Promoting a "good death": determinants of pain-management policies in the United States

Many Americans do not experience a good death. The inadequate treatment of pain at the end of life has been associated with a lack of supportive public policies more than a lack of evidence-based clinical practices or organizational efforts. Given a widespread lack of understanding about pain policies, we examine the critical role played by state medical boards in developing pain policies and then apply event history analysis to identify the variables most critical to the formation of these policies. We develop an integrated model and evaluate the adoption of eight different types of pain policies. The analytic models incorporate fifteen years of observational data and test the impact of contextual, political, extrinsic, and institutional variables. They reveal that the presence of legal counselors on state medical boards has consistently increased the likelihood that state boards adopt policies associated with progressive pain management. Further, policy has been negatively influenced by historical activity: boards that previously adopted one pain policy have been less likely to subsequently adopt additional pain policies. This work illuminates mechanisms behind state pain-policy adoption and provides valuable information for advocates who seek to improve pain-management policy and reduce the amount of pain at the end of life.     

Attitudes about electronic monitoring: Minority and majority racial group differences

Past public opinion research routinely uncovered significant variation in attitudes toward justice system policies among different racial groups. The bulk of punishment attitudinal research, for the most part, focused on more severe sanctions, namely, incarceration and the death penalty. More recent research investigated the perspectives and experiences associated with intermediate sanctions. There are few intermediate sanctions receiving more attention than the use of electronic monitoring, especially with sex offenders. In this article, it is demonstrated that non-White college students have significantly different attitudes about the punitiveness and inequality of electronic monitoring. These findings were uncovered through 599 completed surveys from two universities, and using factor analysis and least-squares regression analysis. Theoretical and practical implications for continued use of this sanction are discussed.     

Assessing the Domestic Violence Training Needs of Benefits Workers

Domestic violence victims often have economic and employment needs that either directly or indirectly stem from their victimization. In their efforts to seek services, victims may turn to benefits workers who are given the task of providing clients with short-term financial help, job training, access to health care, and assistance in obtaining a job. It is not clear whether benefits workers are adequately prepared to help domestic violence victims. In this study, 189 social services workers from the Commonwealth of Virginia were surveyed to assess the training needs of all social services workers. This article focuses on the specific training needs of benefits workers and draws comparisons between benefits workers’ training needs and other workers’ needs. The findings suggest that benefits workers are perceived as knowing less about domestic violence than other social services workers. Implications are discussed. This research was supported by a contract from the Virginia Institute of Social Services Training Activities     

Translation Approaches in Constitutional Hermeneutics

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - In this article, we suggest an alternate approach to interpreting the US Constitution, using...     

Electric Shock: The 2012 India Blackout and Public Confidence in Politicians

How do disruptions in basic public service delivery shape people’s perceptions of politicians? We offer evidence from the July 2012 blackout in India, the largest in human history. Using data from the India Human Development Survey, we compare confidence in politicians between households that were surveyed during the outage and affected by it (treatment) and only days before it (control). Balance statistics show that the treatment and control groups are statistically indistinguishable, and further tests indicate that there was no disturbance to the pattern of surveying. Far from undermining public confidence in politicians, the outage increased it, as citizens reacted to the anxiety created by the crisis. The implications are normatively troubling, as politicians seem to have reaped benefits from disruptions in public service delivery.     

Repression,co-optation and insurgency: Pakistan’s FATA,Southern Thailand and Papua,Indonesia

Scholars have long identified state repression as playing a key role in the onset of insurgency. Violence by security forces increases anger against the state and assists with rebel recruitment. Yet scholars have also recognised that repression does not always lead to rebellion: in some cases it successfully quashes movements before they have begun. This study advances an argument for when and why repression leads to insurgency and sometimes does not. We contend that violence by state security forces can fail to trigger rebellion if local elites within the repressed community are simultaneously co-opted with political and economic opportunities. When elites are satisfied with local autonomy and patronage they deprive the dissident movement of local leadership and coordination. When the state uses repression against a community and at the same time abandons this mutually beneficial relationship, the insurgency has both the leadership and grassroots support it requires. We illustrate our argument by examining three cases of state violence in Asia. In two of our cases, Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Southern Thailand, repression led directly to insurgency. In the third, Papua in Indonesia, ongoing co-optation of local elites has left the movement factionalised and weak.     

Do Municipal Mergers Improve Technical Efficiency? An Empirical Analysis of the 2008 Queensland Municipal Merger Program

Municipal mergers remain an important instrument of local government policy in numerous countries, including Australia, despite some concerns surrounding its efficacy. We consider the claim that amalgamations enhance the technical efficiency of the merged entities by examining the 2008 Queensland compulsory consolidation program that reduced the number of local authorities from 157 to 73 councils. To test the claim, we conduct locally inter‐temporal data envelopment analysis over the period 2003–2013 inclusive. Our evidence suggests that (1) in the financial year preceding the mergers, there was no statistically significant difference in the typical efficiency scores of amalgamated and non‐amalgamated councils and (2) 2 years following the mergers, the typical technical efficiency score of the amalgamated councils was well below the non‐amalgamated cohort. We argue this may be attributed to increased spending on staffing expenses, although comparatively larger operational expenditure also served to diminish efficiency.     

The National Context of Wicked Problems: Comparing Policies on Gun Violence in the US,Canada, and Australia

Scholars and practitioners have always been dogged by problems that are so complex that no practical solution appears to be possible. These have been referred to in the academic literature as “wicked” problems. However, it is possible that a problem’s “wickedness” depends in part on its context and on the vantage point of the observer, meaning that at least some aspects of wickedness can be thought of as being relative rather than absolute. In this article, the complex policy problem of gun control is examined across multiple national contexts to show how a problem that is perceived as being wicked in one jurisdiction can be seen as manageable in another.