Reckoning with the Communist Past in Romania: A Scorecard

During the first two decades following the collapse of the communist regime, Romania has reckoned with the human rights infringements perpetrated from 1945 to 1989 with the help of a range of official and unofficial, judiciary and non-judiciary, backward- and forward-looking methods pursued by a variety of state and non-state actors. This article summarises the progress registered to date in court trials, lustration, access to secret files, property restitution, the truth commission, rehabilitation of former political prisoners, compensation to victims and their descendants, the opinion tribunal, forensic investigations, rewriting history books, unofficial truth projects and memorialisation.     

Authoritarian Co-optation in the Age of Globalisation: Evidence from Hong Kong

The existing literature on authoritarian survival, implicitly or explicitly, assumes that political challenges faced by authoritarian regimes are all domestic. I argue that globalisation exposes authoritarian regimes to new sources of threat. In particular, capital mobility forces authoritarian regimes to deal with not only those who dare to voice out dissatisfaction, but also those who exit. While repression may be the best strategy to silence the vocal, co-optation would be a more effective tool to retain the runaway. It is, however, often impossible to co-opt all the capital owners. As such, authoritarian regimes have to be selective when choosing co-optation targets. I argue that authoritarian regimes would co-opt renowned firms because these firms yield the greatest demonstration effect. Hong Kong provides an interesting case to illustrate my arguments. Beijing strategically co-opted the stakeholders of renowned firms in Hong Kong in order to solve the city's pervasive confidence crisis prior to 1997. I test my arguments with data on firms listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. I find that firms owned by well-known and prestigious elite families were more likely to build political connections with Beijing. To test the causal linkage more rigorously, I use both the genetic matching and instrumental variable approaches. The empirical results provide strong support to my arguments.     

Is In-Prison Treatment Enough? A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Prison-Based Treatment and Aftercare Services for Substance-Abusing Offenders

This study performed a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of the Amity in-prison Therapeutic Community (TC) and Vista aftercare programs for criminal offenders in California. For the average treatment participant, the cost of treatment was $4,112, which led to approximately fifty-one fewer days incarcerated (36% less) than the average individual in the control group. This implies that, for the average offender, treatment reduced recidivism at a cost of $80 per incarceration day. For participants who received both in-prison treatment and aftercare services, an additional day of incarceration was avoided at a cost of $51 per day relative to those that received in-prison treatment only.