Setting the Regulatory Agenda: Statutory Deadlines,Delay, and Responsiveness

Congress imposes statutory deadlines in an attempt to influence agency regulatory agendas, but agencies regularly fail to meet them. What explains agency responsiveness to statutory deadlines? Taking a transaction cost politics approach, the authors develop a theory of responsiveness to deadlines centered on political feasibility to explain how agency managers map rulemaking onto calendar and political time. This theory is tested on all unique rules with statutory deadlines published in the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions between 1995 and 2012. The argument and findings about the timing and ultimate promulgation of rules have implications that reorient the study of the regulatory agenda from legal and political into more managerial terms.     

Minilateral security's relevance to US strategy in the Indo-Pacific: challenges and prospects

The Indo-Pacific region's security landscape is unfolding in highly uncertain and potentially explosive ways. The postwar American-led network of bilateral alliances – underpinned by concrete guarantees of extended deterrence and containment – is now yielding to a more diverse set of alignments and coalitions to manage an increasingly complex array of regional security issues. Multilateralism and minilateralism have emerged as two increasingly prominent forms of such cooperation. Minilateralism's informality and flexibility appeals to those who are sceptical about multilateralism's traditional focus on norm adherence and community-building even as great power competition in the Indo-Pacific is sharply intensifying. However, minilateralism's track record in the region is underdeveloped. The potential for this policy approach to be applied by the United States and its regional security partners as an enduring and credible means of diplomatic and security collaboration in the region will remain unfulfilled as long as the Trump administration's own geopolitical orientation remains uncertain.     

Hybrid Strategies: The American Experience

The United States has never followed only one grand strategy at a time. In this article, I develop the concept of “hybrid” grand strategies—strategies that vary by time and place, and combine the advantages (or disadvantages) of pure strategic archetypes such as containment, integration, regime change, bargaining, or non-intervention. I argue that hybrid strategies have been ubiquitous in American history, varying more by emphasis and degree than by absolute contrast. Moreover, U.S. hybrid strategies have often succeeded in accomplishing their major goals.     

Applied Grand Strategy: Making Tough Choices in an Era of Limits and Constraint

This article hopes to contribute to the strategic content of U.S. foreign policy by offering a definition of grand strategy and case for reorienting U.S. policy around it. Rather than advocate a specific grand strategy—a matter still open for debate—the analysis concludes with a set of attributes to assess whether a proposed grand strategy constitutes a “good” grand strategy. It concludes by introducing the concept of an applied grand strategy approach, which may help to identify and assess the strategic implications of foreign policy choices.     

Incarceration, education and transition from delinquency

Purpose

Much of what is known regarding the transition away from crime is limited to young adulthood and specific life events and samples of non-serious offenders comprised mainly of white males.

Methods

The current study assesses the potential links between educational achievement, post-release schooling, and re-arrest for a cohort of 4,147 incarcerated youths drawn from 115 Florida juvenile institutions and followed for two years post-release.

Results

Incarcerated youths with higher levels of educational achievement are more likely to return to school after release, and those youths who returned to and attended school regularly were less likely to be rearrested within 12 and 24 months. Moreover, among youths who were rearrested, those youth who attended school regularly following release were arrested for significantly less serious offenses compared to youths who did not attend school or attended less regularly.

Conclusions

The study concludes with discussion of the importance of educational achievement as an important turning point for juvenile offenders as they transition into young adulthood.