Treating Life Literally

This essay is a study of three texts written by the psychoanalyst Wulf Sachs. These texts hold an important lesson about the psychoanalytic turn in jurisprudence. Their attempt to extend psychoanalysis’s frontiers to fight the legalization of racism in pre-apartheid South Africa recoils upon itself, stripping self-evidence from the singular constellation of law, life, language, and sovereignty psychoanalysis derives from ancient and modern tragedy and formalizes into a discipline. Even as Sachs’s trilogy turns to psychoanalysis to critique the legalization of racism, it also points to the limits of psychoanalysis itself as a paradigm for the study of law.

Socializer or Signal?, How Agency Accreditation Affects Organizational Culture

Agency accreditation has grown steadily as a management strategy in recent decades. Accreditation is meant to help professionalize public administration work by requiring an agency to adopt policies and practices that are sanctioned by an external organization. Advocates claim that accreditation facilitates the diffusion of best practices and builds a culture of professionalism in an agency. Accreditation clearly leads agencies to adopt formal policies. This article identifies two ways in which accreditation might affect organizational culture: (1) by socializing employees, and (2) by signaling the agency’s priorities to employees. Analyzing attitudinal data from officers in six American police departments, this study finds no association between accreditation and officers’ own values, but finds that accreditation is strongly correlated with officers’ perceptions of their agencies’ priorities.     

The Product and Difference Fallacies for Indirect Effects

Political scientists often cite the importance of mechanism‐specific causal knowledge, both for its intrinsic scientific value and as a necessity for informed policy. This article explains why two common inferential heuristics for mechanism‐specific (i.e., indirect) effects can provide misleading answers, such as sign reversals and false null results, even when linear regressions provide unbiased estimates of constituent effects. Additionally, this article demonstrates that the inferential difficulties associated with indirect effects can be ameliorated with the use of stratification, interaction terms, and the restriction of inference to subpopulations (e.g., the indirect effect on the treated). However, indirect effects are inherently not identifiable—even when randomized experiments are possible. The methodological discussion is illustrated using a study on the indirect effect of Islamic religious tradition on democracy scores (due to the subordination of women).     

Barely legal: racism and migrant farm labour in the context of Canadian multiculturalism

This article investigates how colonial attitudes towards race operate alongside official multiculturalism in Canada to justify the legally exceptional exclusion of migrant farm workers from Canada's socio-political framework. The Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is presented in this article as a relic of Canada's racist and colonial past, one that continues uninterrupted in the present age of statist multiculturalism. The legal continuation and growth in the use of non-citizens to conduct labour distasteful to Canadian nationals has provided an effective means for the Canadian state to regulate the ongoing flow of non-preferred races on the margins while promoting a pluralist and ethnically diverse political image at home and abroad. In the face of a labour shortage constructed as a political crisis of considerable urgency, the Canadian state has continued to admit non-immigrants into the country to perform labour deemed unattractive yet necessary for the well-being of Canadian citizens while simultaneously suspending the citizenship and individual rights of those same individual migrant workers. By legislating the restriction of rights and freedoms to a permanently revolving door of temporary non-citizens through the mechanism of a guest worker programme, the Canadian state is participating in the bio-political regulation of foreign nationals.     

Three Strategies to Prevent Unintended Pregnancy

This paper presents results from fiscal impact simulations of three national‐level policies designed to prevent unintended pregnancy: A media campaign encouraging condom use, a pregnancy prevention program for at‐risk youth, and an expansion in Medicaid family planning services. These simulations were performed using FamilyScape, a recently developed agent‐based simulation model of family formation. In some simulation specifications, policies’ benefits are monetized by accounting for projected reductions in government expenditures on medical care for pregnant women and infants. In a majority of these specifications, policies’ fiscal benefit‐cost ratios are less than 1. However, in specifications that account additionally for projected savings to programs that provide a broader range of benefits and services to young children, all three policies have benefit‐cost ratios that are comfortably greater than 1. The results from my preferred specifications suggest that the simulated policies would produce returns to taxpayers on each dollar spent of between $2 to $6. On the whole, the results of these simulations imply that all three policies are sound public investments.     

