How Transparent are EU ‘Comitology’ Committees in Practice?

Much of the debate on transparency is normative in nature: more transparency is ‘good’ from the perspective of democratic accountability. After all, without information on what decisions are being taken and by whom, it will not be possible for various accountability forums to hold actors to account. This article goes beyond the rhetoric on the need for more transparency in the political system of the EU and examines, in practice as a matter of empirical research, how much transparency there really is. It also goes beyond a purely legal approach to access to information that depends upon the active participation of citizens and others in challenging refusals by specific institutions to grant access to specific documents. We are interested rather in the question as to what extent the institutions are systematically and pro‐actively providing access to their documents via the internet. We focus on the Register of Comitology of the European Commission as a relatively limited case study and, within this context, limit ourselves further to a study of all the documents published in the latest year for which a benchmark was available—2005. Are all comitology documents that exist in fact made available through this public register?     

Analysing Parliamentary Debate with Computer Assistance

The analysis of parliamentary debates is at the confluence of a number of developments in political science. What light can automated and semi‐automated techniques throw on such analysis? In this paper we compare two such approaches, one semi‐automated (Hamlet) and the other fully automated (Alceste). We use both approaches to identify the prominent themes in debate and to assess how far speakers who favour different positions adopt a distinct pattern of discourse. We seek to assess how far the two approaches yield convergent or divergent analyses. Selecting a second reading debate from the UK House of Commons on a private member's bill on abortion in July 1966, we are able to show similarities of analysis despite the detailed differences between the two approaches. In particular, the analysis in Hamlet al.lows identification of the extent to which individual speakers employ one type of vocabulary rather than another. Alceste is able to provide a statistical basis for the different classes of vocabulary that occur in the debate. However, the two programs rest upon quite different assumptions about the relationship between syntax and meaning, with implications for the practice of political science.     

Policymaking and policy analysis in Latin America—A return journey

This paper reviews and updates the conceptual approaches of the author's Journeys Towards Progress (1963). It focuses first on distinctions explaining differences in the path of policymaking and in its effectiveness. Distinctions are made between pressing and autonomously chosen policy problems, between privileged problems and neglected ones that must manage to “ride the coattails” of the former to receive attention, and between policy tasks that are tackled with more motivation than understanding and those with the opposite characteristic. Addressing then similarities in experience with policymaking, the paper first comments on fracasomania (the failure complex) and on the incapacity ever to be surprised at both consequences and determinants of under-development. Indirect and unanticipated effects of policies are illustrated through a Colombian example. A Concluding Lament suggests that the watch for side-effects must be unusually wide-angled in today's Latin America.     

Damage Caps and Civil Litigation: An Empirical Study of Medical Malpractice Litigation in the South

This article looks at the effect that damage caps have on plaintiffs'recovery in medical malpractice litigation, using a unique dataset of litigation in the South, from 1987 to 1999. During thistime, Alabama underwent both the implementation and nullificationof damage-cap laws; neighboring states did not undergo any significantlegal changes. The product of a difference-in-difference approach,the results reveal that the average relative recovery by Alabamaplaintiffs decreased by roughly $20,000 after the Alabama legislatureenacted damage caps and increased by roughly double that amountafter the Alabama Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.     

The interaction of truthful and deceptive information

ABSTRACT

Research consistently shows that truthful accounts are richer in detail than deceptive accounts. It is unknown, however, how interviewees strategically regulate the information they provide when their accounts contain both truthful and deceptive information. This study examined how truths and lies interact, and whether interviewees’ self-reported strategies reflect such interactions. Participants (n?=?144) provided one statement consisting of two elements. We manipulated the veracity of these elements, with participants allocated to either both truthful, both deceptive, or one truthful and the other deceptive conditions. Results indicated that interviewees calibrate the richness of detail provided in the first element of their statement based on the veracity of the following element. Moreover, our exploratory tests revealed that lies become more detailed when they are flanked by truthful information relative to when they are flanked by other deceptive information. The finding that truthful and deceptive information interacts to influence detail richness provides insight into liars’ strategic manipulation of information when statements contain a mixture of truths and lies. Strategic manipulations of this kind could potentially threaten the reliability of commonly used verbal lie detection tools. This study also offers insight to legal practitioners who rely on baseline deviations to assess credibility.