A Genetic Basis for Social Trust?

A propensity to believe that fellow citizens will not act against our interests in social and economic transactions has been identified as key to the effective functioning of democratic polities. Yet the causes of this type of ‘generalized’ or ‘social’ trust are far from clear. To date, researchers within the social and political sciences have focused almost exclusively on social-developmental and political/institutional features of individuals and societies as the primary causal influences. In this paper we investigate the intriguing possibility that social trust might have a genetic, as well as an environmental basis. We use data collected from samples of monozygotic and dizygotic twins to estimate the additive genetic, shared environmental, and non-shared environmental components of trust. Our results show that the majority of the variance in a multi-item trust scale is accounted for by an additive genetic factor. On the other hand, the environmental influences experienced in common by sibling pairs have no discernable effect; the only environmental influences appear to be those that are unique to the individual. Our findings problematise the widely held view that the development of social trust occurs through a process of familial socialization at an early stage of the life course.     

Towards a Model Public Sector Integrity Commission

This article examines the current debate in Australia about public sector integrity and the idea of a standing anticorruption commission. From this debate the article outlines a specific type of ‘public sector integrity commission’ that in principle should have the necessary powers and techniques at its disposal to minimise corruption while ensuring efficiency and fairness. The debate has been most active in jurisdictions that have not had an anticorruption commission – mainly in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania – but debate about integrity commissions has occurred in all jurisdictions. The authors argue that anticorruption commissions are essential to ensure the integrity of the public sector and that a model commission should: cover all elements of the public sector; independently investigate serious and mid‐level complaints; have own motion powers to investigate any matter; have summary authority to apply administrative sanctions; make use of a range of investigative tools; not be tasked with combating major and organised crime; and be held accountable to citizens through a parliamentary committee and a parliamentary inspector.     

Winning and Losing in Investor–State Dispute Settlement

As tensions between investors’ rights and sovereign power escalate, investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) has become a focal point of backlash and controversy. As a result, ISDS now embodies two opposing currents in international law: (1) the erosion of sovereignty that accompanied economic globalization, trade frameworks, and investment treaties following the Second World War and (2) more recently, reassertions of sovereignty prompted by recent backlashes against the global economic order. This article measures and evaluates outcomes of the ISDS system for sovereign participants. Using the best available data, this article contributes more detailed assessments of sovereign winners (home states of claimants) and sovereign losers (respondent states) in the ISDS system. This article also considers the distribution and the proportional impact of outcomes for sovereign participants, both of which are fundamental in the legitimacy debates surrounding the ISDS system.     

Dispossession and disalienation: The fulfillment of life in Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed

For Caleb

In The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin imagines a non‐authoritarian society that privileges freedom and centers the individual's realization of her creative potentials in social context as the means to achieve the highest functioning, least repressive society. The concept central to this imagination of freedom and the ‘good life’ as expressed in her anarchic vision is that of disalienation, in the Marxist sense. In theorizing an anarchic society, whether or not a particular aspect of social organization is disalienating becomes for LeGuin the key criterion for assessing and determining the human efficacy of, in particular: the organization of work; the relationship between self, society, and nature; and the distribution of both social responsibilities and resources. This paper explores how LeGuin measures the alienating effects of a range of socio‐economic institutions, practices, and bodies of knowledge—from how we organize work, to how we establish the state and its governing power, to how we think about time—highlighting her critique of the alienating structures of our culture and the way they curtail human creativity and disarm individuals from developing freely and fully, that is, in a way that would benefit society as a whole and promote individual happiness.     

Linchpin or bag carrier? A study of the importance of the role of the parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister

This study examines the pivotal role of the parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister. The PPS is a vital two‐way conduit between the Commons and Number Ten. As deference among MPs has declined and rebelliousness increased, the PPS who is not up to the job risks jeopardising the prime minister's leadership. The PPSs can be broadly categorised according to their age, experience, potential and designated role, but there has been no pattern of appointments. Every PPS is chosen for his individual qualities, reinterprets the role and fulfils a slightly different function. An examination of the ‘work’ of the prime minister's PPS shows the informal and personal nature of the role. The PPS enjoys unique access to the premier and occupies a position at the centre of government. The job has clearly grown in importance and become more demanding. The performance of Thatcher's five PPSs and Major's first PPS are evaluated using the findings of a questionnaire. The performance of each successive PPS to Thatcher was judged by MPs to be worse than the one before, culminating in the disastrous tenure of Morrison. Gow is shown to be a model PPS because he was respected, trusted and liked in the Commons and at Number Ten.     

