For fear of popular politics? Public attention and the delegation of authority to the United States executive branch

Legislators are thought to delegate policymaking authority to administrative actors either to avoid blame for controversial policy or to secure policy outcomes. This study tests these competing perspectives and establishes that public attention to policymaking is a powerful predictor of the extent to which significant United States statutes delegate authority to the executive branch. Consistent with the policy‐concerns perspective, by one calculation statutes dealing with high‐attention issues entail 48 percent fewer delegating provisions than statutes dealing with low‐attention issues – a far stronger relationship than is typically found in the delegation literature. As per the blame‐avoidance perspective, a number of additional analyses yield results consistent with the notion that fears about future public attention motivate statutory delegation if legislative conflict is sufficiently great. Overall, however, the results suggest that conflict typically is not sufficiently great and that legislators are generally more inclined to limit statutory delegation when the public is paying attention.     

Slouching Towards New ‘Just’ Wars: International Law and the Use of Force After September 11th

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Missing Data Problems in Criminological Research: Two Case Studies

This paper considers the problem of missing data in two circumstances commonly confronted by criminologists. In the first circumstance, there is missing data due to subject attrition—some cases drop out of a study. In this context, analysts are frequently interested in examining the association between an independent variable measured at time t(x _t ) and an outcome variable that is measured at time t + 1(y _t + 1); the problem is that the outcome variable is only observed for those cases which do not drop out of the study. In the second circumstance there is missing data on an independent variable of interest for typical reasons (i.e., the respondent did not wish to answer a question or could not be located). In this case, researchers are interested in estimating the association between the independent variable with missing data and an outcome variable that is fully observed. Criminologists often handle these two missing data problems by conducting analyses on the subsample of observations with complete data. In this paper, we explore this problem with two case studies and we then illustrate the use of methods that directly address the uncertainty produced by missing data.     

欧洲对于私生活的法律保护:法国与德国的比较

比较法的研究有助于对欧盟成员国的不同法律传统的理解.①加强共同体公民的法律保障必须要借助于对其基本权利的保护.②在发现成员国的法律保护机制之间存在一定的相似性之后,比较法研究可以揭示出成员国国内法之间存在的一些重要差别.对于法国和德国尤其是如此.     

The historical roots and development of criminological statistics

The history of the development of criminological statistics must examine the emergence of social statistics in general. The theoretical concerns and technical questions raised by early criminologists cannot be isolated from the wider concerns of sociologists and statisticians at work in other fields. This article traces the history and problems of crime and justice statistics through the distinct periods: a “preparatory” phase (1650–1800),and a “conceptualization” phase (1800–1914). In addition, while specifically noting a dependent relationship with the fields of demography and statistics, the separation of criminological statistics as an automous area is considered. The use of criminal justice statistics for comparative and other purposes has come under considerable review and criticism during recent years, and an examination of historical sources and problems serves to increase the understanding and usefulness of these statistics today.