The Obama Administration and PBB: Building on the Legacy of Federal Performance‐Informed Budgeting?

The administration of President Barack Obama, like those of his immediate predecessors, is focused on trying to improve the quality of, and use of, performance data. The federal government has been pursuing performance‐informed budget reforms for more than 50 years. Most recently, the Bush administration reforms included the President’s Management Agenda and the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). The Obama administration reforms include: measuring the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; reducing or eliminating poorly‐performing programs; setting a limited number of short‐term, high‐priority performance goals; and funding detailed program evaluations. The administration is taking a more agency‐driven approach than the Bush administration, but continues to find it challenging to move beyond production of performance data to its use. There should be opportunities to show how performance information can be used for decision making, given the change in the political climate and the needs to reduce spending and the deficit. Historically, there has been little appetite in the Congress for evidence‐based decision making. The administration, however, can continue to demonstrate how federal agencies can use performance information to more effectively manage programs.     

To protect and collect: a nationwide study of profit-motivated police crime

This study is part of a larger research project on police crime in the United States. Police crimes are those criminal offenses committed by sworn law enforcement officers who have the general powers of arrest. Profit-motivated police crime involves officers who use their authority of position to engage in crime for personal gain. This study reports the findings on 1,591 cases where a law enforcement officer was arrested for one or more profit-motivated crimes during the seven-year period 2005–2011. The profit-motivated arrest cases involved 1,396 individual officers employed by 782 state, local, special, constable, and tribal law enforcement agencies located in 531 counties and independent cities in 47 states and the District of Columbia. Our data is the first systematic study of profit-motivated police crime. The study describes the nature of this form of police misconduct in terms of several dimensions, including the characteristics of police who perpetrate these crimes, where it occurs, the specific criminal charges, and the contexts within which profit-motivated police crime is punished through police agencies and the criminal courts.     

Building sustainable free legal advisory systems: Experiences from the history of AI & law

The enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI) as a source of solutions to problems is not new. In law, from the early 1980s until at least the early 2000s, considerable work was done on developing ‘legal expert systems.’ As the DataLex project, we participated in those developments, through research and publications, commercial and non-commercial systems, and teaching students application development. This paper commences with a brief account of that work to situate our perspective.The main aim of this paper is an assessment of what might be of value from the experience of the DataLex Project to contemporary use of ‘AI and law’ by free legal advice services, who must necessarily work within funding and other constraints in developing and sustaining such systems. We draw fifteen conclusions from this experience, which we consider are relevant to development of systems for free legal advice services. The desired result, we argue, is the development of integrated legal decision-support systems, not ‘expert systems’ or ‘robot lawyers’. We compare our insights with the approach of the leading recent text in the field, and with a critical review of the field over twenty-five years. We conclude that the approach taken by the DataLex Project, and now applied to free legal advice services, remains consistent with leading work in field of AI and law.The paper concludes with brief suggestions of what are the most desirable improvements to tools and platforms to enable development of free legal advice systems. The objectives of free access to legal information services have much in common with those of free legal advice services. The information resources that free access to law providers (including LIIs) can provide will often be those that free legal advice services will need to use to develop and sustain free legal advisory systems. There is therefore strong potential for valuable collaborations between these two types of services providers.     

Gorbachev's Economic Strategy: A Comment

Specialists from three countries report the results of survey research conducted during March-April 2000 in Dagestan. Questions addressed include identification with Russia and with Dagestan, confidence in local, regional, and federal institutions, perceptions of changes in the economy, politics, and cultural life, and perceived threats from external sources. Analysis also specifies attitudinal differences among ethnic groups and among other demographic categories within Dagestan.     

Idealism resurgent (and what realists should do about it): Ideas and foreign aid

David Lumsdaine's study on the role of moral beliefs in the foreign aid regime represents the apex of a recent resurgence in idealist approaches to international relations, including the emergence of a so‐called ‘constructivist’ perspective. In reviewing these contributions, the author argues in favour of treating beliefs other than moral ones as important in developing a fuller understanding of the cognitive dynamics of foreign aid. He also suggests that the role of norms in the foreign aid regime requires special attention, and the need to complement an idealist appreciation for the causal role of ideas with a realist perspective on the role of power and strategy in creation the conditions for the efficaciousness of ideas.     

From the New International Economic Order to the G20: how the ‘global South’ is restructuring world capitalism from within

Abstract

In the early 1970s the G77 and the Non Aligned Movement ( nam ) challenged the material and intellectual pillars of the postwar liberal capitalist system through collective action at the UN to establish a New International Economic Order ( nieo ). The aim was to complete the ‘emancipation’ of the ‘global South’ by creating binding institutional frameworks, legal regimes and redistributive mechanisms correcting historically constructed core–periphery disparities. That ambitious effort failed in the face of ‘Northern’ resistance and national segmentation within the nam . Today re-emerging states of the global South are engaged in a more successful effort to gain voice and alter international hierarchy by claiming a central place in the world capitalist system and restructuring it from within. The vertical late-modern world system centred in the Atlantic and ordered by the ‘West’ is thus gradually giving way to a polycentric international structure in which new regional and transnational ‘South–South’ linkages are being formed. This paper critically reviews the transformation and argues that, while it is creating long sought-for conditions of relative international equality, it has also dampened the emancipatory promise of the anti-colonial struggle.     

