Walls of secrecy and silence

Research Summary Most analysts of the causes of the contemporary credit crunch have concluded that the supervising agencies failed in their duties. The same is true for studies of several major fraud scandals, including the Madoff affair and the Dutch construction fraud. The remedy seems immediately obvious: more and better regulation and supervision. However, this line of reasoning seems somewhat simplistic by ignoring the question of how illegal activities can remain hidden for many years from supervising agencies, victims, and bystanders. This research article argues that the problem also lies in the successful concealment of illegal activities by the perpetrators and in the presence of silence in their social environment. Policy Implications The cases analyzed in this article suggest that financial misconduct also could be controlled by breaking the conspiracies of silence. The strengthening of supervision is unlikely to be effective without simultaneous efforts to encourage people to speak out and to give them incentives to want to know and to tell the truth.     

Ethnic Profiling: A Rising Challenge for European Human Rights Law

Ethnic profiling, defined as the use of racial, ethnic or religious background as a determining criterion for the adoption of law enforcement decisions, has been rising significantly in Europe, in particular in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. This article examines whether European human rights law is well equipped to deal with this challenge, and if not, how it should be reformed. Against the widely held assumption that personal data protection legislation is insufficiently protective of 'sensitive' data relating to race or ethnicity, it explains instead why combating ethnic profiling has been made more difficult, rather than less, by an overly protective reading of the requirements of data protection laws. It then discusses the additional measures that European states could take to address more effectively the human rights concerns prompted by the development of ethnic profiling.     

Voting Advice Applications and Electoral Participation: A Multi-Method Study

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) help users casting a vote by offering an explicit ranking of viable options. The wide amount of readily available information provided by VAAs to users has been shown to contribute to reducing the transactional costs involved in gathering relevant political information. Available evidence also supports the idea that VAA users are more likely to cast a ballot in elections as a result. The extent to which electoral participation is caused by using a VAA, however, remains unclear. Against this background, we reassess the mobilizing effect of VAAs by means of a multi-method approach. Our cross-sectional analysis of 12 national election study data sets provides further support to the idea that VAA usage increases users’ chances of casting a ballot in elections as compared to non-users. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a randomized field experiment conducted in the context of the 2013 Italian parliamentary election.     

Two principles of equal language recognition

Within the umbrella of equal recognition, several principles of linguistic justice can be distinguished. A first, the per-capita principle, mandates prorating language recognition based on a per-capita distribution. A second, the equal-services principle, prescribes upholding the official languages as the languages in which the state speaks and in which public services are provided, irrespective of changing numbers of speakers. Alan Patten defends the prorated per-capita principle. I argue for the equal-services principle, which practically will often amount to a form of linguistic maximin: the more vulnerable the language, the more numerous the resources.     

When Basic Income Meets Professor Pangloss: Ignoring Public Administration and Its Perils

Basic income advocates propose a model that they believe will dramatically improve on current welfare programmes by alleviating poverty, reducing involuntary unemployment and social exclusion, redistributing care work, achieving a better work–life balance, and so on. Whether these expected social effects materialise in practice critically depends on how the model is implemented, but on this topic the basic income debate remains largely silent. Few advocates explicitly consider questions of implementation, and those that do are typically dismissive of the administrative challenges of implementing a basic income and critical (even overtly hostile) towards bureaucracy. In this contribution we briefly examine (and rebut) several reasons that have led basic income advocates to ignore administration. The main peril of such neglect, we argue, is that it misleads basic income advocates into a form of Panglossian optimism that risks causing basic income advocacy to become self‐defeating.     

Analysis of 2,4-Dinitrophenol in Postmortem Blood and Urine by Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry: Method Development and Validation and Report of Three Fatalities in the United States

2,4-dinitrophenol (2,4-DNP) is a compound used in the early 1900s as a weight-loss drug but later prohibited due to its severe adverse effects, including death. It has however been attracting interest, due to its weight-loss properties, and appears to be re-emerging in forensic casework. As 2,4-DNP is available for use in industry and as a pesticide and easily accessible online, the dissemination of this drug can be fast. The compound exerts its effects through inhibition of ATP synthesis, and corresponding thermogenic energy loss which can be fatal. A method for qualitative and quantitative analysis of 2,4-DNP in blood and urine specimens using GC-MS with hydrogen as carrier gas is described. The method was validated and displayed acceptable performance parameters with linearity (R² higher than 0.998), inter-assay imprecision (lower than 10.6%), intra-assay imprecision (lower than 10.7%), and extraction efficiency (92.1%). Stability of 2,4-DNP in blood and urine was studied, and the drug was stable up to 30 days refrigeration or frozen. Six cases in United States suspected to be related to 2,4-DNP were analyzed. Three cases were found to be positive for 2,4-DNP. Concentrations of 2,4-DNP were in the range of 61.6–220 mg/L in urine and <3–114 mg/L in blood. Based on our findings, we suggest that medical examiners and forensic toxicologists be aware of the reappearance of 2,4-DNP, including this compound as a target in death investigations related to weight-loss drugs.     

Resistance to Position Change,Motivated Reasoning,and Polarization

Political Behavior - People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms...     

Migrant women breadwinners in Italy during the crisis: improvement or trap?

Gender gaps in some aspects of the labour market in Europe narrowed during the recent economic crisis, mainly because men were hit harder and because of the ‘added worker effect’. Therefore, the number of families with a single wage-earner, in particular female-headed households, increased. However, the differential impact of the crisis on male and female labour force in part was an unintended effect of the ‘gendered’ and ‘racialized’ structure of the labour market. Occupational concentration in care and reproductive work and the public sector in fact protected women from unemployment. Adopting an intersectional approach and using individual and household data from the Labour Force Survey from 2008 to 2015, the aim of this paper is to assess to what extent the gendered and ‘racialized’ structure of the Italian labour market has changed, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, and to what extent the increase in female breadwinner families, especially among migrants, hides widening or narrowing intersectional inequalities by gender and citizenship.     

Can the cultural environment affect governmental transparency on sustainability? Useful measures for policy makers and practitioners

The aim of this study is to provide useful knowledge to policy makers and practitioners on how to promote the practices of sustainability transparency in local governments, based on the influence of the cultural environment on the disclosure of governmental information on sustainability, including social, environmental and economic information. We perform a comparative analysis of the effects of four types of variables (demographic, sociological, economic and financial) on the disclosure of information on sustainability in two different contexts: Anglo-Saxon and Nordic administrative cultures. Our results show that the factors of the administrative culture context do influence practices of transparency on governmental sustainability. In the Anglo-Saxon environment, the explanatory variables are population size, dependent population and education level. For the Nordic area countries, the main variables are unemployment, dependent population, financial autonomy and debt per capita. Taking into account the study results obtained, we propose measures to facilitate the dissemination of sustainability information in each cultural environment.     

Transitional Journeys Into and Out of Extremism. A Biographical Approach

This article describes an empirical study into processes of homegrown radicalization and de-radicalization of young people. Researchers in Denmark and the Netherlands set out to answer the question regarding what pathways in and out of extremism (mainly far-right or Islamist) look like “from the inside.” The analysis is informed by grounded theory, based on interviews (N = 34) with “formers” and their family members on their life courses. The study shows that radicalization often concurs with distinct social–emotional developmental challenges that young people face in the transition between youth and adulthood. A practical implication of the marked transitional sequences in these processes is that each type of radical journey may call for a different type of (re)action.