Improving emergency management: A total quality management approach

We address the problem of managing emergencies in complex environments and examine the concepts of total quality management (TQM) as a means of increasing organisational capacity to reduce and/or respond to threatening events. The TQM approach initiates and integrates improvement in three fundamental areas of organisational design and operation: technical, organisational, and cultural. We apply this approach to the interactive environment of hazardous materials management and present an “action plan” for introducing TQM into community planning for risk reduction and response, focusing on the technical, organisational, and cultural components of the process. We present evidence of increased performance in reducing hazardous materials risk from field reports of communities that have adopted TQM practices. Finally, we conclude that TQM serves as a generative means of revitalising, renewing, and enabling community engagement in hazardous materials management.     

How Much Disagreement is Good for Democratic Deliberation?

The ideal of deliberation requires that citizens engage in reasonable discussion despite disagreements. In practice, if their experience is to match this normative ideal, participants in an actual deliberation should prefer moderate disagreement to conflict-free discussion within homogeneous groups, and to conflict-driven discussion where differences are intractable. This article proposes a research design and methods for assessing the quality of a deliberative event based on the perceptions of the participants themselves. In a structured deliberative event, over 2,000 individuals were assigned to small groups composed of about 10 persons of varying levels of ideological difference to discuss health care reform in California. We find that participants experience higher satisfaction with deliberation under moderate ideological difference than when they are in homogeneous or in highly disparate groups. That moderate disagreement induces optimal deliberation is consistent with normative expectations and empirically demonstrates the deliberative quality of this event.     

The variable choice set logit model applied to the 2004 Canadian election

Formal work on the electoral model often suggests that parties should locate at the electoral mean. Recent research has found no evidence of such convergence. In order to explain non-convergence, the stochastic electoral model is extended by including a competence and sociodemographic valance in a country where regional and national parties compete in the election. That is, the model allows voters to face different sets of parties in different regions. We introduce the notion of a convergence coefficient, c for regional and national parties and show that when c is high there is a significant centrifugal tendency acting on parties. An electoral survey of the 2004 election in Canada is used to construct a stochastic electoral model of the election with two regions: Québec and the rest of Canada. The survey allows us to estimate voter positions in the policy space. The variable choice set logit model is used to built a relationship between party position and vote share. We find that in the local Nash equilibrium for the election the two main parties with high competence valence, the Liberals and Conservatives, locate at the national electoral mean and the Bloc Québécois, with the highest competence valence, locates at the Québec electoral mean. The New Democratic Party has a low competence valence but remains at the national mean. The Greens, with lowest competence valence, locate away from the national mean to increase its vote share.     

The Political Economy of Child Mortality Decline in Tanzania and Uganda, 1995–2007

This article identifies political economy factors that help explain dramatic differences in the pace of child mortality reduction between Tanzania and Uganda from 1995 to 2007. The existing literature largely explains divergence in basic health outcomes with reference to economic variables such as GDP per capita. However, these factors cannot explain recent divergence across African countries with similar levels of GDP per capita, rates of economic growth, and levels of health funding. I argue that institutional and governance divergences between Tanzania and Uganda can be linked directly to differing coverage levels of key child health interventions (especially related to malaria control), and thus to differing child health outcomes. These institutional differences can be explained in part by historical factors, but more relevant causes can be found in recent political events. In Tanzania, there was an unusually effective project of institution building in the health sector, while in Uganda, by contrast, there was a negative political shock to the health system. This was driven by the repatrimonialization of the Ugandan state after President Yoweri Museveni??s decision to eliminate term limits in the 2001?C2006 period. This repatrimonialization process reversed previous health sector institutional gains and had particularly negative effects on child health service delivery in Uganda over the period in question.     

The Long March Through Whitehall: A Comment on Lowe and Pemberton,The Official History of the British Civil Service,Volume II: 1982–1997

The Thatcher‐Major ‘permanent revolution’ massively changed the British civil service and Whitehall. The political clout provided by strong prime ministerial backing was a key factor in sustaining the momentum of change over the 1980s and 1990s. The process of change developed piecemeal, in a step‐by‐step and, in some ways, even haphazard fashion, with ‘New Right’ ideology just one factor. Economic and financial constraints were important in driving and sustaining the Whitehall efficiency drives and managerial reforms of the period. Support from managerially minded insiders and skilful prime ministerial businessmen advisers brought in from outside were also crucial. In contrast, the Johnson government's approach to civil service reform may be self‐defeating if it creates too much instability and needless strife, rather than building on ideas and building up support at different levels from within Whitehall itself.     

The function of aggression in personality disordered patients

It has been suggested that psychological interventions for personality disorders should focus on improving adaptive expression of the functional needs expressed through problematic behaviors such as aggression. The measurement of function is a necessary condition for devising a function-based treatment approach. Two studies that employ a method for assessing the functions of aggressive behavior in personality disordered patients are described by: (a) a retrospective analysis, through file review of inpatient aggressive behaviors and of the index offenses of patients admitted for treatment, and (b) an analysis of inpatient aggressive incidents where staff and patients were interviewed to elicit functions. Results showed that most aggression had the function of expressing anger, although other functions were also evident. The profile of functions observed in the inpatient studies was somewhat dissimilar to that observed in the studies of predominantly psychotic patients. Therapeutic implications of these findings are discussed.     

Criminal Recidivism Among Juvenile Offenders: Testing the Incremental and Predictive Validity of Three Measures of Psychopathic Features

We studied the predictive, comparative, and incremental validity of three measures of psychopathic features (Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version [PCL:YV]; Antisocial Process Screening Device [APSD]; Childhood Psychopathy Scale [CPS]) vis-à-vis criminal recidivism among 83 delinquent youth within a truly prospective design. Bivariate and multivariate analyses (Cox proportional hazard analyses) showed that of the three measures, the CPS was most consistently related to most types of recidivism in comparison to the other measures. However, incremental validity analyses demonstrated that all of the predictive effects for the measures of psychopathic features disappeared after conceptually relevant covariates (i.e., substance use, conduct disorder, young age, past property crime) were included in multivariate predictive models. Implications for the limits of these measures in applied juvenile justice assessment are discussed.