Survey‐Based Measurement of Public Management and Policy Networks

Networks have become a central concept in the policy and public management literature; however, theoretical development is hindered by a lack of attention to the empirical properties of network measurement methods. This paper compares three survey‐based methods for measuring organizational networks: the roster, the free‐recall name generator, and a hybrid name generator that combines these two classic approaches. Results indicate that the roster and free‐recall name generator methods both suffer from important limitations. The roster method tends to measure many linkages among a limited set of network actors, whereas the name generator tends to measure fewer linkages among a larger set of network actors. Using survey data on policy networks within California regional planning processes (N = 752), we find that the hybrid method strikes an effective balance between these techniques. The hybrid approach performs well in terms of identifying a large number of network actors and interconnections between them. Although no survey‐based measurement technique is perfect, this study suggests that the hybrid name generator is an excellent alternative for the measurement of complex networks with large or shifting boundaries that encompass a diverse set of actors.     

Rapid separation and characterization of cocaine and cocaine cutting agents by differential mobility spectrometry-mass spectrometry

Forensic drug laboratories are inundated with cases requiring time-consuming GC- or LC-based chromatographic separations of submitted samples. High-throughput analytical methods would be of great practical utility within forensic drug analysis. Recently developed ion-mobility-based separation methods combined with mass spectrometry can often be used without chromatography, suppress chemical interferents of similar mass, and operate in seconds. We have evaluated differential mobility spectrometry-mass spectrometry (DMS-MS) for performance on adulterated cocaine mixtures. The DMS interface is only a few centimeters in length, operates in seconds, and can be adapted to any MS system using atmospheric pressure ionization. Drug cutting agents, typical targets such as cocaine, and drug metabolites are rapidly separated by the DMS ion prefilter. Tests demonstrated characterization of complex mixtures, such as isolation of levamisole, an adulterant with alarming side effects, from a 13-component mixture. DMS-MS holds great potential for the analysis of drug samples submitted for forensic analysis.     

A consideration of user financial incentives to address health inequalities

Health inequalities and user financial incentives to encourage health-related behavior change are two topical issues in the health policy discourse, and this article attempts to combine the two; namely, we try to address whether the latter can be used to reduce the former in the contexts of the United Kingdom and the United States. Payments for some aspects of medical adherence may offer a promising way to address, to some extent, inequalities in health and health care in both countries. However, payments for more sustained behavior change, such as that associated with smoking cessation and weight loss, have thus far shown little long-term effect, although more research that tests the effectiveness of different incentive mechanism designs, informed by the findings of behavioral economics, ought to be undertaken. Many practical, political, ethical, and ideological objections can be waged against user financial incentives in health, and this article reviews a number of them, but the justifiability of and limits to these incentives require more academic and public discourse so as to gain a better understanding of the circumstances in which they can legitimately be used.     

The nexus between attribution theory and racial attitudes: a test of racial attribution and public opinion of capital punishment

Research has shown that attribution theory and racial attitudes are among the most consistent attitudinal predictors of capital punishment opinion. This study explores the overlap of these two constructs, racial attribution, and its ability to account for support and opposition to the death penalty. Using data from the 1972–2016 cumulative data file of the General Social Survey, three logistic regression models were used to analyze the effect of internal and external racial attribution on capital punishment opinions for (a) the aggregate sample, (b) White respondents only, and (c) Black respondents only. Respondents were asked whether racial inequalities were due to structural disadvantages or personal deficiencies of Black Americans. Findings showed that respondents in all three models were more likely to support the death penalty when they attributed racial inequalities to personal deficiencies of Blacks and less likely to support the death penalty when they endorsed structural disadvantages, although the effects were somewhat muted for Black respondents. These findings suggest that ongoing public support for capital punishment in the United States is based at least in part on a fundamental attribution error in which Whites and some Blacks alike blame Blacks for their own deprivation.