Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach

This article proposes a new approach to investigating the substance of lawmaking. Only a very small proportion of bills become law in the U.S. Congress. However, the bills that do become law often serve as vehicles for language originating in other bills. We investigate “text reuse” methods as a means for tracing the progress of policy ideas in legislation. We then show how a focus on policy ideas leads to new insights into the lawmaking process. Although our focus is on relating content found within bills, the same methods can be used to study policy substance across many research domains.     

Ambivalence,Political Consensus and Conditionality: Support for Whistleblowing among Danish Employees

Whistleblower research is understandably focused around the protagonists of the practice. We still know surprisingly little about how whistleblowing is perceived in the wider population. Drawing on a representative survey of Danish employees (N = 1,709), this paper analyses how whistleblower public support is distributed along variables such as political preference, political interest and job type, and tests whether it is conditional on whistleblower motivation and type of wrongdoing. The paper finds that public support is strong but also ambivalent. It shows that support is evenly distributed along party preference. It also demonstrates that support is not uniform but conditional on the characteristics of the whistleblower situation. These insights are important for both social and political reasons in the present situation where whistleblowing seems to be on the rise. From a policy perspective, it offers policymakers an important evidence‐based navigation tool in devising whistleblower legislation.     

Estimating Individual Contributions to Complex DNA SNP Mixtures.,

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) of large panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides an alternative or complimentary approach to short tandem repeats (STRs) panels for the analysis of complex DNA mixture forensic samples. For STRs, methods to estimate individual contribution concentrations compare capillary electrophoresis peak heights, peak areas, or HTS allele read counts within a mixture. This article introduces three approaches (mean, median, and slope methods) for estimating individual DNA contributions to forensic mixtures for HTS/massively parallel sequencing (MPS) SNP panels. For SNPs, the major:minor allele ratios or counts, unique to each contributor, were compared to estimate contributor proportion within the mixture using the mean, median, and slope intercept for these alleles. The estimates for these three methods were typically within 5% of planned experimental contributions for defined mixtures.     

The rise of China—challenges and opportunities for the European Union

Asia Europe Journal - China’s growing power and influence raise important and inescapable questions for countries and societies around the world, not least for Europe. A rising China offers...     

The erosion of the administrative state under President Trump: Citizens' pushback against individual and institutional racism

President Trump encouraged bad state actors within the administrative state to contribute to inequities for civilians. We highlight how Trump's actions and rhetoric led to increased individual, institutional, and systemic racism and violence. As a response to this increased violence and rhetoric, we discuss the role civilians (including professional athletes) played in engaging in protests and the 2020 election. Given that more individuals voted in that election cycle, we emphasize the importance for public administration to adapt, evolve, and engage with new actors concerned with administrative action or inaction.     

Police Perceptions of Irrational Unstable Behaviours and Use of Force

Police identification of people experiencing mental illness is usually based on either the person having an official contact history with police or through observing behavioural indicators commonly associated with mental illness during an encounter. Police have voiced concerns with their ability to identify and respond to people experiencing mental illness in a timely way and report that they commonly resort to more coercive tactical options to resolve encounters. The present study employed a mixed method design to examine 286 police use of force incidents to investigate the association between force used on and by offenders displaying irrational-unstable behavioural characteristics. The irrational-unstable offenders were two times more likely to be perceived by police to have an apparent mental disorder and almost four times more likely to have a known mental health history; one in six had an official record of contact with mental health services. There were few differences in police and offender use of force, considering force as both a categorical and a continuous variable, while incident-level comparisons suggested that police force was generally proportional to offender resistance. Implications are discussed in terms of the need to redress limitations with the traditional police approach style.