Just punishments: Guideline sentences and normative consensus

The federal sentencing guidelines prescribe ranges of sentences to be given to persons convicted of felonies in the federal criminal courts. The U.S. Sentencing Commission wrote the guidelines attempting to make sentences conform to community views of appropriate punishments, along with several other criteria. Employing data from a 1994 national sample of adult Americans, designed as a factorial survey, the degree of correspondence is shown between guidelines sentences and those desired by the American public. Although at the individual level only a modest degree of concordance was found, the central tendencies of public opinion (median sentences) were found to correspond quite closely to the guidelines sentences. The major points of disagreement centered around drug trafficking crimes: the guidelines prescribed very long sentences for those crimes and distinguished sharply among trafficking in heroin, powder cocaine, and crack, whereas median sentences desired by the public were much lower and did not distinguish sharply among trafficking in those drugs. We interpret the findings as indicating that the guidelines sentences conform reasonably closely to American normative consensus concerning the sentencing of federal felons.The research reported in this article was commissioned by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily endorsed by the Commission. Full expositions of the findings from the national survey used are given by Rossi and Berk (1995, 1997).     

An agenda for post-troubles policing in Northern Ireland — The South African precedent

Conclusion These proposals represent part of a much larger agenda for policing reform. Critically, it is now time in Northern Ireland, as it was in South Africa, for all sides to start “thinking the unthinkable” if the peace process is to gain momentum. In that process of creating an agenda, opinions will be sought from many quarters. South Africa, in certain limited ways, provides a model of how irreconcilable views about the nature of policing a divided society, can be given serious considerations, of a more peaceful society is to be created. But there is one other crucial lesson from South Africa. Police reform cannot be imposed from above, or according to the dictates of outside experts. It must be based on serious, continuing consultation between all parties — local communities, political parties, the central state, and the police service itself. The South African example demonstrates that existing hostile interests do not have to learn to love one another in making progress in police reform. There is a common interest which surmounts political opposition — local people need the security which an effective, non-partisan police service can provide. minuscule levels.     

Style issues and vote choice

It has been an assumption common in voting research that candidates must offer and voters must perceive opposing stands on issues for those issues to have a rational influence on the vote. Though apparently reasonable, this assumption eliminates analysis of the rational impact of style in voter thinking. This article argues that style issues should not be so easily dismissed and were of some importance in the 1972 presidential election. First, the data indicate that voters considered style issues as important as position issues. Second, voters were able to detect differences between the candidates on certain style issues. Third, salient style issues and salient position issues are similar in their causal relationship to the vote. These findings lend support to the general conclusion that style issues are an important and rational element of voter deliberations and have several implications for the study of public opinion, the behavior of political leaders, and the adequacy of elections as mechanisms of governmental accountability.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in Phoenix, March 31-April 2, 1977. The data presented here were gathered under National Science Foundation Grant GS-35408, Robert D. McClure and Thomas E. Patterson, principle investigators. We would like to thank Professor Patterson and McClure for the use of their data and their helpful comments.     

Harmonizing the international regulation of embryonic stem cell research: possibilities, promises and potential pitfalls

Despite near unanimous global opposition to human reproductive cloning, the United Nations has been unable to reach a consensus as to how cloning practices should be regulated at the international level. As a result, the U.N. objective of establishing binding international regulations governing cloning and stem cell research has yet to be achieved. Given the lack of consensus that exists within the global community on this topic, it seems that any attempt to harmonize the international regulation of cloning and stem cell science will face important obstacles. This paper seeks to illuminate the particular challenges to harmonizing international laws and policies related to stem cell research and human cloning, and to investigate potential methods for overcoming these challenges. By drawing on two other areas in which regulatory harmonization has been attempted, namely: environmental and human safety aspects of international trade, and pharmaceutical research and development, we study approaches to global regulatory harmonization. We conclude that while the challenges to harmonization are diverse and important, so too are the benefits of establishing uniformity in approaches to stem cell research worldwide. This paper proposes a model for harmonizing the regulation of stem cell research that focuses on broader norms and principles rather than specific rules. It further recommends that such harmonization should occur through a process initiated and developed by an independent international agency marked by diversity, both in terms of the cultural identities and perspectives represented, and the interdisciplinary expertise of its members.     

THE POTENTIAL FOR SIGNIFICANT INACCURACIES IN MERGER SIMULATION MODELS

This paper considers the role that merger simulation modelsshould play in European merger control. The use of these models,as off-the-shelf instruments to assess the economic effectsof mergers, has become increasingly widespread in recent years.However, contrary to some claims, merger simulation models donot allow investigators to avoid much of the competitive effectsanalysis relating to the relevant economic market, nor do theynecessarily provide more precision to merger control. Withoutunderstanding the limitations of such models and the circumstancesunder which they can and should be usefully applied, they maynot just be useless, but dangerous in the sense of providingpossibly spurious results with spurious claimed accuracy. Thispaper argues that any merger simulation models used should be"bespoke" models, rather than off-the-shelf models, but cautionsthat even bespoke models will frequently not be as useful asis often claimed. This is not to deny that there are occasionswhen well-constructed bespoke models are genuinely useful anddo offer genuine improvements in merger control.