Constitutional Chrononomy

Every constitution defines and is defined by a period in time. Like all law the creation and application of constitutions require reference to the past and future respectively. Every instance of constitution-making is an attempt to control behavior over an extended period of time. Therefore constitutions will be drafted, both in style and substance, to reflect that temporal ambition. The effectiveness of a constitution also requires that its interpretation makes reference to the understanding of its rules held by the constitution-makers. As a result, and notwithstanding the efforts to make it suitable over a long period by its creators, every constitution is bound to become unsuitable. Courts employ a number of devices to cope with the inevitable obsolescence of constitutions but, sooner or later, every constitution will have to be discarded and a new constitutional era begun.     

Beyond Policy Community — the Case of the GP Fundholding Scheme

The paper examines the conception, implementation and abolition of the GP fundholding scheme, all within 10 years, for evidence of a changed style of health care policy-making. A health care policy community, in which the interests of the medical profession were prominent, existed between 1948 and the mid-1980s. The paper highlights the important factors in the breakdown of the policy community and traces the effect through to the negotiation, implementation and abolition of the GP fundholding scheme. In particular, the role of evidence in health care policy-making has changed significantly. A consequence of the collapse of the policy community has been that a 'folk psychology' rather than evaluative evidence has guided some aspects of health care policy since the 1990s.     

Judicial perceptions of child witness competence

Concern about the difficulties faced by child witnesses in the legal system has led to two major areas of reform: the relaxation of competence and corroboration requirements, and the introduction of special procedures and physical facilities to reduce the emotional pressures of testifying. Although the implementation of these measures depends largely on judicial discretion, little is known about judicial perceptions of child witnesses and about judicial acceptance of these measures. Fifty magistrates and judges in New South Wales, Australia were asked via interview or questionnaire about their beliefs, concerns, and practices related to child witnesses. There was considerable variability in their views about the competence of child witnesses and the need for special protective measures in court for these witnesses. There was, however, more consensus about those aspects of children's ability to testify that give rise to judicial concerns about their competence. Children's honesty was not at issue; they were generally regarded as being at least as honest as adults, if not more so. They were, however, perceived as highly suggestible and susceptible to the influence of others and prone to fantasy. These findings are consistent with the findings of other studies, and provide a basis for judicial education in relation to child witnesses.     

Privatization, Chinese-style: economic reform and the state-owned enterprises

This article reviews 'corporatization' and 'marketization', shorthands for privatization, in the Chinese economy. In particular it concentrates upon the most recent round of state-owned enterprise reforms, the Modern Enterprise System and Group Company System, aimed at transforming China's largest state-owned enterprises into internationally competitive corporations. This represents a partial privatization, given that the state will retain majority ownership, while acquiring domestic and foreign capital via sharelistings and foreign and domestic joint ventures.
Drawing upon interview material from a five-year study of state-owned enterprises, the authors will indicate that such part privatization has been pragmatic and relatively slow. It has been constrained and circumscribed by broader economic and social reform programmes and accompanied by political decentralization and reforms. Ultimately, the reform and pace of reform is shaped by the desire to avoid political and social unrest which could, potentially, threaten the harmony of the Chinese central state apparatus.     

Birth order and self-concept in adolescence

The effect of birth order on self-concept was examined in a sample of adolescent boys and girls. Based upon self-theory, which suggests that the two main processes of self-concept formation (e.g., reflected appraisals and social comparisons) are affected by the power and role relationships associated with ordinal position in the family, several hypotheses were tested: (1) The self-evaluations of only and oldest children are more positive than those of younger siblings; (2) middle-borns have the lowest self-evaluations; (3) these relationships are affected by the sex and spacing of nearest sibling; and (4) the self-conceptions of oldest and only children are more similar to those of their parents than the self-conceptions of younger siblings and their parents. Using analysis of variance and several different measures of self-evaluation, very little support was found for any of these hypotheses. The strongest support was found for the hypothesis on middle-borns, but even these relationships were not large. Several explanations are offered for these weak and inconsistent findings.     

A Critique of the Use of Path Dependency in Policy Studies

Path dependency is an important notion in diachronic approaches to understanding social and political processes. The first section of this paper examines the application of path dependency to policy studies; the advantages of the concept in understanding policy development are highlighted by examples from pension policy and social housing policy in the UK, and the EU budget. The next section considers several criticisms of path dependency: (1) it is a fashionable label for the intuition that 'history matters' without a clear and convincing account of decision-making over time; (2) it explains only stability and not change; (3) its normative implications are confused and mostly left unexplored. The final section concludes that path dependency, despite being theoretically inchoate and difficult to operationalize empirically, is a valid and useful concept for policy studies. However, its proper application demands sensitivity from scholars to other temporal dynamics that may operate in policy development.