Getting to justice?

This article addresses whether Albert Weale’s view in Democratic Justice and the Social Contract (OUP 2013) fits into one of two strands of social contract traditions, and how his account stands up to critics. He claims to stand in the contractarian tradition, which seeks to justify normative principles of justice from non-moral premises. The alternative is the contractualist tradition which assumes that individuals are also motivated by other-regarding moral considerations. The aim of the latter theories is often limited to systematise and specify vague and contested normative judgements concerning shared institutions. There are tensions in Weale’s account as to whether it addresses the question of concern to contractarians or rather that of contractualists. A second challenge concerns Weale’s attempt to extrapolate principles of justice from common property resource regimes within the basic structure of society to that basic structure of a ‘great society’ itself. The impact of the basic structure on individuals is so pervasive that the principle Weale proposes seems misapplied. A claim to the marginal product in complex modes of production supplemented by a social insurance scheme says little about the distributive principles for assessing how the basic structure as a whole should engender the distribution of marginal products among us.     

Mining and Local Corruption in Africa

We investigate whether mining affects local corruption in Africa. Several cross‐country analyses report that natural resources have adverse effects on political institutions by increasing corruption, whereas other country‐level studies show no evidence of such “political resource curses.” These studies face well‐known endogeneity and other methodological issues, and employing micro‐level data would allow for drawing stronger inferences. Hence, we connect 92,762 Afrobarometer survey respondents to spatial data on 496 industrial mines. Using a difference‐in‐differences strategy, we find that mining increases bribe payments, and this result is robust to using alternative models. Mines are initially located in less corrupt areas, but mining areas turn more corrupt after mines open. When exploring mechanisms, we find that local economic activity relates differently to corruption in mining and non‐mining areas, suggesting that mining income incentivizes and enables local officials already present to require more bribes.     

Liberalization without Retrenchment: Understanding the Consensus on Swedish Welfare State Reforms

In 1980, Sweden was a highly regulated economy with several state monopolies and low levels of economic freedom. Less than twenty years later, liberal reforms turned Sweden into one of the world's most open economies with a remarkable increase in economic freedom. While there is resilience when it comes to high levels of taxes and expenditure shares of GDP, there has been a profound restructuring of Sweden's economy in the 1980s and 1990s that previous studies have under-estimated. Furthermore, the degree of political consensus is striking, both regarding the welfare state expansions that characterized Sweden up to 1980, as well as the subsequent liberalizations. Since established theories have difficulties explaining institutional change, this article seeks to understand how the Swedish style of policy making produced this surprising political consensus on liberal reforms. It highlights the importance of three complementary factors: policy making in Sweden has always been influenced by, and intimately connected to, social science ; government commissions have functioned as 'early warning systems', pointing out future challenges and creating a common way to perceive problems; and, as a consequence, political consensus has evolved as a feature of Swedish style of policy making. The approach to policy making has been rationalistic, technocratic and pragmatic. The article concludes that the Swedish style of policy making not only explains the period of welfare state expansion – it is also applicable to the intense reform period of the 1980s and 1990s.     

Advances in Osteometric Sorting: Utilizing Diaphyseal CSG Properties for Lower Limb Skeletal Pair-Matching

Pair-matching of bilateral elements is a major component of resolving commingled remains both in forensic and bioarchaeological contexts. This study presents a new method of osteometric pair-matching of the lower limbs which relies on 3D digital models of the femur and tibia bones. The proposed method, which is accompanied by a freely available open-source implementation, automatically computes a number of osteometric variables including cross-sectional geometric properties from an assemblage of left and right bone antimeres and calculates probabilistically the appropriate matching pairs as well as single elements, whose bones antimere is not present in the given assemblage. The method has been extensively tested on a skeletal sample comprising 396 femurs and 422 tibias from the Athens collection. Our results in testing commingled assemblages with no disparity show that the method’s sensitivity is 1 for sorting femurs and 0.997 for sorting tibias, whereas in assemblages with moderate disparity the sensitivity is 0.999 and 0.992 respectively. Our results further indicate that sensitivity is unaffected by the size of the commingled assemblage although the percentage of identified true matching pairs drops as the number of commingled elements increases. This means that all identified antimeres matched to an individual are still very accurately sorted despite not every individual being identified in very large assemblages. The proposed method can facilitate the sorting process of commingled remains both accurately and efficiently, while leaving a very small percentage of unsorted elements that may require further techniques for further individualization.     

The role of chief executive tenure for public organizations' hiring of management consultants

Public organizations increasingly rely on management consultants to access expertise, impose reforms, and drive organizational change, and spend large sums each year on their services. Despite this, we know little about the antecedents of public organizations' use of management consulting services. Drawing on upper echelon theory, a longitudinal hypothesis‐testing study of the hiring of management consultants in 72 Swedish public organizations, and interviews with Swedish chief executives (CEs), we find an inverted U‐shaped relationship between CE tenure and public organizations' use of management consulting services. We also find that this relationship is moderated by CEs' previous experience and managerial discretion. These findings contribute to theorizing on the use of management consulting services and the influence of CEs in public organizations.     

Explaining the birthright citizenship lottery: Longitudinal and cross‐national evidence for key determinants

In the modern nation‐state, birthright citizenship laws – jus soli and jus sanguinis – are the two main gateways to sociopolitical membership. The vast majority of the world's population (97 percent) obtains their citizenship as a matter of birthright. Yet because comparative research has focused on measuring and explaining the multiple components of citizenship and immigration policies, a systematic analysis of birthright citizenship is lacking. We bridge this gap by analyzing the birthright component in prominent databases on citizenship policies and complementing them with original data and measures. This allows us to systematically test institutional and electoral explanations for contemporary and over‐time variation in birthright citizenship. Institutional explanations – legal codes and colonial history – are consistently associated with limitations on birthright law. As for electoral explanations, specific electoral powers – Nationalist, Socialist and Social‐Democratic parties – rather than the traditional left/right‐wing divide, are linked with reforms in birthright regimes.     

Bribery and public procurement: an experimental study

A procurement contract is granted by a bureaucrat (the auctioneer) who is interested in a low price and a bribe from the provider. Procurement is thus a multi-dimensional bidding contest with one-dimensional type space (the privately known cost). The optimal price and bribe bid is derived based on an iid private cost assumption. In the experiment, bribes are negatively framed to capture that society is better off if bribes are rare or low. Although bid prices are lower than predicted, behavior is qualitatively in line with the linear equilibrium prediction. When bribes generate a negative externality, there is a significant increase in the variability of the data.     

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