How High Should They Jump? An Empirical Method for Setting Municipal Financial Ratio Performance Benchmarks

Heightened concerns regarding the financial sustainability of local councils have resulted in an increasing reliance by municipal regulators on financial ratio performance benchmarking. However, these benchmarks are often assigned without explicit justification and despite a paucity of empirical evidence. Furthermore, regulators typically allocate a single performance benchmark across an entire local government system despite the fact that individual councils may face entirely different operating environments. Failure to take account of the environmental challenges facing councils can result in inappropriate or unattainable performance benchmarks that may give rise to unintended consequences, such as the well‐documented threshold effects. To address this problem, we develop an empirical method for allocating performance benchmarks with respect to the current level of performance and environmental constraints facing individual local authorities. We demonstrate this technique in a case study using data drawn from New South Wales local authority operating ratios.     

Less Haste,More Speed: The Fit for the Future Reform Program in New South Wales Local Government

In August 2011 the New South Wales (NSW) Government established the Independent Local Government Review Panel to examine the options for improving the sustainability of the NSW local government sector. In October 2014 the NSW Government set out its response in its Fit for the Future reform program. This paper provides a critical assessment of the Fit for the Future program. We show that it contains errors, relies on unreliable data, and neglects important factors, which may be ascribed to the haste with which it has been constructed. This could have serious consequences given the potential impact the Fit for the Future program will have on NSW local government. We thus conclude that it would be prudent to address these matters before proceeding further with the program.     

The impact of race and extra-legal factors in charging defendants with serious sexual assault: Findings from a five-year study of one Pennsylvania court jurisdiction

Research on sexual assault case processing remains mixed regarding how extra-legal factors such as the racial-ethnic composition of the defendant-victim dyad may impact prosecutorial decision-making. We use data from 2006–2010 in a Pennsylvania county court jurisdiction to examine the victim- and defendant-related factors that influence charging decisions. We also explore how the demographic and offense characteristics influence decisions to prosecute offenders for more serious types of sexual assault. Our findings indicate that the racial composition of the defendant-victim dyad contributed to the prosecutorial decision to charge an offender with a more serious sexual assault, while victim characteristics and use of violence during the offense were not related to seriousness of the charge.     

Good to share? The pecuniary implications of moving to shared service production for local government services

Shared services are often lauded as an efficacious means of reducing municipal expenditure and thereby improving waning financial sustainability. However, most of the extant theoretical and empirical work only considers costs and benefits at the level of the specific service in question and, hence, fails to capture many of the wider benefits and costs that might accrue to local governments. In this article we first build a schema to illustrate the benefits and costs of moving from separate to collaborative production at the level of individual local authorities. We then test two hypotheses drawn from the schema against a five‐year panel of expenditure data. We find evidence of increased expenditure in the order of 8 per cent that prima facie runs counter to the objectives of many municipal managers engaged with shared services. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for cooperative ventures between local authorities.     

Disunited in ethnicity: the racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong

In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontents surrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong, there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China are racialized. Lowe and Tsang's article provides an examination of the campaign against Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflicts between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duality of time or differing time-inflected cultural habits of Mainlanders and Hong Kongers. As Hong Kong's citizenry and Mainlanders contest the status of the former colony and claim rights over it in ways aberrant to both factions' national consciousness, discrimination increases as Mainlanders are castigated by Hong Kongers for grazing their territory with mannerisms deemed unsettling to Hong Kong's everyday notions of time and space. Hong Kongers' sense of collective identity is shored-up as they reject the People's Republic of China’s favoured concept of pan-Chinese ethnicity by constructing Mainlanders as the inverse of themselves.     

Private exit,public exit,and achievement in secondary education

Perceptions of declining academic achievement have motivated a number of governments worldwide to introduce greater school choices to parents in the hope of fostering competition and thus arrest the apparent decline in educational achievement. Exit provides dissatisfied citizens with a decisive mechanism to signal their views regarding the quality of public education institutions. Private exit – abandoning the public education system entirely – is well established in most countries; however, public exit – moving to a separate system of selective high-quality public schools – is an alternative that exists in only a few jurisdictions. We employ a comprehensive 6-year panel of data on socio-educational advantage and academic achievement for an education system which offers both private and public exit choice. In so doing, we show how different exit options affect choices and outcomes for various categories of schools.     

Observers’ Real-Time Sensitivity to Deception in Naturalistic Interviews

This study tested the ability of experienced interviewers and novice observers to detect deception while watching mock interviews featuring experimental or control questioning methods and different detainee languages. The protocol featured a complex, realistic critical event and naturalistic interviews in which mock detainees could report unconstrained. Experimenters recorded these interviews and presented them to observers who judged veracity in real time. In general, experienced interviewers were no more sensitive to deception than were novices and both groups set conservative response criteria. Observers were more sensitive to deception when viewing control versus experimental questioning methods. Observers were more sensitive to deception when viewing Arabic speakers interviewed through an interpreter. Results imply that not all trained interviewers exhibit a lie bias; additional research should examine how best to transition lab-tested interview methods into the field, and language and interpreter factors may impact the ability to assess veracity in multiple ways.     

Exploring Citizen Assessments of Unilateral Executive Authority

This study investigates the interaction between constitutional considerations and democratic context in evaluations of executive authority. An identical experiment is conducted using undergraduate and Mechanical Turk samples. A hypothetical article raising the question of executive power varies the (1) issue context, (2) expert assessment of constitutional authority, and (3) level of public support for proposed action. Measures of participants’ issue preferences and level of satisfaction with President Obama are also included in the analysis. Results indicate that participants think differently about the desirability and legitimacy of proposed executive action. Constitutional considerations and satisfaction with the President weigh most heavily in assessments of the appropriateness of executive conduct. Differences observed across samples demonstrate that institutional rules have the potential to constrain the influence of political factors in assessments legitimacy, but this is not inevitably the case. Feelings about the President may be especially important where experts agree that he lacks authority to take action. This could indicate that citizens will rally behind presidents they like, and think more critically of those they do not, in times of constitutional crisis.