Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder does not predict criminal recidivism in young adult offenders: Results from a prospective study

As the state of research on the relationship between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and recidivism can be considered controversial, our prospective study investigated whether ADHD predicts recidivism in a sample of 283 male, German, young adult prisoners. Currently existing ADHD symptoms and symptoms that were present in childhood were screened according to the DSM-IV checklist criteria. Information on general and violent recidivism was gathered using government records with a follow-up period of up to five years. The prevalence of adult ADHD was six times greater than in the general population, and the number of participants who retrospectively met the criteria for a diagnosis with ADHD in childhood was ten times greater than found in community samples. Survival analyses did not identify ADHD as a predictor of recidivism. Controlling for conduct disorder, substance dependence, and other relevant variables did not alter results. However, among individuals who were released from prison and then reconvicted for a new crime, offenders diagnosed with ADHD were found to reoffend sooner after release. These findings stress the necessity of differentiating between risk factors for delinquency and risk factors for recidivism.     

Increased Substance Use and Risky Sexual Behavior Among Migratory Homeless Youth: Exploring the Role of Social Network Composition

Travelers are a migratory subgroup of homeless youth who may be especially prone to engaging in risky behavior. This study compared the substance use and sexual behavior of young homeless travelers and non-travelers to evaluate the extent and possible sources of travelers’ increased risk. Data came from face-to-face interviews with 419 homeless youth (36.6% female, 34.0% white, 23.9% African American, and 20.0% Hispanic) between the ages of 13 and 24 years (M = 20.1 years, SD = 2.5) who were randomly sampled from 41 shelters, drop-in centers, and street sites in Los Angeles. Travelers were almost twice as likely as non-travelers to exhibit recent heavy drinking, 37% more likely to exhibit recent marijuana use, and five times as likely to have injected drugs. Travelers also had more recent sex partners and were more likely to report having casual or need-based sexual partners and combining sex with substance use. Mediation analyses suggest that travelers’ deviant peer associations and disconnection to conventional individuals and institutions may drive their elevated substance use. Differences in sexual risk behaviors are likely attributable to demographic differences between the two groups. Overall, these differences between travelers and non-travelers suggest different service needs and the need for different service approaches.     

Single-strand conformation polymorphism of hyper-variable regions HV1 and HV2 of human mitochondrial DNA: detection by silver staining

Human mitochondrial DNA from 50 trios consisting of mother (M), child (C) and father (F) was PCR amplified with primers flanking the hyper-variable regions, HVR1 and HVR2. The amplified products were then fractionated under non-denaturing conditions, silver-stained and compared by single-stranded conformational polymorphism (SSCP). In all but one case, mother and child displayed identical patterns, which could be promptly distinguished from that of the father. For the remaining cases, either set of primers was sufficient to resolve the familial ties. In no instance, M displayed alleles different from those of C within each trio, demonstrating that no false exclusions occurred. The SSCP approach proved to be a robust technique suitable as a preliminary screening in cases requiring identification of multiple samples.     

Party system dynamics and the making and breaking of Italian governments

This paper explores the dynamics of the highly fluid Italian legislative party system. It uses the same theoretical approach as the paper by Laver and Kato (this issue) to explore the making and breaking of governments in Italy following electoral reform. Under office-seeking motivational assumptions, the electoral system provides incentives for parties to band together into cartels in order to fight elections, with the winning cartel forming a government coalition. Inter-electoral legislative party competition, however, within a structure of permissive rules on the formation of legislative party groups, provides incentives for at least some members of the winning cartel to defect. The facility with which legislative parties can split and combine in Italy creates a highly dynamic decisive structure underpinning the making and breaking of governments. This cannot usefully be analysed with traditional models that take parties as unitary actors and assume that the party system is essentially fixed for the entire inter-electoral period.     

Sustainability reporting: How consistency and interdependence in financial and managerial accounting enhance eco-controls

Sustainability reporting requires consistency and interdependency of financial accounting and managerial accounting. Accounting is closely entangled with the eco control (EC) in organisations. The quality of (sustainability) reporting and the disclosures is only as good as the quality and consistency of accounting data captured. Therefore, accounting choices and practises have an important role to play in sustainability reporting. This study explores the mechanism through which accounting informs EC. Through the independent and serial use of two levers, first ‘interdependency’ between financial accounting and management accounting and second, though the use of ‘digitalized information’ as a moderating variable, it is probed as to how EC are shaped. An empirical investigation is undertaken by carefully curating primary data, analysed through partial least squares structural equation modelling technique to inform broader debates in the ‘sustainability reporting’ literature concerning the mechanisms through which EC, are influenced by accounting mechanics, choices and disclosures. Sound EC contributes to sustainability accounting and governance to meet needs of the firms direct and indirect stakeholders without comprising the firm's ability to meet the needs of future stakeholders. The study established that the interdependency between the financial accountants and the management accountants output, mediates the effect of a consistent financial language on EC practises and this effect is independent of the firm size or the industry category. This article brings to the fore, the interplay of FA and MA in informing the environmental controls. The under researched perspective addressed by this study is that EC are highly interdependent with the consistency and comprehensiveness of accounting that informs it which in turn is effected by the cooperation and coordination (interdependency) between FA and MA information providers.     

Droughts and corruption

Public Choice - Natural disasters are challenges for good governance. That conclusion follows from recent research investigating the effects of natural disasters on one important force hostile to...     

Can human rights conditionality reduce repression? Examining the European Union’s economic agreements

The insertion of human rights commitments into international economic agreements is now a widespread practice. We argue that the effect of such commitments depends on the degree of leverage held by one partner over the other. In a comprehensive analysis of the European Union’s (EU’s) relations with developing countries, we find that human rights clauses are conditionally effective; they are associated with improved political freedom and physical integrity rights only in countries that are more heavily dependent on EU aid. An in-depth look at the EU’s enforcement of its human rights clause in the African-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) group reveals that the Union most often responds to violations of political rights—particularly coups and flawed elections—and that enforcement is indeed a more powerful catalyst for change in highly aid-dependent states. Alternative explanations—that the impact of the human rights clause depends on legalization, the country’s strategic importance, NGO activity, or domestic institutions—find little support.     

“One,none, and a hundred thousand” recipes for a robust response to turbulence

Turbulence appears to be a “new normal” in current societies, and public organizations need to learn how to react and adapt to it. Scholars agree on the need for robust actions to respond to turbulence. Through a qualitative comparative analysis performed on the vaccination campaigns of all 20 Italian regions, our paper explores whether different and alternative models of robustness may exist to cope with turbulence. Results shed light on three alternative models featuring static, hybrid, and dynamic robustness. They also highlight that robust governance appears to involve a capacity to learn, and to employ this learning as circumstances demand.     

Globalisation and the Restructuring of State Power in the Arab World

The dynamics of change in the Arab world today are part of a much larger global process–the neo-liberal phase of globalisation–that started in the 1980s and engendered a process of state power restructuring, both for peripheral “weak” states and core industrialised countries. Beyond national differences, the restructuring of the Arab states has implied the consolidation of neo-authoritarian political regimes characterised by fragmentation of the power structure and by an increase in informal modes of government (neo-patrimonialism, corruption), accompanied by the parallel political and economic marginalisation of large sectors of society. These less centralised and more elitist regimes are likely to be more dependent and vulnerable than their predecessors to external pressures and foreign influence.