Pierre-Louis Rœderer and the Debate on Forms of Government in Revolutionary France

The French Revolution raised the problem of how to construct a modern republic under conditions of acute political conflict. The debate over the forms of government was at its most intense before the outbreak of the Terror in 1793, when there seemed to be no alternative to instituting a republic, but there was serious disagreement over what this entailed. The problem was considered in terms of the political thought of Hobbes, Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Helvetius, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Sieyès. The urgent political and constitutional need to reconcile accountable with effective government was central to the use made of both inherited and new ideas about the republican form of government. This parallels Madison's concern to reconcile accountable with effective government during the constitutional debates of the American Revolution.     

THE IMPACT OF CLIENT AND EVALUATOR GENDER ON CUSTODY EVALUATIONS

Fifty-one child custody evaluations from registries of the Family Court of Australia were analysed for evidence of sex role and sex trait stereotyping by using a content analysis program. The categories used in the content analysis included expressive and instrumental sex role traits, power-related behaviours, communications about family and marital interactions, basic care-taking, attachment, and the parents' environment. When analysed by the gender of the evaluator, it was found that male and female evaluators significantly favoured the parent of their own gender in specific categories. It is suggested that the court context has been important in influencing the content of the stereotype.     

Bioethics: A Field in Transition

Bioethics is clearly a field in transition, if not confusion. The author examines two questions at the core of this transition. First, how will bioethics accommodate the different training needs and professional interests of those who understand themselves to be primarily scholars of bioethics, and those who understand themselves to be primarily practitioners of bioethics? And second, whether bioethics will continue to function as an interdisciplinary field or whether it will morph into a discipline in its own right.     

Banking Options and Neighborhood Crime: Does Fringe Banking Increase Neighborhood Crime?

In the past few years, scholars interested in neighborhoods and crime have turned their attention to the role of neighborhood organizations. Recently, (Kubrin, Squires, Graves, and Ousey, Criminology & Public Policy, 10(2), 437–466, 2011) examined the impact of payday lenders on neighborhood crime. They found that there is a significant relationship between payday lenders, and both violent and property crime rates. The current research builds upon their work by exploring banking options in the city of Norfolk, Virginia. Findings indicate that the presence of payday lenders is significantly related to property crime in 2010 and violent crime in 2010, though the findings for violent crimes are not robust. Also there is a mild suppression effect predicting violent crime rates once socioeconomic deprivation is controlled. Pawn shops are not significantly related to either property or violent crimes. Interestingly banks are significant positive predictors of both property and violent crimes. The difference between the findings here and those of (Kubrin, Squires, Graves, and Ousey, Criminology & Public Policy, 10(2), 437–466, 2011) are discussed.     

Bridging the ideological space: A cross‐national analysis of the distance of party switching

Scholars have investigated the characteristics of volatile voters ever since the first voter surveys were carried out and they have paid specific attention to the role of political sophistication on vote switching. Nevertheless, the exact nature of this relationship is still unclear. With increasing volatility over the past decades this question has furthermore grown in relevance. Is the growing unpredictability of elections mostly driven by sophisticated voters making well‐considered choices or is the balance of power in the hands of unsophisticated ‘floating voters’? Several scholars have argued that even under conditions of increasing volatility switching is still mostly confined to changes to ideologically close parties. Most researchers, however, have used rather crude measures to investigate this ‘leap’ between parties. To advance research in this field, this article directly models the ideological distance bridged by volatile voters when investigating the link between political sophistication and volatility. This is done using Comparative Study of Electoral systems (CSES) data that encompass a broad sample of recent parliamentary elections worldwide. Results indicate that voters with an intermediate level of political knowledge are most likely to switch overall. When taking into account the ideological distance of party switching, however, the confining impact of political knowledge on the vote choices made is clearly dominant, resulting in a linear decrease of the distance bridged as voters become more knowledgeable.     

Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice: The Work of the Steering Team for the Child Welfare Research and Evaluation Translational Framework Workgroup

This article describes the framework developed by the Child Welfare Research and Evaluation Translational Framework Workgroup that was sponsored by the U.S. Children's Bureau for building evidence and bringing evidence-supported interventions to scale. The framework delineates five phases of implementation and evaluation: 1) identify and explore problem definitions and strength of evidence for promising interventions; 2) develop and test innovative interventions when evidence is suggestive; 3) compare and learn about alternative treatments where evidence is equivocal; 4) replicate and adapt better treatments when summary evidence is strong; and 5) apply and improve continuously the quality and integrity of evidence-based practice.     

Efficiency and legitimacy in collaborative public management: Mapping inter-local agreements in England using social network analysis

English councils have long aspired to be ‘self-sufficient’, providing services within single jurisdictions with limited inter-local collaboration. However, by 2017 almost all local councils (97 per cent) participated in one or more frontline or back-office ‘shared service’ involving 338 distinct partnerships. We analyse this new-found enthusiasm for inter-council collaboration by performing exploratory social network analysis on organizational and financial data for all 353 English councils. We examine factors predicting collaboration and the characteristics of the service networks that result, focusing on resource, organizational and political considerations. Propensity to collaborate was found to be unpredictable, but partner choice was rational, driven by geographical proximity and similarity in organizational and resource characteristics. We argue that, according to the institutional theory of organizations, both efficiency and legitimacy influenced these reform choices, and the risks of fashionable collaboration were mitigated by careful partner selection. We highlight implications for future quantitative research into symbolic (non-instrumental) forms of collaboration.     

‘It’s Not OK’, but ‘It’ never happened: parental alienation accusations undermine children’s safety in the New Zealand Family Court

ABSTRACT

While the public campaign slogan in New Zealand when referring to family violence, is ‘It’s Not OK’, many women in New Zealand report that the Family Court prefers the catchphrase ‘It never happened’. When women and children escaping violence and abuse reach out to the New Zealand Family Court for protection believing the justice system will help them, they often enter an alternative reality where they are not believed and are subsequently made less safe. This is particularly so for those women whose well-founded fears for their children’s safety get reinterpreted as evidence of a deliberate attempt to alienate the children from their fathers. The Backbone Collective, an independent organisation, surveyed New Zealand women about their experiences in the Family Court, finding that many women reported being accused of parental alienation. This paper investigates the sources of these allegations of parental alienation and how they impact mothers and their children. We argue that the use of parental alienation in the New Zealand Family Court is undermining the international rights of children.