The perils of hyper-vigilance: the war on terrorism and the surveillance state in South-East Asia

The analysis examines the puzzle as to why the intelligence structures of South-East Asia largely failed to detect the evolving threat of violently inclined radical Islamic groups, despite the existence of elaborate and pervasive internal security arrangements within the states of the region. The article explores this issue by positing contending viewpoints about how authoritarianism in South-East Asia might have affected the awareness of such threats. Answers to these questions enable an assessment of the current ASEAN response to the ‘war on terrorism’ and to discern whether South-East Asia's elites will move either to improve the quality of their intelligence and threat analysis in the future, or whether they will, instead, extend the instruments of authoritarian rule, further curtailing civil and political space under the rubric of combating terrorism. The evidence so far suggests that the latter outcome is the more likely.     

Alternative theories of sharecropping: Some tests using evidence from northeast India

The recent debate concerning the efficiency of sharecropping contracts yields a number of testable hypotheses, four of which can be examined in the light of some primary data for a group of sharecroppers in northeast Bihar. The salient feature of the empirical analysis is the comparison of the resource allocation patterns on owned and rented land cultivated by the same farmer, which provides a more powerful test of inefficiency than those advocated previously. Broadly speaking, the findings support the ‘Marshallian’ position that such contracts do involve inefficiency—in the Bihar context, at least.     

Punctuated Equilibrium in Comparative Perspective

We explore the impact of institutional design on the distribution of changes in outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. Using comprehensive indicators of governmental actions over several decades, we show that in each country the level of institutional friction increases as we look at processes further along the policy cycle. Assessing multiple policymaking institutions in each country allows us to control for the nature of the policy inputs, as all the institutions we consider cover the full range of social and political issues in the country. We find that all distributions exhibit high kurtosis values, significantly higher than the Normal distribution which would be expected if changes in government attention and activities were proportionate to changes in social inputs. Further, in each country, those institutions that impose higher decision-making costs show progressively higher kurtosis values. The results suggest general patterns that we hypothesize to be related to boundedly rational behavior in a complex social environment.     

The Future of Renewable Energy in Australia: A Test for Cooperative Federalism?

In the context of the Australian federal system industry development will be influenced by the policies of each sphere of government. When announcing a set of policies in 1997 to develop the renewable energy industry the Australian federal government acknowledged the need for a cooperative approach between all governments and industry. The objective of this article is to analyse the government policies over the 1997–2007 period to promote the development of the renewable energy industry in Australia. The article highlights a number of factors that have served as barriers to the development of the industry. The research provides important insight into the difficulties associated with establishing cooperative national arrangements in areas of state government responsibility in the Australian federation. The lessons also inform the current debate on the policy initiatives needed to more effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions from stationary energy from the increased availability of renewable energy .     

Surveillance and resilience: Relationships,dynamics, and consequences

“Resilience” is a contested term with varying and ambiguous meaning in governmental, business, and social discourses. Surveillance is increasingly relied on as an instrument for resilience, enhancing the capability of anticipating, preventing, or recovering from adversity, thus preserving the fabric of society and the state. However, surveillance itself might undesirably erode social freedoms, rights, and other public goods. In the present study we focus on the interrelationship of surveillance and resilience. Studying the relationships between surveillance and resilience requires not only the theoretical study of possible examples but also the exploration and evaluation of the resilient entity’s core properties, strategies, and tactics and the external observer’s stance toward the entity in question. Furthermore, different contexts may exhibit different effects of surveillance on resilience. For example, an increase in surveillance by a democratic state may lead to increasing resilience of the state in the face of terrorist attacks but may also lead to the decreasing resilience of that society’s ability to exercise democratic values. The various models generated by these differing relationships will be explored with relation to three examples: the surveillance of international migration, the surveillance of extremist views, and the surveillance of digital financial transactions.     

Is There More Violence in the Middle?

Is there more violence in the middle? Over 100 studies have analyzed whether violent outcomes such as civil war, terrorism, and repression are more common in regimes that are neither full autocracies nor full democracies, yet findings are inconclusive. While this hypothesis is ultimately about functional form, existing work uses models in which a particular functional form is assumed. Existing work also uses arbitrary operationalizations of “the middle.” This article aims to resolve the empirical uncertainty about this relationship by using a research design that overcomes the limitations of existing work. We use a random forest‐like ensemble of multivariate regression and classification trees to predict multiple forms of conflict. Our results indicate the specific conditions under which there is or is not more violence in the middle. We find the most consistent support for the hypothesis with respect to minor civil conflict and no support with respect to repression.     

U.S. Child Safety Seat Laws: Are they Effective,and Who Complies?

This paper assesses the effectiveness of child safety seat laws in the United States. Over the past 35 years, these laws have steadily increased mandatory child safety seat restraint ages. We exploit state‐year level variation in the age until which children are required to ride in child safety seats to estimate triple difference models using Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data from 1975 to 2011. Our findings show that increasing the age thresholds is effective in increasing the actual age of children in safety seats. Across the child‐age distribution, restraint rates increase by between 10 and 30 percentage points or by between 50 and 170 percent, in the long run. We also estimate the impact of the child safety seat laws on the likelihood that a child dies in a fatal accident. We find that the laws saved up to 39 children per year. Finally, we find that the laws primarily induce compliant parents to switch from traditional seatbelt use to child safety seat use, with only small effects among parents who do not restrain their children.     

Reflections on variability in the blood–breath ratio of ethanol and its importance when evidential breath-alcohol instruments are used in law enforcement

Variability in the blood–breath ratio (BBR) of alcohol is important, because it relates a measurement of the blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) with the co-existing breath-alcohol concentration (BrAC). The BBR is also used to establish the statutory BrAC limit for driving from the existing statutory BAC limits in different countries. The in-vivo BBR depends on a host of analytical, sampling and physiological factors, including subject demographics, time after end of drinking (rising or falling BAC), the nature of the blood draw (whether venous or arterial) and the subject’s breathing pattern prior to exhalation into the breath analyzer. The results from a controlled drinking study involving healthy volunteers (85 men and 15 women) from three ethnic groups (Caucasians, Hispanics and African Americans) were used to evaluate various factors influencing the BBR. Ethanol in breath was determined with a quantitative infrared analyzer (Intoxilyzer 8000) and BAC was determined by headspace gas chromatography (HS-GC). The BAC and BrAC were highly correlated (r = 0.948) and the BBR in the post-absorptive state was 2 382 ± 119 (mean ± SD). The BBR did not depend on gender (female: 2 396 ± 101 and male: 2 380 ± 123, P > 0.05) nor on racial group (Caucasians 2 398 ± 124, African Americans 2 344 ± 119 and Hispanics 2 364 ± 104, P > 0.05). The BBR was lower in subjects with higher breath- and body-temperatures (P < 0.05) and it also decreased with longer exhalation times into the breath-analyzer (P < 0.001). In the post-absorptive state, none of the 100 subjects had a BBR of less than 2 100:1.