EARLY NEUTRAL EVALUATIONS: APPLICATIONS TO CUSTODY AND PARENTING TIME CASES PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION IN HENNEPIN COUNTY,MINNESOTA

A program to apply Early Neutral Evaluation (ENE), a confidential, settlement‐oriented and accelerated alternative dispute resolution technique, to child custody and parenting time cases has been cooperatively developed by Hennepin county Family Court Services and the Minnesota Fourth Judicial District Family Court. Parties are referred by the court to a male/female team of experienced neutral evaluators for early feedback on the probable outcome of a full evaluation and an opportunity to negotiate a settlement. It has proven to be a highly successful program in its first 2 years, with the majority of cases reaching an early settlement. The ENE program reduces the stress and expense of custody disputes for clients, expedites judicial case management, maximizes Family Court Services staff efficiency, and focuses subsequent evaluations on critical issues.     

If the kids are united

Legal and practical context: Further political and judicial activities regarding collectivemanagement are imminent in the first half of 2007 at Europeanlevel. Key points: The author looks into the historical, practical, and legal backgroundas well as the raison d'etre of collective management of musicbefore outlining some specific aspects of relevance for collectingsocieties in the digital world. This includes the complementaryrelation of collecting societies with Digital Rights Managementand the rolling out of pan-European licences in line with theEuropean Commission Recommendation of October 2005. Conclusions: The author suggests that collective management will become evenmore important for a wide range of creative works in the digitalworld and that right holders together with their collectingsocieties are already proposing approaches fit for the informationsociety. He concludes that there is little need for politicalinterference in the nascent online market at this crucial timeof evolution.     

Do constitutions matter? Evidence from a natural experiment at the municipality level

This paper asks if it does matter for taxes and government spending whether the mayor is elected (and recalled) by direct election or by the municipal council. It thus contributes to the economic literature on the impact of constitutions on economic outcomes. The effects are identified based on reforms of the municipal constitutions that were exogenous from the point of view of the municipalities in content and timing: each year, quasi-randomly selected groups of municipalities introduced the new constitution. This setup helps overcome endogeneity and identification issues that are common to many studies in the field using country level data. Using a new panel dataset of the 686 municipalities in three German states, this paper shows that direct mayoral election and recall through referendum only (as opposed to election and recall through the municipal council) reduce tax rates and increases spending on government employees.     

Reforming me softly – how soft law has changed EU return policy since the migration crisis

Abstract

In the wake of the 2015/2016 migration crisis, EU policy-makers have urged returning more irregular migrants. In order to achieve this, the EU has adopted a series of non-binding documents for European administrations (such as the EU Return Handbook) and agreed on informal return deals with countries of migrants’ origin including Afghanistan. This article argues that the EU’s shift towards soft law has not altered the EU’s return policy in a profound way. Yet, it has managed to ‘convert’ EU return policy by emphasizing a particular interpretation of existing hard law (towards more restrictive practices and a stronger focus on ‘efficiency’). The soft law approach has also allowed policy-makers to signal action in times of crisis at lower legislative and sovereignty costs.     

Fairness matters when responding to disasters: An experimental study of government legitimacy

Governments worldwide are regularly faced with severe weather conditions and disasters caused by natural hazards. Does the way in which governments respond to disasters affect their legitimacy? The current study investigated how evaluations of authorities were influenced by four aspects of a governmental response to a hypothetical disaster. In a survey experiment participants read a scenario in which a government distributed aid in the aftermath of a flooding. Data were collected from the Netherlands, France, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia (N = 2,677). Results showed that the government was seen as more legitimate when it was described as distributing resources fairly, following fair procedures, and providing a material benefit to the participant. However, in contrast to predictions derived from system‐justification theory, results showed that outcome dependence was associated with reduced legitimacy. These findings suggest that response policies that address both instrumental and fairness concerns might help maintain positive evaluations of governments.     

On unobserved worker heterogeneity and employment protection

It has been claimed that employment protection aggravates problems of adverse selection if workers differ with respect to their productivity. Analyzing European and US labor law, we identify regulations which work in the opposite direction. Where employment protection legislation allows dismissals only for good cause and imposes social criteria upon the employer’s selection process in the event of redundancies, the average productivity of hireable workers is shown to improve. However, we find that the employers’ reduced freedom of choice more than offsets the productivity increase of newly hired workers and job creation is deterred by employment protection legislation. Nevertheless, low-productivity workers may favor the introduction of employment protection provisions.     

Laufbahnklassen. Zur empirischen Umsetzung eines dynamisierten Klassenbegriffs mithilfe von Sequenzanalysen

Based on Bourdieu??s notion of trajectory-classes, the article proposes a dynamic concept of social class that accounts for typical patterns of intra-generational mobility. The hypothesis is that social class trajectories cluster into stable as well as upward and downward mobile trajectory-classes. This assumption is tested empirically by applying sequence analysis to individual trajectories of class positions measured by means of the Goldthorpe class scheme. The data are drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and cover 15 years of individual occupational histories for four different age cohorts of men and women. In addition to a striking stability of class positions, there are also specific patterns of class mobility for men that point to institutional mechanisms of social closure and career paths. Women??s trajectory-classes are shaped by class-specific patterns of labor market (re-)entries and exits. Furthermore, analyzing the process of capital accumulation based on various indicators of economic, cultural and social capital, the trajectory-classes can be interpreted as a result of investment strategies.     

The Unequal Distribution of Speaking Time in Parliamentary‐Party Groups

Parliamentary debates provide an arena where Members of Parliament (MPs) present, challenge, or defend public policies. However, the “plenary bottleneck” allows the party leadership to decide who participates in a debate. We argue that in this decision the timing of a debate matters: in proximity of elections, the leadership should be concerned with maintaining its brand name and therefore restrict floor access, in particular if the debate is salient for the respective party. We evaluate our hypotheses in a cross‐country study drawing on a novel data set covering all speeches given during one or two legislative terms in six European parliaments. We find that the electoral cycle matters for the distribution of speaking time: Party leaders do restrict parliamentary speechmaking to a smaller number of MPs at the end of the term. This has important implications for our understanding of parliaments as an electoral arena and for our understanding of intraparty politics.