Welfare as Wrecking Ball: Constructing Public Responsibility in Legal Encounters Over Public Housing Demolition

Scholarship on welfare privatization illustrates how the process often curtails and undermines public responsibility for the poor. In this article, I examine how recipients, policy makers, and judges participate in the legal process as a means of challenging and defending privatization. I look at cases of litigation initiated by public housing tenants between 1985 and 2012 to fight the demolition of their homes to explore the changing meaning of public responsibility within a shrinking public sector. My findings show that as legislative and administrative reforms steered courts toward a more flexible understanding of public responsibility, courts gave increasing attention to the economic hardships experienced by the state itself, while downplaying the plight of low‐income tenants.     

It depends whose data are being shared: considerations for genomic data sharing policies

There is an urgent need for consistent data sharing policies that promote the advancement of science while respecting the values and interests of those providing their genetic data for research. Responding to the article of Jalayne J. Arias, Genevieve Pham-Kanter, and Eric G. Campbell, ‘The Growth and Gaps of Genetic Data Sharing Policies in the United States’, this commentary further explores the challenges of human subjects’ protection in existing data sharing policies. We will elaborate on the need for data sharing policies to accommodate variation in individual and group preferences around data sharing and privacy concerns by comparing our previously published data on patients’ and parents’ consent to data sharing and attitudes about privacy to data from focus groups with HIV-positive, underserved individuals who were asked about their willingness to participate in genetic research and share their data broadly. These studies support the observation of Arias, Pham-Kanter, and Campbell that researchers, and funding agencies will need to balance the privacy interests of groups as well as individuals in future genomic data sharing policies.     

Labor union involvement in occupational safety and health, 1957-1987

Right-to-know policies and related market-oriented occupational health policies require an institutionalized means through which workers can interpret and act on information about quality differences among jobs. In principle, labor unions could play this role. However, union coverage has been declining since the 1950s, and the decline has accelerated in recent years. This paper documents the growth in occupational health and safety activities in unionized workplaces from 1957 to 1987 and the decline in union representation in hazardous workplaces from 1971 to 1986. It also analyzes the relationship between right-to-know and right-to-refuse-hazardous-work guarantees under industrial relations and occupational health law.     

Death penalty attitudes and the tendency to convict or acquit

Three studies examined whether attitudes toward the death penalty were related to conviction or acquittal proneness. They were not, even in a case where it was clear that the prosecution was asking for death. Two questions asked whether attitudes toward the death penalty were related to changes in the threshold of guilt or in the amount of evidence required to find guilt when death as compared to life imprisonment was the potential sentence. They were so related, but answers to such questions were unrelated to verdicts in a death case. In one study, strong opponents of the death penalty were no different from others in attitudes toward attorneys and witnesses, in recollection of the facts of a trial, or in their subjective impressions about the trial. The basis of any attitude-behavior relation in this area is questioned.     

On the design of optimal mechanisms for the Arrow-Hahn-McKenzie economy

This essay presents necessary and sufficient first-order conditions for the general design of allocation mechanisms that decentralize Pareto optimal decisions in Arrow-Hahn-McKenzie (AHM) economies. An AHM economy is distinguished from the usual Arrow-Debreu private ownership economy since the consumption or production of any commodity may induce externalities, including initially endowed commodities. Because competitive markets will not generally internalize all externalities efficiently, the mechanism design must be generalized to include a rule that computes prices for commodities appearing as initial endowments so as to define consumers' individual budget sets. A natural design criterion for the generalized allocation mechanism is to have agents communicate both price and allocation messages to the center, enlarging the message space relative to that necessary for implementing mechanisms in Arrow-Debreu economies. The larger message spaces give agents increased flexibility, which has two significant consequences: (1) the dominant-strategy property of the Demand-Revealing Mechanism in economies with only public goods, a single pure private good, and quasilinear preferences, is lost unless the center adopts an enforcement structure that suitably restricts the allocation messages that agents may transmit; (2) if an endowed commodity is not a pure private good, then the Demand-Revealing Mechanism loses the dominant-strategy property, regardless of the enforcement structure adopted or of the nature of consumers' preferences, so that the problem is exacerbated in general AHM economies.     

Run,Jane, Run! Gendered Responses to Political Party Recruitment

Many researchers point to gender inequities in party recruitment practices to explain women’s underrepresentation on the ballot. However, there has been little systematic research about how men and women respond to recruitment, so we do not know whether gender-balanced recruitment would actually lead to gender-balanced outcomes. We conduct two studies to address this question. First, in cooperation with a county Republican Party, we identically recruited 5510 male and 5506 female highly active party members to attend a free candidate training seminar. Republican women were half as likely to respond to the invitation as men. Second, we conducted a survey experiment of 3960 voters on the Utah Colleges Exit Poll. Republican men’s level of self-reported political ambition was increased by the prospect of elite recruitment significantly more than Republican women’s, thereby increasing the gender gap vis-à-vis the control. The gender gap in the effect of recruitment on political ambition among Democrats was much smaller. Together, these findings suggest that to fully understand the role recruitment plays in women’s underrepresentation, researchers must understand the ways in which men and women respond to recruitment, not just whether political elites engage in gendered recruitment practices.     

The future of privacy certification in Europe: an exploration of options under article 42 of the GDPR

The EU faces substantive legislative reform in data protection, specifically in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). One of the new elements in the GDPR is its call to establish data protection certification mechanisms, data protection seals and marks to help enhance transparency and compliance with the Regulation and allow data subjects to quickly assess the level of data protection of relevant products and services. To this effect, it is necessary to review privacy and data protection seals afresh and determine how data protection certification mechanisms, seals or marks might work given the role they will be called to play, particularly in Europe, in facilitating data protection. This article reviews the current state of play of privacy seals, the EU policy and regulatory thrusts for privacy and data protection certification, and the GDPR provisions on certification of the processing of personal data. The GDPR leaves substantial room for various options on data protection certification, which might play out in various ways, some of which are explored in this article.     

Can Policy to Address Some Disability Rights Mitigate Weak Approaches to Others?

Governments prioritize some rights over others because of policy constraints. We ask whether differential disability policy priorities can readdress other unrealized rights when applied to services for people with disabilities in boarding houses in Australia. The housing is inappropriate to their support needs and breaches their immediate right to unsegregated housing. Findings about the government-funded support showed that their well-being improved, but the housing increased their support needs and reduced their eligibility for suitable housing, implying that support policies that prioritize progressive realization rights are not successful where immediate realization rights to housing remain unaddressed. These findings about the negative social outcomes from ignoring human rights hierarchies have implications for policy priorities.