Betting shops in the public eye: A commentary

Betting shops are a familiar feature in towns and cities throughout the UK. However, in recent years, increasing social and political concerns have been expressed about the presence of betting shops in high streets and about the role of betting shops in encouraging gambling. Such concerns include the concentration of betting shops in areas of social deprivation, the impact of such shops on the vitality of and viability of town centres, the perceived links between betting shops and both anti‐social behaviour and criminal activity and the presence of Fixed Odds Betting Terminals in betting shops. This commentary paper outlines the origin and characteristics of betting shops, explores some of the recent concerns betting shops have attracted and offers some brief concluding reflections on the impact of policy responses to these concerns.     

Pork barrel politics and electoral returns at the local level

Public Choice - Does the targeted spending of public resources provide electoral benefits for incumbents? Despite the attention of scholars to that question, the empirical results are mixed thus...     

Direct Versus Indirect Federal Bond Subsidies: New Evidence on Cost of Capital

The longstanding debate surrounding the most effective way for the U.S. federal government to subsidize state and local government capital‐raising received renewed attention in recent years due to the passage and subsequent expiration of the taxable Build America Bond (BAB) program. Recent academic studies, as well as reports from the U.S. Treasury Department, claim that the direct subsidy approach as evidenced by the BAB program provides greater bond borrowing cost benefits to state and local governments compared to traditional tax‐exempt bonds. This research investigates the extent to which such borrowing cost benefits may be overstated since it appears previous studies did not adequately account for the early call optionality of tax‐exempt bonds.     

Parties’ policy adjustments in response to changes in issue saliency

Abstract

A number of studies have investigated when parties change their policy positions. However, this growing body of research has had limited interaction with the literature on issue competition. To bring these two perspectives together, this article investigates how and when parties adjust their respective policy positions on immigration, the environment and the welfare state. In the article it is argued that especially large parties in electoral terms adjust their policy positions on specific issues in response to changes in the party system saliency of these issues. When the other parties increase their focus on a given issue, large parties adjust their position in the direction preferred by a majority of the voters. In the article this argument is investigated empirically, based on CMP data from 18 West European countries from 1980 to 2014. The findings largely support the argument and show a strong potential for further integration of the two dominant perspectives on party competition.     

Does court-supervised reorganization work? Evidence from post-confirmation firm failure

Unlike the US Chapter 11, the Belgian reorganization legislation requires that distressed firms remain temporarily under court-supervision during the post-confirmation stage. Using a hand-collected sample of firms, we analyze the likelihood of business failure and the time to failure during this period. Less viable firms are more likely to fail and do faster so, indicating relatively effective reorganization proceedings. Firms that are indebted to highly secured banks or owe high sums of unpaid taxes are more likely to fail. Judicial discretion affects the likelihood of failure only in a subsample of sole proprietorships.     

The Rule of Law Beyond Thick and Thin

In this paper it is argued that different understandings of the requirements of the Rule of Law can to a large extent be explained by the position taken with regard to two interrelated distinctions. On the one hand, the Rule of Law can be regarded as either a principle of law or as a principle of governance. On the other hand, the requirements of the Rule of Law can be regarded as defining either a minimum standard which something has to meet in order to be law or as an aspirational standard identifying what it means to be good law. In combination these two distinctions define a range of perspectives on the nature of the Rule of Law that are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.     

Duff on the Legitimacy of Punishment of Socially Deprived Offenders

Duff offered an argument for the conclusion that just or legitimate punishment of socially deprived offenders in our unjust society is impossible. One of the claims in his argument is that our courts have the standing to blame an offender only if our polity has the right to do so since our courts are acting as the representatives of, or to use the exact phrases by Duff, “in the name of”, or “on behalf of”, the whole polity. In this paper I will challenge that claim. I will argue that the courts can be seen as acting, not on behalf of the whole polity, but only on behalf of a subset of its citizens, namely, the just citizens (i.e. the citizens who cannot be seen to have wronged the deprived offenders).