The Politics of Food Regulation and Reform in Ireland

Amid a period of increasing political anxiety generated by the BSE crisis, the Irish Government sought to replace a confusing medley of food regulations with a single agency responsible for regulating food from the 'farm to the fork'. Presented as a radical departure from a regime previously discredited, its remit would be to redefine the relationship between risk assessment, management and communication. In this context, the paper puts forward three principal arguments. First, that while the Minister for Health and Children was keen to extol both the scientific credentials of the agency, and the importance of shifting regulatory responsibility from the Department of Agriculture and Food (DAF) to the Department of Health and Children (DOHC), what remains novel is the manner in which reform has managed to retain political access for influential agri-business interests. Second, that any reform undertaken should be fully cognisant of the international agreements between the European Union and the World Trade Organisation which extended further a free market in food trade. The agency's institutional architecture therefore was framed with the intention of restoring market confidence without threatening the habitat of those multi-national companies that occupy this arena. Finally, that the role of science (and risk) in food regulation has altered. Rather than perform the task of sustaining order through responsible government, science now participates in (re)constituting order through the market.     

State and local law enforcement response to transnational crime

This report, using the results of the survey and new research, identifies some next steps to providing State and local law enforcement with tools to identify and respond to transnational crime.... The second section [excerpted here] is a literature review of the current state of the field in identifying and responding to transnational crime at the State and local level. This section provides a context for the interpretation of the results of this study....     

The relationship of perceptions and emotions to behavior in the face of collective inequality

The present experiment investigated the role of emotions and perceptions in determining the overt behavior of disadvantaged group members. Three limitations to the existing psychological research are presented as a possible reason for the present inability to describe a consistent relationship between the emotions and perceptions of those faced with intergroup inequalities and their subsequent actions. The present experiment attempted to address these limitations by employing a laboratory paradigm in which subjects actually engage in overt behavior. As well, a broader array of emotions and perceptions were assessed and subjects were offered a variety of behaviors from which to choose. The findings point to a relatively strong relationship between emotions and perceptions on the one hand, and overt action on the other. Feelings of frustration and anger, the perception of one's personal treatment as satisfactory and just, and hope of future improvement of one's position combined to discriminate between subjects who accepted their disadvantaged position, those who took normative forms of action, those who reacted in an individual nonnormative way, and those who chose collective nonnormative behavior.