Congress and Administrative Policymaking: Identifying Congressional Veto Power

The ability of presidents to unilaterally shape administrative policymaking challenges a foundation of congressional power: Rarely can Congress statutorily veto administrative actions over presidential opposition. Consequently, Congress has turned to other means of influence, including the appropriations and oversight processes, although questions remain about the degree to which they have been effective. To investigate, I study a spatial model of administrative policymaking that assumes Congress can execute a legislative veto, as well as a baseline model in which congressional influence requires a coalition with the president. I compare the two models and develop empirical tests that exploit instances when their implications differ. Applying the tests to data on federal regulatory policymaking shows consistent evidence that Congress exerts veto power over administrative activity, even over those actions endorsed by the president. I conclude by discussing some broader implications, including the extent to which existing studies understate the constraints on presidential power.     

Marijuana But Not Alcohol Use During Adolescence Mediates the Association Between Transmissible Risk for Substance Use Disorder and Number of Lifetime Violent Offenses

Aim

This study determined the extent to which alcohol and marijuana use during adolescence mediates the relation between transmissible risk for substance use disorder (SUD) and lifetime number of different types of violent offenses.

Methods

The transmissible liability index was administered to 359 10-12 year old youths who were tracked to 22 years of age. Past year frequency of alcohol and marijuana consumption was longitudinally tracked to age 22 at which time lifetime violent offenses was recorded.

Results

Rate of increase in marijuana use mediated the association between transmissible risk and lifetime number of different types of violent offenses. No association was found between past year frequency of alcohol use and violent offenses.

Conclusions

Prevention directed at lowering the psychological characteristics associated with transmissible risk for SUD may also reduce violent offending.     

Incarceration, education and transition from delinquency

Purpose

Much of what is known regarding the transition away from crime is limited to young adulthood and specific life events and samples of non-serious offenders comprised mainly of white males.

Methods

The current study assesses the potential links between educational achievement, post-release schooling, and re-arrest for a cohort of 4,147 incarcerated youths drawn from 115 Florida juvenile institutions and followed for two years post-release.

Results

Incarcerated youths with higher levels of educational achievement are more likely to return to school after release, and those youths who returned to and attended school regularly were less likely to be rearrested within 12 and 24 months. Moreover, among youths who were rearrested, those youth who attended school regularly following release were arrested for significantly less serious offenses compared to youths who did not attend school or attended less regularly.

Conclusions

The study concludes with discussion of the importance of educational achievement as an important turning point for juvenile offenders as they transition into young adulthood.     

Integrating the American criminal justice and mental health service systems to focus on victimization

Although most research and policy in the mental health and criminal justice arenas have operated independently of one another, there is a growing consensus suggesting the need for an integration of these two disparate, yet complementary systems. Furthermore, in light of the adverse mental health consequences that often accompany victimization experiences, it is apparent that these two systems should develop and foster overlapping services for crime victims. The research reviewed herein provides an examination of issues such as these, identifies some of the barriers that stand in the way of a successful integration of the two systems, and attempts to provide some guidance and direction for future integrated mental health and criminal justice system approaches. An outline of research gaps and directions for future study are offered for the integration of criminal justice and mental health systems, as such collaborations are likely to alleviate some of the deleterious mental health outcomes evident among crime victims and at the same time reduce the occurrence of repeat victimization.     

Frauds and fakes in the Australian aboriginal art market

This article examines the topic of problematic art in the Australian Aboriginal art market. For Aboriginal people art plays an important social, economic and political role. It has also become a major source of income for many. Thus when the integrity of that art is challenged by allegations of fraud and deception it is imperative to explore the veracity of these claims and the responses made to them. In the article particular attention is devoted to those responses made through both the Australian criminal and civil systems of justice. This analysis shows that there are special problems associated with establishing the authenticity of Aboriginal works of art which tend to hamper the prosecution of fraud cases while a dearth of expertise and interest in art fraud at large among Australian law enforcement bodies is a further barrier to effective action. The conclusion is reached that at present the Australian legal system is poorly equipped to deal with frauds and fakes in the Indigenous art market—a situation which will take time and more imaginative solutions to remedy.     

Local cohesion and radical right support: The case of the Swiss People’s Party

Radical right parties have become effective electoral competitors in many parts of Western Europe yet failed to achieve success in others. Much recent scholarship seeks to understand variation in radical right support. Here, we argue that local social cohesion boosts these parties’ vote shares. We use Swiss census data at the municipal level to measure local cohesion, drawing on indicators of residents’ commuting patterns, linguistic similarities and home ownership. Regression analysis shows that social cohesion is a positive predictor of local level support for the Swiss People’s Party, but not for any other major party. Hierarchical logit models combining aggregate cohesion measures with survey data demonstrate this contextual effect on individuals’ vote choices.     

COMBATING HEALTHCARE COST INFLATION WITH CONCERTED ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS IN A CHINESE PROVINCE

This article defies the traditional notion that cost inflation in healthcare could hardly be curbed without the significant revision of economic incentive scheme, but demonstrates the possibility of containing cost inflation with concerted administrative actions in the Chinese context. It examines the case of Fujian Province that embarked on a health bureaucracy‐led policy reform without an alteration of economic levers but mainly using administrative tools to combat cost escalation. Through clearly defined, well designed, targeted and concerted administrative measures, effective cost containment is attainable in China's healthcare sector, at least in the short run. If combined well with the powerful economic instruments, administrative tools would be able to augment their effects in cost containment, provided with the government's possession of hospital ownership. At the heart of Fujian's case are the reassertion of the government stewardship, the reconstruction of the collapsed accountability mechanisms, the reconfiguration of policy instruments, and the revision of administrative incentives, rather than the decreased costs per se. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Space–Time Modeling of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq

The US and its Coalition partners concluded combat operations in Iraq in August 2010. Rather surprisingly, little empirical evidence exists as to the factors that contributed to the ebb and flow in levels of violence and the emergence and disappearance of hot spots of hostilities during the campaign. Building upon a tradition of criminology scholarship, recent work demonstrates that Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks are clustered in space and time and that these trends decay in a manner similar to that observed in the spread of disease and crime. The current study extends this work by addressing a key potential correlate of these observed patterns across Iraq—namely, the timing and location of a variety of Coalition counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. This is achieved by assessing the co-evolving space–time distributions of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the first 6 months of 2005. To do so, we employ a novel analytic technique that helps us to assess the sequential relationship between these two event types. Our analyses suggest that the number of COIN operations that follow insurgent IED attacks (moderately) exceeds expectation (assuming that events are independent) for localities in the vicinity of an attack. This pattern is more consistent than is observed for the relationship in the opposite direction. The findings also suggest that less discriminatory COIN operations are associated with an elevated occurrence of subsequent insurgency in the vicinity of COIN operations in the medium to long term, whilst for more discriminatory and capacity-reducing COIN operations the reverse appears to be true.     

Assessing the impact of imprisonment on recidivism

Objectives  

There is debate about the extent to which imprisonment deters reoffending. Further, while there is a large literature on the effects of imprisonment, methodologically sound and rigorous studies are the exception due to problematic sample characteristics and study designs. This paper assesses the effect of imprisonment on reoffending relative to a prison diversion program, Community Control, for over 79,000 felons sentenced to state prison and 65,000 offenders sentenced to Community Control between 1994 and 2002 in Florida.