To What Extent Do Third Parties Influence Business Compliance?

Regulatory scholars have increasingly observed that it is not only public regulatory agencies and official enforcement action that motivate and enforce businesses' compliance with the law; in many situations, certain third parties may have greater capacity and power to motivate and enforce compliance with the law than do official regulatory agencies. This paper examines the extent to which businesses' worries about, and perceptions of pressure from, various third parties influence their internal compliance management activities and moral commitment in relation to complying with the objectives of competition and consumer protection law. Using data from a survey of 999 large Australian businesses, we find that businesses worry a lot about the reactions of a range of third parties including customers, shareholders, employees, and business partners to non-compliance. We find little evidence that these worries have much impact on what businesses actually do. However, perceptions of risk of complaints do influence what they do.     

Mega‐Disasters and Federalism

Measured in dollar terms, Hurricane Katrina was the worst natural disaster in American history. Mega‐disaster response recovery and mitigation put federalism to an especially difficult test because they require speed, efficiency, decisiveness, and effective coordination. This essay focuses on the response to and recovery from Katrina in order to probe the implications of mega‐disasters for federalism. It understands federalism as being composed of four dimensions: the three levels of government and the civic realm. It tests key defenses of federalism against civic and government performance during Katrina. It offers examples of successes and failures involving all four dimensions and provides specific recommendations for improving mega‐disaster mitigation, response, and recovery while maintaining an appropriate constitutional balance among the three levels of government and between the civilian government and the military.     

The Performance–Trust Link: Implications for Performance Measurement

Although the link between government performance and citizen trust in government seems intuitive, the relationship is not supported in some of the literature. This article argues that the difficulty of empirically demonstrating this link is rooted in the difficulty of defining and measuring government performance meaningfully. Performance measurement can improve citizen trust in government directly through citizen participation in the evaluation process or indirectly by improving citizens' perceptions of government performance. To achieve this potential, current performance-measurement practice must be improved: to measure what citizens really care about, to be more systematic and integrated across agencies, to include other governing entities, and to become an ongoing participatory process in which governments and citizens are both transformed.     

A Move Toward Specificity: Examining Urban Disadvantage and Race-and Relationship-Specific Homicide Rates

The purpose of this research is to estimate the differential impact of structural conditions on race- and relationship-specific homicide rates for U.S. cities in 1990. The structural conditions commonly employed in race-specific homicide research are examined, such as job accessibility, economic deprivation, racial segregation, and racial inequality. Furthermore, four relationship categories of homicide—acquaintance, family, stranger, and intimate—are disaggregated by racial group. The detailed relationship-specific homicide rates are compared to a baseline homicide rate to determine whether structural factors associated with urban disadvantage similarly influence homicide rates across relationship types. The results indicate that differences emerge in the impact of structural conditions on homicides disaggregated by race- and relationship-specific categories. Theoretical explanations consistent with criminology and race-relations literature are discussed, as well as the potential benefits and implications for studies that pursue more meaningful and detailed classifications in homicide offending.