Reforming sacred institutions: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Roman Catholic Church compared

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) are both conceptualized as sacred institutions, with many features of ideology/theology, hierocratic structure, and policy process in common. After periods of exclusion, they both also faced strong pressures to adapt to changes in the modern world, both internal and external, and to reduce status differentiation within the hierarchy and between the clergy/apparatchiki hierarchy and the laity/population. The present article compares and contrasts de-Stalinization under Khrushchev (1956–1964) with the results of Vatican II (1959–1965), and Gorbachev’s reforms (1985–1991) with the efforts of Pope Francis to reform the RCC (2013–present). The comparisons validate the explanatory power of the noted similarities between these sacred institutions, while also highlighting significant differences in structure, mission, and process, which explain why Pope Francis has adopted an incremental strategy for reform of the RCC, in contrast to Gorbachev’s revolutionary strategy for reforming the CPSU.     

Outsourcing Public Health Laboratory Services: A Blueprint for Determining Whether to Privatize and How

In a continuing effort to reform and reinvent the way public organizations do business, the outsourcing of services has become a popular tool, particularly as resource constraints limit options available to governments. All too often, the decision is made, for reasons of ideology or resource constraints, to outsource services without giving careful consideration to the impact of privatization on the core missions of an agency, or whether privatization, in fact, offers real cost savings. Purchasing tools designed for traditional commodity purchases are often grossly unsuited for making decisions on specialized technical services.
This article suggests a process for the evaluation of an option to outsource laboratory services. It suggests that, prior to contracting or privatizing services, the concerned agency should evaluate:
the impact on the agency's core mission
the availability, stability, and reliability of private sector service providers
the relative costs of internal and external (public or private sector) service providers
the potential impact on regulatory enforcement
the ability to monitor the performance of external providers
potential conflicts of interest
Based on this model, the ongoing internal evaluation of services offers public agencies management tools to obtain the best value for the taxpayer dollar, not only in terms of the raw cost per test, but also in managing the quality of the services.     

Veto Players and Institutional Analysis

The veto players theory can be used to analyze all political systems regardless of regime (presidential or parliamentary), party system (one-, two-, or multiparty), and type of parliament (unicameral or multicameral). This paper develops the veto players theory to account for a series of important political phenomena: the difference between majoritarian and supermajoritarian institutions; the importance of absenteeism, or of political marginalization; the importance of agenda control and referendums; the reasons for government stability (parliamentary systems) and regime stability (presidential systems); the reasons for independence of bureaucracies, and judicial independence. All these phenomena are analyzed in a coherent way, on the basis of the same framework. Empirical evidence from existing literature corroborating the theory is provided.     

An Investigation of the Public Deficts and Government Spending Relationship: Evidence for Greece

This paper tests the validity of the Buchanan-Wagner hypothesis for Greece, that increases in public spending are the result of the tolerance of large deficits over the period 1961–1994. To test this hypothesis, three unit-root pretests, the Dickey-Fuller, Phillips-Perron and Kwiatkowski et al. and maximum likelihood estimation techniques of cointegrating vectors and a vector error-correction model are employed. A long-run relationship is found to exist among government spending, deficit, income,wages and adult population and the importance of short-run deviations are presented. The empirical evidence suggests that Buchanan and Wagner hypothesis, seems to find support for Greece in the long-run and the short-run. Further, productivity in the public sector is lower than in the private sector and the growth of income is not an important determinant of the increase in the relative size of public spending.     

Sociology and international relations: legacies and prospects

While sociological concepts have often been implicitly used in International Relations (IR), recent years have seen a more explicit engagement between IR and Sociology. As with any such interdisciplinary assignation, there are both possibilities and challenges contained within this move: possibilities in terms of reducing IR's intellectual autism and opening the discipline towards potentially fertile terrain that was never, actually, that distant; challenges in that interdisciplinary raiding parties can often serve as pseudonyms for cannibalism, shallowness and dilettantism. This forum reviews the sociological turn in IR and interrogates it from a novel vantage point—how sociologists themselves approach IR concepts, debates and issues. Three sociological approaches—classical social theory, historical sociology and Foucauldian analysis—are critically deployed to illuminate IR concerns. In this way, the forum offers the possibility of (re)establishing exchanges between the two disciplines premised on a firmer grasp of social theory itself. The result is a potentially more fruitful sociological turn, one with significant benefits for IR as a whole.     

A Preliminary Study on Vacuum Metal Deposition as a Standalone Method for Enhancement of Fingermarks on Ballistic Brass Materials

In order to assess the efficacy of vacuum metal deposition (VMD) as a technique to develop fingermarks on ballistic metallic surfaces, a preliminary study using six donors (three male & three female) was conducted. Using a sequential metal deposition process, two metal combinations were studied—gold/zinc and silver/zinc. Results indicate the potential of this technique, by developing identifiable fingermarks on brass metal disks aged from a few days up to more than a month old. As the development of fingermarks on fired (brass) cartridge cases is an area of interest, a further study was conducted where a total of 20 fingermarks were deposited on cases. After firing, second level fingermark characteristics were successfully observed on cartridge cases highlighting its potential as a fingermark enhancement method for ballistic brass materials. Further work is required to fully evaluate the VMD process and its reliability as a fingermark enhancing method on ballistic surfaces.     

An Anthropological Examination of the Types of Skeletal Fractures Resulting from Fatal High (˃3 m) Free Falls,

Fatal falls from heights (?3 m) often result in blunt force trauma (BFT) to the skeleton. The fracture patterns that result from this BFT mechanism are well understood in forensic anthropology and forensic pathology; however, details of the specific types of fractures that result remain poorly documented. The aim of this study was to provide a detailed examination of the types of fractures that may result from fatal high falls. Fractures were recorded from 95 full‐body postmortem computed tomography scans of individuals known to have died from a high fall. Trauma was then analyzed taking into account the extrinsic and intrinsic variables known to influence a fall using multiple logistic regression. A total of 339 types of fractures were classified, of which 16 were significantly associated with this BFT mechanism. Classified fracture types will augment anthropological interpretations of the circumstances of death from BFT in cases of suspected high falls.     

A partially randomized field experiment on the effect of an acoustic gunshot detection system on police incident reports

Journal of Experimental Criminology - To examine whether the introduction of an acoustic gunshot detection system (AGDS) allied to CCTV cameras increased the frequency of confirmed incidents of...