POLICY DESIGN FOR LEGITIMACY: EXPERT KNOWLEDGE,CITIZENS, TIME AND INCLUSION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM’S BIOTECHNOLOGY SECTOR

More than ever, policy designers need to take legitimacy deficits seriously. To do so, they increasingly involve citizens in policy design processes and draw from a wider range of expertise. Where should they stop in terms of inclusiveness to citizens and expertise and for how long should they allow citizens and experts to be persuasive? These are the questions addressed in this article. Policy design legitimacy, the article argues, can be related to variations in designers and politicians’ inclination to resort to output‐oriented (expertise‐based) versus input‐oriented (citizen‐centred) design processes. Input‐oriented processes have a higher potential in terms of legitimacy deficit reduction than output‐oriented processes, but they take longer, notably because they require the involvement of large numbers of people. In contrast, output‐oriented processes have a slightly lower legitimacy potential, but can produce it faster. These propositions are illustrated by two policy design narratives drawn from the United Kingdom’s biotechnology sector.     

INFLUENCE AND SELECTION PROCESSES IN WEAPON CARRYING DURING ADOLESCENCE: THE ROLES OF STATUS,AGGRESSION, AND VULNERABILITY*

The role of peers in weapon carrying (guns, knives, and other weapons) inside and outside the school was examined in this study. Data stem from a longitudinal study of a high-risk sample of male students (7th to 10th grade; N = 167) from predominantly Hispanic low-socio-economic-status schools in the United States. Longitudinal social-network models were used to test whether similarity in weapon carrying among friends results from peer influence or selection. From a goal-framing approach, we argue that weapon carrying might function as a status symbol in friendship networks and, consequently, be subject to peer influence. The findings indicate that weapon carrying is indeed a result of peer influence. The role of status effects was supported by findings that weapon carrying increased the number of friendship nominations received by peers and reduced the number of given nominations. In addition, peer-reported aggressiveness predicted weapon carrying 1 year later. These findings suggest that adolescent weapon carrying emerges from a complex interplay between the attraction of weapon carriers for affiliation, peer influence in friendship networks, and individual aggression.     

Beyond sticks and stones: Human capital enhancement efforts in response to violent crime in Latin America

Violent crime has been commonplace in Latin America over the past decades. While existing research has made progress in explaining the rationale and outcomes of government coercive strategies against crime, it has overlooked the non‐coercive strategies implemented to improve public security. It is argued in this article that political authorities make human capital enhancement efforts to shape actors’ incentives about criminal activity and mitigate crime. Accordingly, it is hypothesised that violent crime increases human capital enhancement efforts, and that the effect of violent crime on human capital enhancement efforts is larger when left‐oriented governments are in power because they stress actors’ motivations over windows of opportunities as the main drivers of crime. Support for these hypotheses is found in a sample of Latin American democracies in the period 1990–2007.     

Legal Positivism and Legal Disagreements

This paper deals with the possibility of faultless disagreement in law. It does this by looking to other spheres in which faultless disagreement appears to be possible, mainly in matters of taste and ethics. Three possible accounts are explored: the realist account, the relativist account, and the expressivist account. The paper tries to show that in the case of legal disagreements, there is a place for an approach that can take into account our intuitions in the sense that legal disagreements are genuine and at times faultless.     

Agricultural extension in transition worldwide: structural,financial and managerial strategies for improving agricultural extension

Agricultural extension is in transition worldwide. Governments and international agencies are advancing structural, financial and managerial strategies to reform extension. This article reviews and analyses these reform measures, concluding with a conceptual framework that is intended to underscore at once the diversity and interconnectedness of these structural, financial and managerial strategies for decentralizing public sector agricultural extension.     

Do people want a ‘fairer’ electoral system? An experimental study in four countries

When judging how ‘fair’ voting rules are, a fundamental criterion used by both scholars and politicians is their ability or inability to produce proportional results – that is, the extent parties’ seat distribution after the elections accurately reflects their vote shares. How about citizens? Do citizens care about how proportional the outcome is? Or do they judge the outcome solely on the basis of how well (or poorly) their party performed? Taking advantage of a uniquely designed survey experiment, this article investigates the causal effect of proportionality on voter support for voting rules in four countries: Austria, England, Ireland and Sweden. The results show that proportionality drives support for the voting rules not above, but beyond party performance. There is little cross-country variation, which suggests that proportionality is appreciated in different contexts with little status quo bias. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the causal mechanisms linking electoral rules to voter support.     

Punctuated Equilibrium and Agenda‐Setting: Bringing Parties Back in: Policy Change after the Dutroux Crisis in Belgium

The article analyzes how focusing events affect the public and political agenda and translate into policy change. Empirically, the study focuses on the policy changes initiated by paedophile Marc Dutroux's arrest in 1996 in Belgium. Theoretically, the article tests whether Baumgartner and Jones's (1993 ) U.S. punctuated equilibrium approach applies to a most different system case, Belgium being a consociational democracy and a partitocracy. Their approach turns out to be useful to explain this “critical case”: Policy change happens when “policy images” and “policy venues” shift. Yet, the Dutroux case shows also that political parties, as key actors in the Belgian policy process, should be integrated more explicitly in the punctuated equilibrium theory. Finally, the article argues that the quantitative analysis of longitudinal data sets on several agendas should be supplemented with qualitative case study evidence (e.g., interviews with key decision makers) to unravel the complex case of issue attention and policy change.