Combining the Strengths of Qualitative Comparative Analysis with Cluster Analysis for Comparative Public Policy Research: With Reference to the Policy of Economic Convergence in the Euro Currency Area

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a well-established method for comparing national public policy similarities and differences. It is argued that Cluster Analysis can add additional benefits to such research when used concurrently with QCA. Cluster Analysis provides a better method for the initial exploration of multivariate data and examining how countries compare because it can work with the full range of available interval data while patterns are created and viewed. This provides the best first method for exploring patterns and likely groupings of countries. QCA then provides a more robust method for theorizing about the construction of such groupings and their relationship around similar variable scores. QCA makes such theorizing transparent. The research example used to illustrate the benefits of combining Cluster Analysis and QCA is an analysis of the evolving of macroeconomic policy for the countries sharing the Euro, comparing 2005 (precrisis) with 2010 (postcrisis).     

A review of the cognitive interview

Abstract

In this critique of the Cognitive Interview (CI), discussion is organized around four themes; (1) the effectiveness of various components of the CI, (2) the relationship between the CI and other interviewing methods such as the Guided Memory Interview, the Standard Interview, and the Structured Interview, (3) different measures of memory performance and (4) the effect of training quality on interviewer performance. We comment on some of the theoretical and methodological issues to be considered in CI research and the practical considerations relating to the use of the CI in the field.     

Book reviews

The Politics of Central Europe by Attila Ágh. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1998. Pp.xii + 244. £15.99 pb ISBN 0 7619 5032 X.

Legitimacy and the European Union by David Beetham and Christopher Lord. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd, 1998. Pp.viii + 144. £11.99 pb ISBN 0 582 30489 X.

Party Discipline and Parliamentary Government edited by Shaun Bowler, David M. Farrell and Richard S. Katz. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Pp.ix + 304. $59.95 hb ISBN 0 8142 0796 0; $22.50 pb ISBN 0 8142 5000 9.

Conscience and Parliament edited by Philip Cowley. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998. Pp.204 £35 hb ISBN 0 7146 4836 1; £16.50 pb ISBN 0 7146 4388 2.

The House of Lords: Its Parliamentary and Judicial Roles edited by Brice Dickson and Paul Carmichael. Oxford: Hart Publishing Ltd, 1999. Pp.258. £30 hb ISBN 1 84113 020 6.

Namibia's Post‐Apartheid Regional Institutions: The Founding Years by Joshua Bernard Forrest. Woodbridge, Suffolk: University of Rochester Press, 1999. Pp.xviii + 408. £40 hb ISBN 1 58046 028 3.

Bakom Riksdagens Fasad by Magnus Hagevi. Göteburg: Akademiförlaget, Corona, 1998. Pp.314 pb ISBN 91 24 16844 0.

Feminist Perspectives on Public Law edited by Susan Millns and Noel Whitty. London: Cavendish Publishing Limited, 1999. Pp.xviii + 306. £19.95 pb ISBN 1 85941 480 X.

Senates: Bicameralism in the Contemporary World edited by Samuel C. Patterson and Anthony Mughan. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Pp.xii + 360. $52 hb ISBN 0 8142 0810 X; $19.95 pb 0 8142 5010 6.

Deliberative Democracy in Australia: The Changing Place of Parliament by John Uhr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp.xvi + 265. £45 hb ISBN 0 521 62458 4; £15.95 pb ISBN 0 521 62465 7.

Pursuit of Justices: Presidential Politics and the Selection of Supreme Court Nominees by David Alistair Yalof. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp.x + 296. £19.50 hb ISBN 0 226 94545 6.     

The Internet and Parliamentary Democracy in Europe

The overall aim of this volume is to investigate the impact of new information and communications technologies (ICTs), in particular the Internet, upon parliamentary democracy in Europe. Through a comparative study of four parliaments (the British, European, Portuguese and Swedish), our research addresses three important dimensions of the impact of the Internet on parliamentary democracy, namely, the practices, principles and rules related to the use of the Internet in a parliamentary context. It is hoped that, by comparing the experiences of the four parliaments and their Members, a European perspective on the development of and issues about ‘parliamentary e-Democracy’ can be established. The main sources of data and methodologies employed in this volume include a questionnaire survey, content analysis of parliamentary websites, interviews with parliamentarians and parliamentary staff and research workshops. Here we highlight the main features of the individual contributions included in this volume.