A Fresh Look at Stock Market Short‐termism

In this article, we develop a novel understanding of stock market short‐termism as a social phenomenon. Contrary to formerly popular academic belief, short‐termism is a problem that is highly unlikely to be structurally self‐correcting. An important driver of short‐termism typically elided within standard legal‐academic analyses is the informational centricity of modern stock markets, and resulting pressure on corporate managers to generate fresh ‘news’ indicative of perceived business ‘progress’. We highlight the growing enthusiasm of policy‐makers for a discriminatory ‘two‐tiered’ approach to public company investor relations. Accordingly, long‐term and committed investors are expected to be brought into the company's governance ‘inner circle’, while other investors are implicitly relegated to lowertier ‘outsider’ status. We argue that this supports a discriminatory approach to the allocation of voting entitlements in newly listing companies, enabling committed investors to develop cooperative and sustained governance relations with management unencumbered by ‘outside’ stock market pressures for short‐term financial‐performance outcomes.     

Watering Down the Court of Justice? The Dynamics between Network Implementation and Article 258 TFEU Litigation

With the establishment of an administrative network to manage implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), a more consensual approach to judicial enforcement seemed like a natural next step. This anticipation was partially derived from the experimentalist nature of the WFD, requiring concerted action in the specification and application of its open‐ended and broad provisions. This article assesses how important changes in WFD implementation practices shape the role played by the Court of Justice with respect to Article 258 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The examination of the WFD litigation reveals interesting tensions. Network‐based implementation practices keep Member States accountable for the progress of implementation and make a subsequent legal action swifter. At the same time, implementation practices remove from courts those issues that may be better solved by network participants. The results show how the function and exercise of judicial enforcement is influenced by the ways in which legislation is implemented.     

Professionals' Contribution to the Legislative Process: Between Self,Client, and the Public

How may professionals be made to contribute to legislative processes so that their expertise redounds to the public interest, despite the legislative product being likely to have a negative impact on their clients' wealth? Drawing on a case study of the legislative process that gave birth to Israel's recent (2002–2008) trusts taxation regime, based on five years of participant observation among the trust professional community, I find that to obtain the benefit of private‐sector professionals' expertise under such circumstances, government should have legislation drafted in a dispassionate, exclusive environment of experts rather than in the political arena; it should build professionals' trust in government by adopting an explicitly collegial approach; it should focus reform efforts on elements of the existing law so clearly inequitable as to make a refusal to contribute difficult to justify; and take care that the new regime creates a compliance practice lucrative enough to compensate for any loss to professionals consequent on its enactment. Once professionals' interests are suitably safeguarded, their loyalty to clients appears surprisingly brittle and government can successfully combine with them in the public interest.     

Assessing the Reliability of Retrospective Reports of Adverse Childhood Experiences among Adolescents with Documented Childhood Maltreatment

The literature suggests that childhood maltreatment is related to a higher probability of developing psychopathology and disease in adulthood. However, some authors have questioned the reliability of self-reports of maltreatment, suggesting that psychopathology at the time of evaluation affects self-reports. We evaluated the reliability of the self-reports of 79 young adults who were identified in childhood by Child Protective Services by comparing two moments of evaluation. Psychological and physical symptoms were tested to evaluate their interference with the reports. We found good to excellent agreement, with no significant correlation between the changes in self-reported experiences and the changes in physical and psychological symptoms, suggesting that the reliability of reports is not related to the health state at the time of the report.     

Environmental management by law in China: The Guangzhou experience∗

Taking enviornmental management in Guangzhou as an example, this article explores the theory and practice of Communist China's idea of “environmental management by law.” Based on the Guangzhou experience, it argues that environmental management by law in China is mainly an administrative system of environmental management which takes law strictly as a tool for efficient and effective environmental protection. This system is operated on the principle of ‘rule by law’, and is the antithesis of the Maoist practice of “rule by person.” Contrary to its Western counterpart, China's environmental management system is built on a state‐centered conception of administrative law instead of a ‘right‐centered’ one which is the core of the ‘rule of law’ tradition.     

Size,Democracy, and the Economic Costs of Running the Political System

The search for the optimal size of political systems is one of the most enduring in political thought. Given the validity of arguments for and against small units, one might expect variation in rearrangements of unit sizes. However, the reform trend is uniform: units, often at the local level, are amalgamated to harvest scale effects. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the argument on economies of scale in the economic costs of running political systems. Our testing ground is a recent Danish reform. It allows us to avoid endogeneity problems often facing researchers of size reforms. The reform was directed by the central government and constitutes an exogenous shock to 239 municipalities, whereas 32 municipalities were left untouched. We thus have a quasi‐experiment with pre‐ and posttreatment observations for both an experiment and a control group. Our findings show that scale effects, measured as administrative costs per inhabitant, are considerable.     

Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses

Collection and especially analysis of open‐ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments in machine learning based analysis of textual data. A crucial contribution of the method is that it incorporates information about the document, such as the author's gender, political affiliation, and treatment assignment (if an experimental study). This article focuses on how the STM is helpful for survey researchers and experimentalists. The STM makes analyzing open‐ended responses easier, more revealing, and capable of being used to estimate treatment effects. We illustrate these innovations with analysis of text from surveys and experiments.     

Do Voters Respond to Party Manifestos or to a Wider Information Environment? An Analysis of Mass‐Elite Linkages on European Integration

Recent studies analyze how citizens update their perceptions of parties’ left‐right positions in response to new political information. We extend this research to consider the issue of European integration, and we report theoretical and empirical analyses that citizens do not update their perceptions of parties’ positions in response to election manifestos, but that citizens’ perceptions of parties’ positions do track political experts’ perceptions of these positions, and, moreover, that it is party supporters who disproportionately perceive their preferred party's policy shifts. Given that experts plausibly consider a wide range of information, these findings imply that citizens weigh the wider informational environment when assessing parties’ positions. We also present evidence that citizens’ perceptions of party position shifts matter, in that they drive partisan sorting in the mass public.     

Converging on euroscepticism: Online polity contestation during European Parliament elections

Does the increasing politicisation of Europe signify a step towards the legitimation of the Union? This could be the case if the increased public intensity of debate and polarisation of opinion brought about by politicisation do not fragment the audience and if arguments presented in public are sufficiently clear about the desired nature of the polity. To answer this question, the focus of this article is on dynamic contestation in the public sphere using original data of news platforms and political blogs in 12 EU Member States and transnational websites during the European Parliament election campaign of 2009. The results are, first, that diffuse eurosceptic evaluations dominate public debates despite large variation in the intensity of debate across Member States. Second, a majority of evaluations made, particularly those by citizens leaving comments online, are negative in all countries included in this study. A gap between elites and citizens persists, but it appears less pronounced than often proclaimed in the literature. And third, democracy is a primary concern in EU polity contestation, especially for those evaluating the EU negatively. Although little evidence is found of a fragmentation of audiences, the prominence of diffuse euroscepticism poses a major challenge to legitimation of the Union.