Public Administration Education and Europeanization: Prospects for the Emancipation of a Discipline?

The twin processes of Europeanization and Transition provide significant opportunities for the development of Public Administration education in Europe and provide a possibility to further the 'emancipation' of the discipline. In terms of Europeanization, the increasing challenges of politico-administrative interaction between national administrations and the institutions of the European Union illustrate that it is essential for Public Administration graduates to acquire an informed understanding of both the European context of policy-making and of the administrative organization and culture of other member states and countries associated with the EU. As a second element, the transition process in Central and Eastern European states could provide the discipline with further impetus to search for its own identity and approach in a European context. This article reviews the key findings of the results of the comprehensive inventories undertaken by the SOCRATES Thematic Network in Public Administration with regard to the current direction in which Public Administration education in Europe is moving. It addresses whether attention to European issues is reflected in the curriculum as well as links with the profession and whether cross-fertilization between the development of new programmes in the transition states and PA academic programmes in the EU member states has actually occurred.     

The Elusive Backfire Effect: Mass Attitudes’ Steadfast Factual Adherence

Political Behavior - Can citizens heed factual information, even when such information challenges their partisan and ideological attachments? The “backfire effect,” described by Nyhan...     

Connecting social and environmental policy in Australia: Collateral gains or collateral damage?

Climate change research relating to “co‐benefits” suggests that the facilitation of social‐welfare outcomes through environmental policy offers a powerful means of incentivising climate change action. Concerns about social‐welfare, however, are often used to undermine climate change policies, typically through political claims that low‐to‐middle‐income households should not shoulder the costs of greater policy alignment between social and environmental objectives. Integrating the social into the environmental can therefore, on the one hand, lead to “co‐benefits” as each agenda promotes the other in political discourse, or alternatively to collateral damage if the policy objectives are framed as incompatible. This article explores both scenarios through two case studies of energy policy in Australia. The findings show that social‐welfare concerns can be a powerful discursive tool with the potential to facilitate political consensus, but also that this potential is not being fully realised, primarily because environmental concerns suffer when attempts are made to integrate the two areas discursively.     

Domain Name DRS Policies: from the sublime to the ridiculous

Legal context. Cybersquatting emerged as a major problem fortrade mark owners in the latter part of the 1990s. Litigationhas proved a heavy and expensive method of resolving disputes.Over the past decade, various alternative dispute resolutionpolicies have been introduced, most notably the UDRP and mostrecently the .eu ADR Procedure. Key points. The article tracks the development of dispute resolutionand associated sunrise policies from the UDRP, via the NOMINETDRS Policy to the new .eu ADR Procedure. The UDRP was designedto assist nobody but trade mark owners. The NOMINET DRS Policyis wider and covers other rights owners without being specificas to the nature of the relevant rights. The .eu ADR Procedureon the other hand expressly extends to a wide variety of rightsranging from trade mark rights to rights in respect of familynames and condemns speculative as well as abusive registrations.The article draws attention to some of the shortcomings of the.eu ADR Procedure and laments the fact that the European Commission,which is responsible for the introduction of the .eu domain,did not consult more widely with a view to arriving at a sensibleworkable result. The author predicts a shambles both in relationto the .eu sunrise policy and the ADR procedure. Practical significance. The UDRP, the NOMINET DRS, and the .euADR Procedure all contain very similarly worded provisions,which help to conceal the significant differences between them.Practitioners formulating and/or responding to complaints underthese policies and procedures need to be aware of the differences.     

Investigation of the Criminal and Conditional Release Profiles of Canadian Federal Offenders as a Function of Psychopathy and Age

Using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 1991) diagnostic cutoff score of 30, the complete criminal career and community release profiles of 317 Canadian federal offenders (224 low scorers and 93 scoring within the psychopathic range) were investigated. Adult crimes were coded according to age at commission as well as either violent, nonviolent, or nonsexually violent. Changes in performance following release into the community also were examined. Results indicated that offenders scoring within the psychopathic range consistently committed more violent and nonviolent crimes than their counterparts for about three decades, spanning their late adolescence to their late 40s. Numbers of nonviolent criminal offenses committed by high PCL-R scorers declined considerably after age 30 relative to violent offenses, which declined and then rebounded in the late 30s before a major reduction was evidenced. Throughout adulthood, high PCL-R scorers failed during community release significantly faster than did low scorers. Importantly, from a risk management perspective, the release performance of low PCL-R scorers improved with age, whereas the opposite was seen for high scorers. Further, offenders scoring high on the PCL-R did not show a lower charge to conviction ratio with age, suggesting that they may not have been getting better at manipulating the legal system.     

Settling institutional uncertainty: Policing Chicago and New York, 1877–1923

We show how both the Chicago Police Department and the New York Police Department sought to settle uncertainty about their propriety and purpose during a period when abrupt transformations destabilized urban order and called the police mandate into question. By comparing annual reports that the Chicago Police Department and the New York Police Department published from 1877 to 1923, we observe two techniques in how the police enacted that settlement: identification of the problems that the police believed themselves uniquely well equipped to manage and authorization of the powers necessary to do so. Comparison of identification and authorization yields insights into the role that these police departments played in convergent and divergent constructions of disorder and, in turn, into Progressivism's varying effects in early urban policing.