Crime,punishment and human nature

In Thinking About Crime James Q. Wilson brings a new dimension to crime policy research by explicating the failure of criminologists to adequately consider the philosophical perspectives on man and society which underlie alternate policy options. As a result, they rarely appreciate the inherent limits on government efforts to deal with crime. Wilson's consideration of these limitations, together with a critique of causal analysis in criminological thinking, lead him to propose an alternate conceptual framework, policy analysis. Our inspection of Wilson's own thinking reveals, however, that policy analysis is no less problematic and shortsighted than causal analysis, a result we attribute to serious flaws in his critique of criminological thinking and to the incorporation of his own biases about human nature into his conceptual framework. We seek in the concluding section to remove this bias and to demonstrate how policy analysis may be expanded into a more flexible, multi-dimensional framework, one which accounts for different assumptions about human nature and different policy goals.     

Dealing with populists in government: the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition in Greece

ABSTRACT

The Great Recession triggered an unprecedented level of political turmoil in Greece, leading to a major readjustment of the party system and the near disappearance of the once mighty socialists of PASOK. Gradually, SYRIZA – a radical-leftist-turned-populist party – rose to become the key electoral player under the aegis of its young and popular leader, Alexis Tsipras. SYRIZA eventually won two general elections in 2015 and ruled together with the populist radical right Independent Greeks (ANEL) as junior partner, a coalition of great analytical significance, representing the first ever governing alliance of left-wing and right-wing populist parties in Europe. This contribution investigates reactions to the SYRIZA-ANEL government, giving special emphasis to measures undertaken by domestic and external actors. A key finding that warrants further research is that, under the same conditions of economic crisis that bring populists to power, economic institutions and material constraints can play an important role in taming populist actors and socializing them into the standard rules of the liberal democratic regime.     

Representational roles and representative/constituency agreement: The democratic national party convention of 1976

Representational Role Theory is applied to presidential nominating conventions. Delegates to the 1976 Democratic convention are compared to the voters who selected their slates in 10 key presidential preference primaries. Because of party rule restrictions on delegates' behavior, representational roles are not pertinent to what is typically the most important decision of the convention, the first ballet vote for the party's presidential nominee. However, role orientations appear to be useful in understanding two other sets of decisions: (1) the creation of the party platform and (2) voting for the party's presidential nominee in the event that the nomination requires more than one ballot. Other than the first ballot, the Delegate role is not very popular among convention delegates.