The Tarasoff dilemma in criminal court.

The duty to protect, or Tarasoff duty, has been conceptualized as arising solely in the context of a clinical setting. A recent California Supreme Court ruling in People v. Clark adds legal, clinical, and ethical dilemmas to the oftentimes contentious Tarasoff issue. Though the Tarasoff issue is but a minor legal point in Clark, a possible consequence of Clark is that a Tarasoff warning could be deemed nonconfidential and admissible in a criminal trial. Psychotherapists could therefore be testifying in criminal courts as prosecution witnesses. While the possibility of a chilling effect on patients' disclosure of violent ideation in the context of psychotherapy first caused apprehension after the California Supreme Court's 1976 decision in Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, this same Court's ruling in People v. Clark some 14 years later may ensure that this fear finally becomes realized.     

Fatal transfusion reactions caused by donor antibodies to recipient leukocytes

Of three patients who suffered episodes of acute respiratory deterioration following blood transfusion, two died. The cause is believed to have been antibody in the donor plasma directed against recipient leukocytes. Autopsy examination of the lungs and serological study of blood donors established the diagnosis. While these transfusion complications are not rare, unfamiliarity with them leads to incorrect diagnosis.     

Brexit,the Belfast Agreement and Northern Ireland: Imperilling a Fragile Political Bargain

The major impact of the Belfast Agreement was to engineer a peaceful coexistence between nationalism and unionism that involved each bloc recognising it had sufficient power to thwart the political ambitions of the other side, but not enough to push through its own agenda. This paper argues that Brexit seriously damages this peaceful coexistence and could trigger what is termed an Ulster war of attrition in which Northern Ireland becomes entrapped in a political stalemate where each side strives to triumph without having sufficient power to do so. It also argues that to restore internal political stability in Northern Ireland, and to indemnify against the risk of disorderly relationships between the British and Irish governments in the future, the strategic importance of Strand 3 of the Belfast Agreement requires strengthening.     

Managing Racial Diversity: Matching Internal Strategies with Environmental Needs

Although demographic diversity has been of paramount concern to researchers and practitioners in public management, studies exploring managerial strategies to capitalize on and respond to the needs of diverse client populations are scarce. This article examines strategies for managing diversity as a way to buffer environmental challenges in service delivery and performance resulting from heterogeneous client demands. Findings suggest that administrators prioritize diversity efforts when faced with higher levels of regulatory violations (a performance measure). A higher percentage of black residents is associated with lower service quality. However, the effect of managerial strategies for diversity on performance is conditioned by the racial composition of the clients: as the percentage of black nursing home residents increases, diversity management efforts are associated with a lower number of regulatory violations. Similarly, at higher levels of racial heterogeneity, diversity management efforts are associated with fewer regulatory violations.     

Behavioral Public Administration ad fontes: A Synthesis of Research on Bounded Rationality,Cognitive Biases,and Nudging in Public Organizations

This article provides a comprehensive overview of how policy makers, practitioners, and scholars can fruitfully use behavioral science to tackle public administration, management, and policy issues. The article systematically reviews 109 articles in the public administration discipline that are inspired by the behavioral sciences to identify emerging research trajectories, significant gaps, and promising applied research directions. In an attempt to systematize and take stock of the nascent behavioral public administration scholarship, the authors trace it back to the seminal works of three Nobel Laureates—Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, and Richard Thaler—and their work on bounded rationality, cognitive biases, and nudging, respectively. The cognitive biases investigated by the studies reviewed fall into the categories of accessibility, loss aversion, and overconfidence/optimism. Nudging and choice architecture are discussed as viable strategies for leveraging these cognitive traps in an attempt to alter behavior for the better, among both citizens and public servants.     

A problem with empirical studies of party policy shifts: Alternative measures of party shifts are uncorrelated

Many recent cross-national studies analyse the causes and electoral consequences of party policy shifts, using party position measures derived from election manifestos, expert surveys or voter surveys. However few studies validate their findings by analysing multiple measures of party policy shifts. In this article, data on European parties’ position shifts on both European integration and left-right ideology is analysed, showing that this is problematic because, while alternative measures of party policy positions correlate strongly in cross-sectional analyses, alternative measures of parties’ policy shifts are essentially uncorrelated in longitudinal analyses. Suggestions are offered on how to address this problem.     

Why do only some people who support parties actually join them? Evidence from Britain

What makes people join a political party is one of the most commonly studied questions in research on party members. Nearly all this research, however, is based on talking to people who have actually joined parties. This article simultaneously analyses surveys of members of political parties in Britain and surveys of non-member supporters of those same parties. This uniquely enables us to model the decision to join parties. The results suggest that most of the elements that constitute the influential ‘General Incentives Model’ are significant. But it also reveals that, while party supporters imagine that selective benefits, social norms and opposing rival parties’ policies are key factors in members’ decisions to join a party, those who actually do so are more likely to say they are motivated by attachments to their party’s values, policies and leaders, as well as by an altruistic desire to support democracy more generally.