The Chapter VII Powers of the United Nations Security Council

Netherlands International Law Review -     

A Comparison of Forensic and Nonforensic Malingerers: A Prototypical Analysis of Explanatory Models

Explanatory models of malingering strive to understand the primary motivation underlying attempts to feign. Rogers, Sewell, and Goldstein (1994) provided empirical support for the conceptualization of pathogenic, criminological, and adaptational models. In the current study, a prototypical analysis of 221 forensic experts results in a slightly refined formulation: the adaptational model was decomposed into its two broad dimensions (cost–benefit analysis and adversarial setting). An important finding is that the factor structure for the explanatory models remained stable when applied to both forensic and nonforensic cases. As a first investigation, significant differences were observed in prototypical cases of malingering by the category of referral (forensic or nonforensic) and by type of feigning (mental disorders, cognitive impairment, and medical syndromes). Surprisingly, the feigning of medical syndromes appeared to play a relatively prominent role in both forensic and nonforensic cases and to be influenced by the apparent adversarial context of the assessment. Finally, important gender differences were observed, especially with nonforensic prototypical cases of malingering.     

Citizen response to regional integration in the Americas: The cases of Costa Rica and El Salvador

This study examines public opinion in Costa Rica and El Salvador regarding regional integration in Central America. Recent efforts at regional integration as well as the response of the governments of the above countries to those efforts are reviewed. Public opinion toward regional integration is significantly more positive but less structured in El Salvador than in Costa Rica. Differences in the international and domestic contexts help to explain the differential responses in these two countries. Likewise, contextual factors help to account for differences between Central American and European publics in attitudes toward regional integration. Charles L. Davis is associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. His interests are Latin American politics and comparative political behavior. Matthew J. Gabel is assistant professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. His interests are European politics and the politics of regional integration. Kenneth M. Coleman is a former professor at the University of Kentucky, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the University of New Mexico. His interests are Latin American politics and public opinion.     

Federalism Revised: The Promise and Challenge of the No Child Left Behind Act

Federalism in education has undergone significant changes since the Winter Commission. During the early 1990s, federal policy makers faced the challenge of organizational fragmentation and policy incoherence in public education. In the last 15 years, the intergovernmental system has evolved from one that is predominantly compliance‐driven to one that is performance based, as suggested by the congressional adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. While the former is often characterized by images of “picket fence” federalism and administrative silos, the latter remains very much a work in progress, with the promise of raising academic proficiency. This paper first examines the paradigm shift and then considers emerging politics in intergovernmental relations. The author explores the ways in which state and local policy makers are altering the rules governing education service provision in response to performance‐based federal expectations.     

Information, institutions and constitutional arrangements

This paper develops a theory of optimal institutional structure for staggered-term (overlapping generations) organizations such as legislative bodies. Our model is a simple stochastic game of multi-principal, multi-agent dynamic relationships. Our results emphasize two key features that are determined by legislative founders at the “constitutional moment”. First, they will agree to institute a mechanism that endows (imperfectly informed) legislators with information about the history of play. Second, we provide conditions in which legislative founders will be indifferent to the structure of legislative procedures.     

Managing Racial Diversity: Matching Internal Strategies with Environmental Needs

Although demographic diversity has been of paramount concern to researchers and practitioners in public management, studies exploring managerial strategies to capitalize on and respond to the needs of diverse client populations are scarce. This article examines strategies for managing diversity as a way to buffer environmental challenges in service delivery and performance resulting from heterogeneous client demands. Findings suggest that administrators prioritize diversity efforts when faced with higher levels of regulatory violations (a performance measure). A higher percentage of black residents is associated with lower service quality. However, the effect of managerial strategies for diversity on performance is conditioned by the racial composition of the clients: as the percentage of black nursing home residents increases, diversity management efforts are associated with a lower number of regulatory violations. Similarly, at higher levels of racial heterogeneity, diversity management efforts are associated with fewer regulatory violations.     

Measuring and Explaining Political Sophistication through Textual Complexity

Political scientists lack domain‐specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text snippets and incorporate these results into a statistical model of sophistication. This includes previously excluded features such as parts of speech and a measure of word rarity derived from dynamic term frequencies in the Google Books data set. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and rescaled to political texts in a way that facilitates probabilistic comparisons. We reanalyze the State of the Union corpus to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using our improved approach, including the ability to compare complexity as a function of covariates.     

Employee Perceived Effect of Leadership Training: Comparing Public and Private Organizations

This study reports on the effectiveness of a year-long field experiment involving training in transformational and transactional leadership in the public and private sectors. Using before and after training assessments by employees of several hundred Danish leaders, the analysis shows that transformational leadership training is associated with increases in behaviors linked to both transformational leadership and the use of verbal rewards, but only for public sector organizations. There is no impact in private sector organizations. Transactional leadership training appears to be equally effective in stimulating the use of pecuniary rewards in both public and private organizations.