A note on the timing of investments in litigation contests

Allowing the plaintiff and defendant to choose the order in which they invest effort into trial, we show that the timing of litigation efforts is critically dependent on the level of defendant fault. For a high (low) level of defendant fault, the plaintiff invests after (before) the defendant’s investment choice. The equilibrium order of litigation efforts in turn is decisive for (a) the level of total litigation effort, (b) justice achieved by the litigation contest, and (c) plaintiffs’ incentives to bring suit. As a result, the endogenous timing bears vital implications for policy makers.     

Police oversight in the United Kingdom: The balance of independence and collaboration

A key feature of modern policing is external oversight of alleged police misconduct. The present paper focuses on the three UK oversight agencies: the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), the Police Complaints Commissioner for Scotland (PCCS); and the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI). Document analysis and interviews were utilized to highlight the different models of oversight with regard to the balance of responsibility for complaint investigations. The PONI exemplifies a model of regulatory independence that provides a strong challenge to the very limited PCCS model and intermediate IPCC model. An emerging trend was indentified of co-operation between external and internal agency personnel working towards police reform and areas in which oversight agencies can contribute to reform are presented.     

Diffraction,transrational perspectives,and peace education: new possibilities

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on the theoretical lens of diffraction to conceptualize a new approach to transrational peace education theory and praxis in the post-2016 posttruth political era and Industry 4.0 economic period. The paper reviews foundational concepts and approaches from key founders of the field – Paulo Freire and Betty Reardon – before turning to two contemporary peace education scholars – Wolfgang Dietrich and Hilary Cremin – to investigate the contributions of recent scholarship toward diverse diffractive possibilities for transrational peace education. In this sense, diffraction offers pluralistic views and transformative possibilities for transrational peace education in varied contexts. Transrational peace education builds upon peace education to integrate affective and aesthetic perspectives into peace education theory and praxis. Before concluding, we offer some theoretical implications and pedagogic responses for scholars seeking to work at diffractive transrational intersections. The contribution of the paper is toward theorizing new perspectives for transrational peace education theory and praxis in the 21^st century.     

Retrenchment of Social Policy by Other Means: A Comparison of Agricultural and Housing Policy in Turkey

Abstract

In many low- and middle-income countries, conventional welfare state institutions provide social protection only for the formally employed. In contrast, the rural and urban poor are often protected by “social policy by other means”. Based on a comparative analysis of two major unconventional welfare programs in Turkey, agricultural state support and access to squatter housing, this article explains retrenchment of social policy by other means. Agricultural retrenchment was the result of coercive policy transfer from international organizations in a post-crisis context, while the retrenchment of squatter housing was driven by domestic political entrepreneurs responding to decreases in the availability of urban land and the number of informal squatters. In both cases, retrenchment became politically sustainable due to functional replacement with more conventional welfare programs. This analysis challenges the narrow focus of mainstream welfare state research, provides an explanation of retrenchment of social policy by other means, and enhances our understanding of Turkey’s uneven welfare state development.     

Narrative roles in criminal action: An integrative framework for differentiating offenders

Purpose. The proposal that offenders’ narratives help to shape criminal action raises the possibility of a finite set of narrative themes for distinguishing offenders. The present paper seeks to articulate narrative themes that may be active within the roles offenders adopt during offending events. Possible themes may be derived from studies of fundamental narratives in literary criticism, notably Frye (1957) . Within personality psychology, McAdams (1993) has also argued for a restricted set of personal narratives in any given culture produced by the dominant dimensions of Potency and Intimacy. Methods. The sub‐set of narratives on which offenders’ draw can be explored through the roles criminals see themselves as playing during offending episodes. Case study interviews were therefore content analysed to illustrate offence roles based in narrative themes and their cognitive, affective, and identity components. Results. These considerations suggest that four thematic narrative roles can be distinguished: Professional, Victim, Tragic Hero, and a Revengeful Mission. Distinct patterns of cognitive distortion, affective, and identity components are proposed within these four narrative roles. Conclusion. The Narrative Offence Roles specified and illustrated in the present paper offer hypotheses for empirical study and the possibility of a new aetiological perspective in criminology.