Verfahren beim Einspruch gegen die Anklageschrift

Das dem angerufenen Gericht übergeordnete OLG hat nach der von § 215 StPO vorgegebenen Systematik vor einem Ausspruch nach § 215 Abs 4 erster Satz StPO oder Vorlage nach § 215 Abs 4 zweiter Satz StPO stets zu prüfen, ob nicht einer der in § 212 Z 1–4 genannten M?ngel der Anklageschrift vorliegt. Erst bei negativem Ergebnis dieser Prüfung kommt eine Entscheidung des OGH in Betracht. übermittelt dieser die Sache zur Entscheidung über den Einspruch einem anderen OLG, ist dieses an das negative Ergebnis der Prüfung durch das dem angerufenen Gericht übergeordnete OLG und an die für den Nichtigkeitsgrund des § 281a StPO entscheidenden Verdachtsannahmen nicht gebunden.     

Decision rules,membership and political centralization in the European Union

The decision to enter the European Union is based on a comparison of the costs of staying out and going it alone, and the costs membership. The latter depend on the degree of preference heterogeneity between prospective members and the Union as well as the decision rules employed for “constitutional” decisions. The same calculus guides the decision, by member states, to shift policies up to the Union level, only now the decision rules refer to centrally assigned policies. Preference heterogeneity makes more inclusive rules optimal in either case while at the same time reducing the attractiveness of membership or the centralization of policies to the EU level, respectively. The analysis complements and extends both traditional fiscal federalism literature as well as the more recent political economics literature on federalism.

Gender equality in Swedish AI policies. What's the problem represented to be?

Over the past few decades, Sweden has established itself as a “world leader” in gender equality. Alongside this development, Swedish politicians have also initiated ambitious plans that aim to establish the country as “world class” in terms of digitalization. International research shows that women and racialized groups are in a minority in the design processes, that AI facial recognition systems are built with white male faces as the norm, and that digital tools replicate racial injustices. In this paper, we are interested in if, and if so how, gender equality is articulated and thus filled with meaning in national policies on AI and digitalization. The overall aim is to discuss the potential of gender (equality) mainstreaming to challenge systems of privilege in the implementation of AI systems in the public sector. The paper analyses how gender equality is filled with meaning in national policy documents on AI and gender equality. The main findings show that gender equality is turned into a question of lack of knowledge and information, which in turn blocks out an understanding of gender equality as something that is related to gendered power relations.     

Getting to justice?

This article addresses whether Albert Weale’s view in Democratic Justice and the Social Contract (OUP 2013) fits into one of two strands of social contract traditions, and how his account stands up to critics. He claims to stand in the contractarian tradition, which seeks to justify normative principles of justice from non-moral premises. The alternative is the contractualist tradition which assumes that individuals are also motivated by other-regarding moral considerations. The aim of the latter theories is often limited to systematise and specify vague and contested normative judgements concerning shared institutions. There are tensions in Weale’s account as to whether it addresses the question of concern to contractarians or rather that of contractualists. A second challenge concerns Weale’s attempt to extrapolate principles of justice from common property resource regimes within the basic structure of society to that basic structure of a ‘great society’ itself. The impact of the basic structure on individuals is so pervasive that the principle Weale proposes seems misapplied. A claim to the marginal product in complex modes of production supplemented by a social insurance scheme says little about the distributive principles for assessing how the basic structure as a whole should engender the distribution of marginal products among us.     

Mining and Local Corruption in Africa

We investigate whether mining affects local corruption in Africa. Several cross‐country analyses report that natural resources have adverse effects on political institutions by increasing corruption, whereas other country‐level studies show no evidence of such “political resource curses.” These studies face well‐known endogeneity and other methodological issues, and employing micro‐level data would allow for drawing stronger inferences. Hence, we connect 92,762 Afrobarometer survey respondents to spatial data on 496 industrial mines. Using a difference‐in‐differences strategy, we find that mining increases bribe payments, and this result is robust to using alternative models. Mines are initially located in less corrupt areas, but mining areas turn more corrupt after mines open. When exploring mechanisms, we find that local economic activity relates differently to corruption in mining and non‐mining areas, suggesting that mining income incentivizes and enables local officials already present to require more bribes.     

Liberalization without Retrenchment: Understanding the Consensus on Swedish Welfare State Reforms

In 1980, Sweden was a highly regulated economy with several state monopolies and low levels of economic freedom. Less than twenty years later, liberal reforms turned Sweden into one of the world's most open economies with a remarkable increase in economic freedom. While there is resilience when it comes to high levels of taxes and expenditure shares of GDP, there has been a profound restructuring of Sweden's economy in the 1980s and 1990s that previous studies have under-estimated. Furthermore, the degree of political consensus is striking, both regarding the welfare state expansions that characterized Sweden up to 1980, as well as the subsequent liberalizations. Since established theories have difficulties explaining institutional change, this article seeks to understand how the Swedish style of policy making produced this surprising political consensus on liberal reforms. It highlights the importance of three complementary factors: policy making in Sweden has always been influenced by, and intimately connected to, social science ; government commissions have functioned as 'early warning systems', pointing out future challenges and creating a common way to perceive problems; and, as a consequence, political consensus has evolved as a feature of Swedish style of policy making. The approach to policy making has been rationalistic, technocratic and pragmatic. The article concludes that the Swedish style of policy making not only explains the period of welfare state expansion – it is also applicable to the intense reform period of the 1980s and 1990s.     

Advances in Osteometric Sorting: Utilizing Diaphyseal CSG Properties for Lower Limb Skeletal Pair-Matching

Pair-matching of bilateral elements is a major component of resolving commingled remains both in forensic and bioarchaeological contexts. This study presents a new method of osteometric pair-matching of the lower limbs which relies on 3D digital models of the femur and tibia bones. The proposed method, which is accompanied by a freely available open-source implementation, automatically computes a number of osteometric variables including cross-sectional geometric properties from an assemblage of left and right bone antimeres and calculates probabilistically the appropriate matching pairs as well as single elements, whose bones antimere is not present in the given assemblage. The method has been extensively tested on a skeletal sample comprising 396 femurs and 422 tibias from the Athens collection. Our results in testing commingled assemblages with no disparity show that the method’s sensitivity is 1 for sorting femurs and 0.997 for sorting tibias, whereas in assemblages with moderate disparity the sensitivity is 0.999 and 0.992 respectively. Our results further indicate that sensitivity is unaffected by the size of the commingled assemblage although the percentage of identified true matching pairs drops as the number of commingled elements increases. This means that all identified antimeres matched to an individual are still very accurately sorted despite not every individual being identified in very large assemblages. The proposed method can facilitate the sorting process of commingled remains both accurately and efficiently, while leaving a very small percentage of unsorted elements that may require further techniques for further individualization.