Therefore, policy accumulation becomes an additional source of the well-known ‘attribution problem’ in evaluation research. We argue that policy accumulation poses fundamental challenges to existing approaches of evidence-based policy-making. Moreover, these challenges are very likely to create a trade-off between the need for increasing methodological sophistication on one side, and the decreasing political impact of more fine-grained and conditional findings of evaluation results on the other.     

Planning for Brexit: the Case of the 1975 Referendum

Both during and since the 2016 referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union, concerns were raised as to the absence of contingency planning within Whitehall. This situation was in direct contrast with 1975, when extensive planning took place for the possibility of a vote to leave the European Community. However, there has been little in the way of detailed analysis of the contingency planning undertaken in 1975. Using archival evidence of the Wilson government's preparations, this article highlights the complex challenge that withdrawal would have posed for the UK in 1975, the tensions that existed between the political imperative for a swift withdrawal, in the event of a leave vote, and the civil service's concerns as to whether such a withdrawal was deliverable. Finally, it shows how dependent the UK's position would have been on the approach taken by the other members of the EC.