The calculus of dissent: Party discipline in the British Labour government, 1974–1979

The strength of political parties is taken to be one central difference between the political systems of the United States and the United Kingdom. We analyze defection from party line voting within the British Labour Party in the House of Commons between 1974 and 1979 to suggest that this dichotomy is overdrawn. In fact, the analysis shows that the dynamics of legislative behavior are quite similar in the two systems, notwithstanding the significant institutional differences between a separation of powers system and the West-minster model. Members of Parliament, like American Congressmen, balance the demands of their constituents, activists within their local party, and party leadership, as well as wage intraparty battles over the direction of policy.     

Women and sport: A lost ideal

In their analyses of capitalism and patriarchy, socialists and feminists have tended not to view sport as a legitimate area for sustained study. Socialists have often been content to view sport as a peripheral and unimportant feature of a world order dominated by capitalist social relations and economic contradictions, or have viewed sport as essentially a cultural reflection of the material sphere.Similarly, feminists have focussed their attention on the primary loci of work, family and sexuality, thereby unconsciously reinforcing the patriarchal concept of sport as masculine. In this analysis we briefly outline women's involvement in the recent Olympics and assess competing strategies for overcoming women's subordination in the arena of sport.     

Four Principles of Big Data Practice for Effective Child Welfare Decision Making

Large administrative data systems are powerful tools that can aid child welfare decision making by allowing populations, trends, and risks to children to be described. But realizing the value that this “big data” can bring to improving the lives of children and their families requires one to (a) start the process by asking a question, (b) take a disciplined approach to converting data to evidence, (c) commit to the cyclical process of improvement using evidence, and (d) arrange and analyze the data in ways that maximize evidence yield. This article describes how these four principles can help agencies and researchers use big data wisely and in accordance with scientific standards as an instrument to generate evidence that fuels the cycle of continuous quality improvement.     

The governance of shale gas production in South Africa

The proper governance of shale gas mining in the Karoo region of South Africa is important. With an estimated 390 trillion cubic feet of recoverable shale gas, large economic gains are possible. This may dramatically change the South African energy sector; in the United States, similar explorations have led to what pundits term the ‘shale gas revolution’. The development and production of shale gas hold economic advantages, but also potential environmental costs, thus the regulation of fracking activities is an important consideration as the development of shale gas in the Karoo progresses. This study reviews the regulations imposed in other countries as well as the current regulatory framework of South Africa. This article analyses these regulations in terms of the content of fracking fluid, seismic activity and the pricing regime. Effective regulation will be key to maximise a positive impact, should shale gas development continue.     

British Steel And Government Since Privatization: Policy 'Framing' and the Transformation of Policy Networks

Privatization has its own distinctive dynamics, resulting particularly from the institutional restructuring which tends to transform policy networks and communities. This happens principally for two reasons. Firstly, the crucial balance of resource dependencies is changed irrevocably, and established policy communities break down. Secondly, the separation between the principal actors tends to produce a 're-framing' of major policy issues. Here, Schön and Rein's (1994) concept of issue 'framing' offers a useful metaphor for how actors give a coherent organization to a complex reality by selecting for attention a few salient features. At the same time, they argue also that the nature of 'objective' reality might be found in the world's tendency to resist our interpretations, leading to a discovery of the limitations of particular frames. The case of British Steel offers a good example of the dynamics of this process. In the days of state ownership, the British Steel Corporation and government generally shared similar 'frames' on major issues. Since privatization, however, the two actors have tended to adopt separate 'frames' and have become more independent of each other. Multi-arena politics, such as Europeanization, can drive them still further apart. Nevertheless, in recent years British Steel has come to appreciate some of the limitations of its own frame, and has sought to reconstruct its relationship with government. There is an imbalance in the resource dependencies, however, which precludes the reconstruction of a policy community     

The results of a randomized controlled trial of police body-worn video in Australia

Journal of Experimental Criminology - We report the results of a randomized controlled trial of police body-worn video (BWV) cameras in an Australian context, with a focus on how cameras influence...     

Consensus on validation of forensic voice comparison

Since the 1960s, there have been calls for forensic voice comparison to be empirically validated under casework conditions. Since around 2000, there have been an increasing number of researchers and practitioners who conduct forensic-voice-comparison research and casework within the likelihood-ratio framework. In recent years, this community of researchers and practitioners has made substantial progress toward validation under casework conditions becoming a standard part of practice: Procedures for conducting validation have been developed, along with graphics and metrics for representing the results, and an increasing number of papers are being published that include empirical validation of forensic-voice-comparison systems under conditions reflecting casework conditions. An outstanding question, however, is: In the context of a case, given the results of an empirical validation of a forensic-voice-comparison system, how can one decide whether the system is good enough for its output to be used in court? This paper provides a statement of consensus developed in response to this question. Contributors included individuals who had knowledge and experience of validating forensic-voice-comparison systems in research and/or casework contexts, and individuals who had actually presented validation results to courts. They also included individuals who could bring a legal perspective on these matters, and individuals with knowledge and experience of validation in forensic science more broadly. We provide recommendations on what practitioners should do when conducting evaluations and validations, and what they should present to the court. Although our focus is explicitly on forensic voice comparison, we hope that this contribution will be of interest to an audience concerned with validation in forensic science more broadly. Although not written specifically for a legal audience, we hope that this contribution will still be of interest to lawyers.