Interest group size dynamics and policymaking

We present a dynamic model of endogenous interest group sizes and policymaking. The model integrates ‘top-down' (policy) and `bottom-up' (individual and social-structural) influences on the development of interest groups. Comparative statics results show that the standard assumption of fixed-sized interest groups can be misleading. Furthermore, dynamic analysis of the model demonstrates that reliance on equilibrium results can also be misleading since equilibria may be unstable. Complicated dynamics may then emerge naturally, leading to erratic time patterns for policy and interest group sizes. Our model can endogenously generate the types of spurts and declines in organizational density reported in empirical studies.     

Political accountability for price stability and unemployment in a multi-party system with coalition governments

A model of party popularity for multi-party systems is presented and applied to the Netherlands. Main conclusions are: first, inflation and unemployment and their interaction affect the popularity of parties; second, it is important to take into account that voters may reckon with a trade-off between these variables; third, it is wrong to handle a coalition government as a homogeneous entity.     

Narrative dynamics in European Commission AI policy—Sensemaking,agency construction,and anchoring

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is arguably one of the most powerful and disruptive technologies of our times which may pose challenges as well as opportunities to contemporary political organizations. Studying AI from a lens of perceived uncertainty, this article studies the policy response of the European Commission toward this fast-paced emerging technology. By empirically focusing on the Commission's policy process from start to end, from initial communication to concrete proposal, the article shows how different types of narratives are used to construct the new policy area of AI policy. A novel theoretical framework is constructed building on a combination of narrative organizational studies and narrative policy studies, displaying how narratives play a key role in organizational sensemaking, agency construction and anchoring. The paper finds that the Commission broadly makes sense of AI technologies with a future-oriented discourse, establishes agency to existing and new forms of political organizing and anchors the policy response within the overarching frame of the EU single market policy. The main contribution of the paper is that it shows how political organizations settles uncertainty through narratives and sketches a way forward through establishing policy goals and anchoring them within pre-existing lines of political mobilization.     

Consumers Beware: Online Personalized Pricing in Action! How the Framing of a Mandated Discriminatory Pricing Disclosure Influences Intention to Purchase

Social Justice Research - Online businesses collect a wealth of data on customers, often without properly informing them. Increasingly, these data can be used for behavioral price discrimination....     

Executive Remuneration: Industry and Job Family Effects

This research explores the distribution of executive remuneration based on the type of industry and job family in South African state-owned enterprises. A regression analysis of secondary data collected on 222 executives was conducted. The overall results based on pairwise comparison suggest that the distribution of executive remuneration across various categories of industry was the same except between forestry—defense, forestry—telecommunications, defense—telecommunications, and energy—development funding. However, the results also indicated that there was no difference in the distribution of remuneration across various categories of job families in South African state-owned enterprises.     

From corporatism to lawyocracy? On liberalization and juridification

In 1997 Robert Kagan questioned whether European countries had to fear the coming of American style adversarial legalism. He answered this question with a qualified “no.” Today we are no longer so sure the answer is “no,” even in a country that Kagan considered the antipole of US adversarial legalism, the Netherlands, traditionally characterized by informal and consensual conflict resolution. In the present article we chart a trend of increasing juridification and legalism, that is, more formal and legal conflict resolution, in the Netherlands between 1970 and 2008. The trend is related to major changes in economic governance institutions, which generated a shift from corporatism toward lawyocracy; from power of the associations of civil society toward power of courts, lawyers, and judges. Yet the newly dominant system of governance is modified and merged with elements of the old system, producing a specific Dutch version, which one could call “corporatist lawyocracy.” We identify two types of liberalization as major driving forces: social liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by economic liberalization in the subsequent decades. If one considers economic liberalization a product of neoliberal “Reaganomics,” the legal changes are in a way an “American export product,” although a different one than the lawyering styles of large international American law firms mentioned by Kelemen and Sibbitt in 2004.     

Criminal law and mentally ill offenders in comparative perspective

Abstract

In this stick we compare legal arrangements dealing with mentally disordered offenders in the criminal law systems ct Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. To describe relevant diffesenoes and similarities in the arrangemeats, we used a checklist containing antral aspects of adjudication, assessment and treatment of mentally ill offenders. These aspects concern: (1) the legal classifications of mental illnesses that can lead to exclusion of criminal responsibility: (2) the acceptance of diminished capacity as a partial excuse; (3) the possibilities for imposing security measures of compulsory treatment instead of or next to criminal punishment; (4) the conditions for their imposition in terms of seriousness of crimes committed and dangerousness of offenders; (5) the available hospitals or special clinics for executing security measures; (6) the role and task of forensic mental health professionals in assessing the offender's state of mind and in advising compulsory treatment; (7) the rules for duration, prolongation and termination of the measures. The findings of this comparative analysis are evaluated in light of legal protection for mentally disordered offenders.     

How Do Fictions Construe Our Laws for Us?

This paper on van Schooten’s book starts from the observation that citizens untrained in the law are yet able to live by the law, while not being part of the established interpretive community. They manage to live with fictions. Neither the discredited flow model of legal communication rejected by Van Schooten nor her own semiotic and institutional alternative theory manages to deal with this phenomenon in an adequate way. We can learn from Plato’s discussion with Crito in which the laws were imagined as speaking beings that there is a long philosophical tradition according to which laws are imagined to speak to us (while everybody knows otherwise). Working with this legal fiction in our own democratic societies requires an analysis of the way fictions construe our laws for us. Five of these fictions are then briefly mentioned: perfect or at least adequate legal knowledge; legislative intention; instrumental reason; the General Interest; and the rule of measures, not of men.