Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom,and Beyond

The article overviews and elaborates the concept of polycentricity, defined as a structural feature of social systems of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules. The article starts by introducing the concept as it was advanced by Michael Polanyi and developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It continues introducing possible instances of polycentricity as well as related notions, as part of an attempt to further elaborate the concept through a concept design approach that systematically applies the logic of necessary and sufficient conditions. The article concludes by arguing that the polycentricity conceptual framework is not only a robust analytical structure for the study of complex social phenomena, but is also a challenging method of drawing non‐ad hoc analogies between different types of self‐organizing complex social systems.     

SENTENCING HOMICIDE OFFENDERS IN THE NETHERLANDS: OFFENDER,VICTIM, AND SITUATIONAL INFLUENCES IN CRIMINAL PUNISHMENT*

Empirical investigations of criminal sentencing represent a vast research enterprise in criminology. However, this research has been restricted almost exclusively to U.S. contexts, and often it suffers from key data limitations. As such, an examination of more detailed international sentencing data provides an important opportunity to assess the generalizability of contemporary research and theorizing on criminal punishment in the United States. The current study investigates little-researched questions about the influence of prosecutorial sentencing recommendations, victim/offender relationships, and extralegal disparities in sentencing by analyzing unique data on the punishment of homicide offenders in the Netherlands. The results indicate that offender, victim, and situational offense characteristics all exert important independent effects at sentencing and that prosecutorial recommendations exert powerful influences over judicial sentences. The article concludes with a discussion of future directions for comparative sentencing research across international contexts.     

DEMONSTRATING THE VALIDITY OF TWIN RESEARCH IN CRIMINOLOGY

In a recent article published in Criminology, Burt and Simons ( 2014 ) claimed that the statistical violations of the classical twin design render heritability studies useless. Claiming quantitative genetics is “fatally flawed” and describing the results generated from these models as “preposterous,” Burt and Simons took the unprecedented step to call for abandoning heritability studies and their constituent findings. We show that their call for an “end to heritability studies” was premature, misleading, and entirely without merit. Specifically, we trace the history of behavioral genetics and show that 1) the Burt and Simons critique dates back 40 years and has been subject to a broad array of empirical investigations, 2) the violation of assumptions in twin models does not invalidate their results, and 3) Burt and Simons created a distorted and highly misleading portrait of behavioral genetics and those who use quantitative genetic approaches.     

The Politics of Fiscal Austerity: Implications for the United States

As austerity becomes the new normal for advanced nations, questions are raised about whether nations can make the hard choices necessary to bring about a sustainable fiscal future. The political defeat experienced by so many European governments undertaking fiscal consolidations points to the vulnerabilities that leaders will face. This article shows that how some Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations have survived the daunting politics of fiscal consolidation by timing actions for periods of economic recovery and political honeymoons following elections and by pursuing deficit reduction strategies that emphasize broad sweeping changes yielding high potential for dramatic economic gains over the longer term. Unlike many European nations today, the seemingly endless appetite for US treasuries by worldwide markets give the United States the luxury of choosing to begin deficit reduction only when the economy strengthens. However, the absence of market pressure also reduces the sense of urgency, consigning national leaders to create internal crises such as the 2012 “fiscal cliff” to force their own hand. While the polarized politics characterizing our party system does not bode well for concerted fiscal action, divided government carries the potential for spreading political risks and promoting more sustainable fiscal outcomes, as it has in our recent history and in other nations as well.     

Representation as a median mandate? A response to Best,Budge and McDonald

The preceding article by Best, Budge and McDonald acknowledges much of the substance of the alternative ‘bilateralist’ interpretation of democratic governance I advocated and attempts to re‐focus the median mandate approach towards a longer‐term, and potentially more productive, understanding of the opinion‐policy relationship. Both are welcome developments. Despite taking these steps, however, the authors choose to allow the fate of the median mandate thesis to rest ultimately on an attempt to re‐establish the short‐term one‐to‐one relationship that I challenged. In this brief note, I argue that this not only undercuts the more positive initiatives noted above, but also is based on a flawed understanding of how the short‐term relationship should be operationalised and tested.