Creating the Financial Stability Forum: What Role for Existing Institutions?

The Financial Stability Forum (FSF)—now rebranded as the Financial Stability Board (FSB)—has become a focal point for financial regulatory initiatives in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Despite its central status, the body has received little attention from scholars. This is particularly striking both in light of the increasing centrality of the FSF/FSB within the realm of financial regulatory governance and the body's unusual structure and composition. Indeed, the creation and design of the FSF pose an empirical puzzle: what explains the creation of a new, informal and loosely structured institution and the centre of a financial regulatory governance regime? At the time of the Forum's creation, the broader financial architecture was marked by significant institutional density, with a large number of international organisations engaged in governance activities. This paper argues that it is precisely the structure and activities of these existing institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Joint Forum on Financial Conglomerates, which account for the creation and design of the FSF, and points to the need for scholars to take seriously the role of organisations operating within institutionally dense spaces.     

Crime scene analysis and the escalation of violence in serial rape.

The current study examines the crime scene behavior manifest by 108 serial rapists responsible for the perpetration of 565 rapes across various cities within the US. The goal of the current study is to identify which aspects of crime scene behavior reported to law enforcement by the victim are most useful in predicting, early in a series of offenses, which rapists are most likely to escalate into higher and, at times, life threatening levels of violence. Using 58 scales that quantify the verbal, physical, and sexual behavior manifest by a rapist in his interaction with his victim during his first reported rape and 36 modal variables that summarized approach, timing, demographics, and weapon usage across the series of rapes, the study attempts to differentiate between those rapists who escalate in their use of blunt force (Increasers) from those who do not (Non-Increasers). A logistic regression indicates that rapists who are white rather than of minority status and who, at the time of their first reported rape, rape their victims for longer periods of time and use more profanity are more likely to escalate in their level of blunt force than those rapists who do not exhibit these behaviors. The relevance of this type of predictive framework for law enforcement in its attempts to prioritize particular investigations is discussed.     

Between Fiscal,Ideological, and Social Dilemmas: The Soviet ‘Bachelor Tax’ and Post-war Tax Reform, 1941–1962

This article examines the ‘tax on bachelors, singles, and small families of the USSR’. The tax was introduced in 1941 to boost the birth rate and expanded in 1944 to finance the state’s benefits offered to mothers and children. The Ministry of Finance eventually moved away from its support for the regressive and inefficient bachelor tax and explored other tax-based strategies to boost the birth rate and support families. However, it was constrained in its reform efforts, both by Khrushchev and by ideas about the appropriate role of taxes as the Soviet Union progressed away from crisis and towards communism.     

The Participedia Project: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

Participedia is an open-source, participatory knowledge tool that responds to a new global phenomenon: the rapid development of experiments in new forms of participatory politics and governance around the world. The experiments are diverse and widespread, from the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly in Canada and the Oregon Citizens' Initiative in the United States to Participatory Budgeting in Brazil, deliberative forums in China, Panchayati Raj reforms in India, and citizen technology assessment in Denmark. Our knowledge of this rapidly expanding universe is shallow. The authors of this article, together with several others, have created the Participedia to respond to this deficit in knowledge. This article documents the development of the Participedia project to date. Participedia aims to be useful to scholars (and practitioners) as an open-source, real-time, cumulative qualitative and quantitative data repository about participatory and deliberative governance experiences. We believe that Participedia is the first effort in the social sciences to build a large data set through a method that is both crowd-sourced and structured to produce good quality, comparable information.

[Editor's Note: The authors of this article are two of the co-founders of Participedia.]     

Elemental analysis of bone: proton-induced X-ray emission testing in forensic cases

Proton-induced X-ray emission (PIXE) is a spectroscopic technique that provides the researcher with the elemental composition of a given target material. In this paper, we illustrate the utility of PIXE analysis in two forensic contexts: (1) case of cremation in which the nature of the remains is questioned and (2) cases of death by gunshot wound. In the first case, elemental analysis by PIXE reveals that the purported cremated remains are not bone. The last two cases show that radiopaque metallic residue embedded in bone is composed of lead from a projectile.     

A Community‐Based Model for Remediating Juveniles Adjudicated Incompetent to Stand Trial: Feedback from Youth,Attorneys, and Judges

This study examined client satisfaction with a community‐based restoration services program for youth adjudicated incompetent to stand trial in Virginia. The sample consisted of 130 youth (ages 8‐21 years), 80 attorneys, and 43 juvenile court judges. Youth overwhelming found restoration services helpful to them, although some concepts were harder to learn than others. Both judges and attorneys were generally knowledgeable about juvenile competency law, although both were less knowledgeable about competency evaluators and the services provided to youth. Results will be used to improve teaching tools, training of Restoration Counselors, and communication between program providers and the legal community.