Investment Treaty Arbitration as a Species of Global Administrative Law

The article outlines a simple thesis: that international investmentarbitration – pursuant to regional and bilateral investmenttreaties – offers the clearest example of global administrativelaw, strictly construed, yet to have emerged. We present thisthesis by explicating four key features of investment treaties:they permit investor claims against the state without exhaustinglocal remedies; they allow claims for damages; they allow investorsto directly seek enforcement of awards before domestic courts;and they facilitate forum-shopping. Our argument is that, owingto this unique conjunction of features, the regulatory conductof states is, to an unusual extent, subject to control throughcompulsory international adjudication. Having highlighted thesefeatures, we then claim that investment arbitration is bestanalogized to domestic administrative law rather than to internationalcommercial arbitration, especially since investment arbitrationengages disputes arising from the exercise of public authorityby the state as opposed to private acts of the state. Further,we claim that the linkages between investment arbitration anddomestic legal systems are more direct and more closely integratedthan other forms of international adjudication in the publicsphere. For these reasons, we argue that the emerging regimeof investment arbitration is to be understood as constitutingan important and powerful manifestation of global administrativelaw.     

Personality and Ability Effects on Reactions to Argumentative Unfairness

The study focusses on the relationship of personality and reactions to unfair argumentative contributions. Unfair contributions were embedded in four argumentative episodes and presented in written, auditory, and role-play mode. Each participant's cognitions, emotions, and verbal responses were assessed and aggregated across the four episodes. Although no differences in evoked cognitive, emotional, and verbal responses arose between the different presentation modes, the identification of unfair contributions and the verbal responses' collaboration depended on the participants' cognitive abilities and personality traits. Implications for theory and practice of social justice research are discussed.     

Birth spacing as a family strategy: evidence from 19th century Leuven, Belgium

This article investigates the hypothesis that 19th-century working class families in Leuven, Belgium, were controlling their fertility by means of birth spacing for household economic reasons. Detailed life-course data were collected in order to construct, on one hand, a set of covariates that represent the influences of natural fertility on birth intervals and, on the other, a number of family variables that represent the hypothetical, household economic motivation to space births. The findings strongly suggest that birth intervals were not merely a function of natural fertility differences and that family strategic spacing behavior also played a role.     

Evaluating Transformational Leaders: The Challenging Case of Eric Shinseki and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Evaluating less than fully successful transformational leaders is difficult. One common method of assessing leadership is to focus on a single temporal narrative. A second approach uses a particular theory, such as transformational leadership, to frame the analysis. The latter, less common strategy is used with the example of Eric Shinseki, who served as both chief of staff of the U.S. Army and as secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The analytic framework used here has six major elements that are specified by 22 factors. Using those factors to evaluate Shinseki's tenure at the VA, he is found to be very poor in only 2 factors but poor in 11, adequate in 6, good in 1, and excellent in only 2. While using a list of factors does not eliminate subjectivity or the challenges of reaching a single assessment, it does clarify the elements of judgment and weighting.     

The Effect of Associative Issue Ownership on Parties’ Presence in the News Media

Some studies suggest that challenger parties push new issues onto the agenda, especially when they ‘own’ these issues. Others claim that established parties largely determine how prominent issues appear on the agenda. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on an issue on which challenger parties have most ‘ownership’: immigration. Political claims on this issue made by political parties in newspapers in seven West European countries after three events that could potentially trigger attention to immigration were studied. Large and government parties appear most prominent in the news. However, findings show a significant, positive effect of associative issue ownership on claims-making in the news, while controlling for party size and government status. So, when challengers have issue ownership they appear as claim-makers on the issue. These results paint a balanced picture of the role that challenger and established parties have in setting the agenda.     

Explaining Explanations: How Legislators Explain their Policy Positions and How Citizens React

Legislators claim that how they explain their votes matters as much as or more than the roll calls themselves. However, few studies have systematically examined legislators’ explanations and citizen attitudes in response to these explanations. We theorize that legislators strategically tailor explanations to constituents in order to compensate for policy choices that are incongruent with constituent preferences, and to reinforce policy choices that are congruent. We conduct a within‐subjects field experiment using U.S. senators as subjects to test this hypothesis. We then conduct a between‐subjects survey experiment of ordinary people to see how they react to the explanatory strategies used by senators in the field experiment. We find that most senators tailor their explanations to their audiences, and that these tailored explanations are effective at currying support—especially among people who disagree with the legislators’ roll‐call positions.     

Consent in escrow

Disasters such as flash flooding, mass shootings, and train and airplane accidents involving large numbers of victims produce significant opportunity for research in the biosciences. This opportunity exists in the extreme tails of life events, however, during which decisions about life and death, valuing and foregoing, speed and patience, trust and distrust, are tested simultaneously and abundantly. The press and urgency of these scenarios may also challenge the ability of researchers to comprehensively deliver information about the purposes of a study, risks, benefits, and alternatives. Under these circumstances, we argue that acquiring consent for the immediate use of data that are not time sensitive represents a gap in the protection of human study participants. In response, we offer a two-tiered model of consent that allows for data collected in real-time to be held in escrow until the acute post-disaster window has closed. Such a model not only respects the fundamental tenet of consent in research, but also enables such research to take place in an ethically defensible manner.