Rent seeking for madness: the political economy of mental asylums in the United States, 1870 to 1910

Public Choice - Recent studies indicate that the ideological stances of government parties no are longer associated with differences in total government spending. At the same time, we observe that...     

Strategies for dealing with policy ambiguities

Ambiguities often weave through policies, leading to conflict and confusion over the intents and purpose of said policy and how it may manifest in any specific instance. Given that policy management is a core function for most public service agencies, the challenges here are almost universally experienced as public servants balance the political, legal, and technical requirements of policies against their functionality in practice. To this end, the authors use a grounded theory approach to identify themes in how practitioners cope with policy ambiguities. Relying on data from program evaluation reports and interviews with practitioners, the authors triangulate five themes: interpretation as a collaborative endeavor, teach people how to think, processes simplify and guide, consistency comes from horizontal communication, and policy interpretation evolve. Conclusions argue that ambiguity is a key theoretical and practical challenge that impacts the quality and character of democratic governance.     

Amazonian peasant livelihood differentiation as mutuality-market dialectics

ABSTRACT

Economistic approaches to the study of peasant livelihoods have considerable academic and policy influence, yet, we argue, perpetuate a partial misunderstanding – often reducing peasant livelihood to the management of capital assets by rational actors. In this paper, we propose to revitalize the original heterodox spirit of the sustainable livelihoods framework by drawing on Stephen Gudeman’s work on the dialectic between use values and mutuality on the one hand, and exchange values and the market on the other. We use this approach to examine how historically divergent mutuality-market dialectics in different Amazonian regions have shaped greater prominence of either extractivism or agriculture in current livelihoods. We conclude that an approach centered on the mutuality-market dialectic is of considerable utility in revealing the role of economic histories in shaping differential peasant livelihoods in tropical forests. More generally, it has considerable potential to contribute to a much-needed re-pluralization of approaches to livelihood in academia and policy.     

Taking the bait: interrogation questions about hypothetical evidence may inflate perceptions of guilt

ABSTRACT

During suspect interviews, police will sometimes ask about hypothetical incriminating evidence to evoke a cue to deception – a technique known as a bait question. Previous research has demonstrated such questions can distort peoples’ memory for what evidence exists in a case. Here, we investigate whether such memory distortion can also cause people to see the suspect as more likely to be guilty. Across three experiments, we find exposure to bait questions led to participants hold inflated views of a suspect’s guilt. Further, we demonstrate bait questions cause reliable, robust memory distortion, leading participants to believe non-existent, incriminating evidence exists. However, we found no evidence to support the speculated mechanisms for this inflation – namely, (1) that source monitoring errors could lead people to misremember false evidence as real evidence and (2) that bait questions provide ‘key evidence’ to fill in the gaps of an incomplete theory of a case. In sum, bait questions have the problematic potential to shift jurors towards guilty verdicts. We suggest future research directions on bait questions, including the need for different designs to clarify why bait questions inflate guilt, and recommend practitioners avoid the use of bait questions.     

Why do Historians Ignore Digital Analysis? Bring on the Luddites

This article argues that historians have failed to grasp the profound opportunities afforded by computational analysis. Despite the abundance of machine-readable data liberated by digitisation—alongside tools and exemplar studies—there has been no widespread embrace of text mining or revival of cliometrics. This ambivalence has arisen mainly through apathy and side-lining of computational analysis to a specialist methodological niche. The absence of justification is damaging to the intellectual vitality of the discipline and its capacity to face the dawning age of data science. The article calls for an urgent debate about the historian and the computer. More than anything else, this requires sceptics to come forward to meet the advocates to discuss how we face the future. British political history has a proud tradition of methodological innovation and there is no better subfield in which to begin a debate that has fundamental implications for the whole discipline.     

The Science behind United States Smart Power in Honduras: Archaeological Heritage Diplomacy

The cultural heritage of Honduras offers a critical platform for United States heritage diplomacy under the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Cultural Heritage Center. Of specific note is the formal 2004 Honduran–American Memorandum of Understanding for the preservation of cultural property and, beginning in 2001, periodic projects under the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation. The diplomatic efficacy of American cultural heritage policy and the Ambassadors Fund comes from long-term, sustained funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Program. Established networks by archaeologists have enabled the successful re-entry of United States cultural diplomacy in Honduras in the last decade.