Driving Priorities in Risk‐based Regulation: What's the Problem?

Both risk‐based and problem‐centred regulatory techniques emphasize giving priority to matters that are serious and important. In the case of both risks and problems, however, issues of identification, selection, and prioritization involve inescapably normative and political choices. It is important, therefore, to understand why regulators target the risks and problems that they do; which factors drive such choices; and how regulation is affected when these factors pull in similar or opposite directions. Such an understanding provides a fresh framework for thinking about the challenges of both risk‐based and problem‐centred regulation. The analysis presented here does not oppose either risk‐based or problem‐centred regulation, but it illustrates why neither is as straightforward as simple calls for ‘better regulation’ may suggest, and it proposes ways in which key aspects of those challenges may be addressed.     

Mapping and Explaining Parliamentary Rule Changes in Europe: A Research Program

We outline a comprehensive research program on institutional reforms in European parliaments. Original data show that parliamentary rules in Western European parliaments have been changed frequently and massively during the period from 1945 to 2010 suggesting that actors use institutional reforms as a distinct strategy to pursue their substantive goals. We discuss how institutional instability affects existing theoretical and empirical arguments about institutional effects. Furthermore, we present four ideal‐typical approaches to analyzing rule changes, present new software tools for identifying and coding changes in large text corpora, and demonstrate their usefulness for valid measurement of the overall change between subsequent text versions.     

Confidently Wrong: Police Endorsement of Psycho-Legal Misconceptions

Public beliefs about psychological issues relevant to the legal system have been demonstrated to often be misconceived, but the endorsement of such beliefs in law enforcement samples is largely unknown. This study was the first to compare psycho-legal beliefs between law enforcement officers and the general public in the UK. Participants were presented a 50-item questionnaire measuring five psycho-legal topics; police procedures, courts, tough on crime, mental illness, and memory and cognition. Despite direct involvement and relevant experience, law enforcement officers endorsed just as many empirically contradictory beliefs as those who were not law enforcement officers. Further, law enforcement officers were more confident in their responses. This research has implications for identifying areas of limited knowledge within police samples that can be targeted by police education.     

Private sector reform — public sector style

This paper presents the highlights of Cuba's process of transition towards a market economy from the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 to the enactment of new U.S. embargo-tightening measures in mid 1996. It analyzes the conditions that led to a market opening and the ends, the means and the actors of the ensuing process of economic reform.     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Resident Mothers and the Moral Dilemmas they Face During Custody Disputes

Recent scholarship has critiqued the tendency for separated mothers in custody disputes to be defined as hostile and alienating. Through the presentation of three case studies, drawn from an interview-based study with 21 women, we show how such pejorative constructions only arise when the conflicting gendered moral accountabilities of contemporary motherhood are overlooked. We found that mothers tend to believe that contact with non-resident fathers is generally in a child’s best interests. However, as a result of balancing complex moral obligations for the care of their children, they may raise questions about particular kinds of arrangements for contact with particular fathers. We argue, therefore, that family law practice will lead to better outcomes for children when professionals listen to the history of, and reasons for, mothers’ positions. To enable family law professionals to undertake this task, we offer an alternative interpretive framework for making sense of women’s stories. Should family law professionals make use of this framework, it is likely that they will understand that the positions mothers adopt are often the outcome of the difficult moral dilemmas they encounter in caring for their children, and that the reductive rubric of the ‘hostile mother’ needs to be treated with scepticism.