CENTRAL GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS AND THE POLICY PROCESS

Government departments are central organizations in the development of public policy. Yet there is very little literature on the political role of departments, their internal relationships and their relationships with other departments and other government actors and institutions. This article reviews the extant literature on government departments. It argues that much of the existing research has either focused on the role of the Prime Minister or it has been institutional and static, providing an analysis of the administration and organization of departments rather than political interactions. The article therefore provides an alternative research agenda which stresses the need to examine the relationships and networks that exist within and between departments and how departments react to events and interests in the outside world.     

SELECTIVE APPREHENSION: A POLICE STRATEGY FOR REPEAT OFFENDERS*

This study examines the effectiveness of the Repeat Offender Project (ROP), a specialized police unit in Washington, D.C. It documents how the ROP unit operated, what it cost, and how well it achieved its goal of “selecting, apprehending, and contributing to” the conviction of persons believed to be committing jive or more Part I offenses per week. A controlled experiment showed that the ROP substantially increased the likelihood of arrest for the persons it targeted. Quasi-experimental data indicated that ROP arrestees had longer and more serious histories of prior arrests than a comparison sample of arrestees of officers in other police units. The former arrestees were also more likely to be prosecuted and convicted on felony charges and more likely to be incarcerated. ROP officers’arrest productivity was cut in half; but this cost appears to have been offset by the greater seriousness of the current and prior offenses of its arrestees. The study concludes that the creation of selective apprehension units provides a promising new strategy for major urban police departments.     

Kosovo Defines the West

Kosovo is a proxy war with the Holocaust. As such, this war and its outcome will do much to define the West in the next century That it is a war in Europe, for Europe, sets it apart from all the other tragedies from Rwanda to Kashmir. Our collage of comment on this subject ranges from the secretary general of NATO to the leader of the Kosovars in Albania.     

Climate politics in hard times: How local economic shocks influence MPs attention to climate change

Most countries struggle to implement CO₂ reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade-off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade-offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference-in-differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade-offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a ‘window of opportunity’ for advocates of the ‘ green shift’.     

DODGY KEBABS EVERYWHERE? VARIETY OF WORLDVIEWS AND REGULATORY CHANGE

In the study of risk regulation, grid-group cultural theory has attracted considerable interest. There has, however, been a lack of a systematic interest in its claims and in methodological issues. In this article, we present five claims that are drawn from cultural theory and assess them in the light of failure in meat inspections in Germany. These claims are assessed through the analysis of argumentation as recorded in newspapers. In the light of its empirical findings, this article argues that the claims and methodology employed offer a promising avenue for further work to investigate the usefulness of this particular theoretical approach.