Mission Accomplished: The Wartime Election of 2004

The war in Iraq, so the widely accepted view, hurt the reelection of George W. Bush. We contend, to the contrary, that the war helped him get reelected. First, we show that his victory fits the dominant pattern of wartime elections in American history. Second, we find that Bush’s approval ratings benefited from a complex rally where the Iraq war prolonged rather than diminished the 9/11 effect; most Americans affirmed rather than disputed a link between the war in Iraq and the war on terror. Third, while Bush’s approval proves sensitive to U.S. casualties in the Iraq war, any damage to his standing prior to the election was mitigated by sufficient popular support for that war. And finally, on Election Day, Bush was able to garner the vote of two critical blocks with favorable feelings about the Iraq war, be it the decision to invade or the prospect of success.

Designing property rights for water: mediating market,government, and corporation failures

Recent decades have seen an acceleration in public concern about the allocation of increasingly scarce water supplies. There are many reasons for this concern, such as growth in urban populations. In this article, we focus on how surface water’s special qualities (the combination of spillovers, rent-seeking behavior, and common pool resources) complicate the assignment of property rights in any legal framework. These characteristics make specific market structures necessary in order to efficiently allocate rights. The state usually designs those structures. Yet, just like markets can fail, so can governments fail to effectively allocate those rights. So designers often turn to quasi-judicial conservancy boards as a second-best solution. We argue that those boards may themselves fail through a form of “corporation failure.” We address these three types of failures, and offer an analysis of two cases that suggests that the likelihood conservancy boards will suffer from corporate failure depends on the actions of the boards and outside stakeholders (like governments).

Fluorescent TiO2 powders prepared using a new perylene diimide dye: applications in latent fingermark detection

A new, highly fluorescent dye was synthesised using oleylamine combined with a perylene dianhydride compound. The new dye was characterised by 1H NMR, UV-vis spectroscopy and fluorescence spectroscopy as well as quantum yield. The dye was absorbed onto titanium dioxide nanoparticles for use as a fingerprint detection powder. The new fluorescent powder was applied to latent fingermarks deposited onto different non-porous surfaces and compared with commercial fluorescent powders. The powder exhibits strong fluorescence at 650-700 nm under excitation at 505 nm. On glass surfaces, the new powder gave images showing tertiary-level detail of the fingermark ridges with almost no background development. Compared with current magnetic fluorescent powders, the new powder was slightly weaker in fluorescence intensity but produced significantly less background development, resulting in good contrast between the fingermark and the substrate.     

The Political Consequences of the Crash

The financial crash of 2008 precipitated a major recession. It shattered the financial growth model that had dominated the previous twenty years and plunged the international economy into a period of economic and political restructuring of uncertain duration. The immediate origins of the crash lay in the lending practices associated with the sub-prime mortgages in the United States which produced the credit crunch in 2007, but the wider causes were the unbalanced character of growth in the international economy and the particular role played by finance. The crisis has been explained in a number of different ways, focusing on the behaviour of the financial markets, the institutional and policy conditions that made the boom possible and then undermined it, longer-term economic and policy cycles and the nature of uncertainty and risk in complex social systems. The political impact of the crash and the recession has not been uniform; it has been highly uneven, depending on the position of particular states in the international economy. The rapid interventions by governments to stave off financial collapse at the end of 2008 were successful, but at the cost of creating serious problems of adjustment for the future. The political debate around what were the causes, who should be blamed and what should be done is only just beginning, and the way this crisis comes to be understood will play a major part in determining how it is eventually resolved and how far-reaching will be the changes to the international economy and to domestic politics.     

The Gradual Defederalization of Canadian Health Policy

Health policy is an important facet of territorial politics,drawing the contours of the sharing community. Changes in themanagement of the division of powers in health policy pointto shifting understandings of the federal political community.This article adopts this approach in the Canadian case, whereobservers disagree about whether values of federal diversityremain robust or are eroding. It considers three Commissions(Rowell-Sirois, Hall, and Romanow) reporting over a 60-yeartime span. The Commissions adopt different understandings ofthe division of powers and of the proper forms of intergovernmentalhealth governance, moving from a robust understanding of federaldiversity and the division of powers in the 1940s, to an afederalemphasis on efficiency and pan-Canadian citizenship in the early2000s.     

The Democratic Legitimacy of Bias Crime Laws: Public Reason and the Political Process

Law and Philosophy -