Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age,by Alasdair Roberts

This article uses Ross Perot's campaign for president in 1992 as a case study in how two key political institutions—the conventional political press and the party system—mediate the effects of political communication. Reporters allocated positive and negative coverage to Perot according to the same rules that they normally follow, and voters were as responsive to this coverage as they were to media coverage of two earlier “outsider” candidates for president, Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart. Part I of this article, which appeared in the previous issue of Political Communication, dealt with the earliest, relatively unmediated phase of Perot's campaign and the takeoff phase of the mediated campaign. Part II deals with the remainder of the campaign, including the general election.     

Regulating transnational corporate bribery: Anti-bribery and corruption in the UK and Germany

Recent large-scale cases involving multi-national corporations such as the BAE Systems and Siemens bribery scandals illustrate the difficulties faced by the UK and German sovereign states in controlling complex trans-national and multi-jurisdictional crimes. This article analyses the mixture of enforcement, self-regulatory and hybrid mechanisms that are emerging as part of UK and German responses to controlling transnational corporate bribery. This regulatory landscape incorporates a diverse array of direct and indirect state and non-state ‘regulatory’ actors of varying levels of formality. Mechanisms of a self-regulatory nature vary in terms of their mandatory/voluntary requirements and manufactured/organic formation. However, there is an assumption that the emergence of a variety of enforcement, self-regulatory and innovative hybrid mechanisms is sufficient but in reality this is not the case. Instead, the key argument of the article is that while these mechanisms are aiding the response, they are likely to fail leading to the default position of accommodation by state agencies, even where the will to enforce the law is high.     

The relationship between schemas and offence supportive attitudes in mentally disordered sexual offenders

Abstract

The study of schemas in sexual offenders is a relatively new approach in attempts to understand the deviant beliefs and attitudes of sexual offenders. Emerging findings suggest that offence supportive attitudes may be the product of an offender's underlying schemas. This study aims to establish the relationship between offence supportive attitudes and schemas in a sample of mentally disordered sexual offenders (MDSOs). Thirty-one male sexual offenders held within low through high security forensic mental health units were assessed using the Young Schema Questionnaire - Short Version 3 and the Questionnaire on Attitudes Consistent with Sex Offending. Correlational analyses suggested a pattern of relationships in which Insufficient Self-control, Entitlement and Enmeshment arose as the schemas associated with most offence supportive attitudes. This supports a relationship between schemas and offence supportive attitudes in MDSOs and is consistent with the literature to date. Implications for further research and treatment are considered.