Religion and the State: The Case of Faith–based Schools

It is always misleading, and sometimes dangerous, to suppose that the current problems represent no more than a recapitulation of earlier and intractable difficulties. An inhibiting sense of déjà vu numbs the mind and distracts attention from the essential novelty of deceptively familiar issues. The contemporary interaction of religion and politics in Western societies is as different from nineteenth–century contests between traditional faiths and their critics as it is distant from medieval versions of the church and state question. These truisms are well illustrated by the attempt made in this article to apply some of the harder lessons of historical and of cross–national studies to current debates on changing relations between organised religion and public education.     

Competing bureaus and politicians: A compliance approach to the diversion of public funds

This article analyzes the effects of the compliance relationship between the governing party and two competing bureaus producing differentiated goods. We assume that the three players simultaneously and independently take their decision in terms of production and rents with perfect knowledge of each others strategies. Unlike Niskanen's competitive results, which are invariant with respect to the monopoly solution and only depend on the characteristics of the review process, here the budgetary equilibrium changes depending on the nature of the goods supplied by the competing bureaus and is affected both by their demand and cost conditions and by the resources available to the governing party.     

Two items of evidence, no putative source: an inference problem in forensic intelligence

Intelligence analysts commonly associate cases on the basis of similarities found in compared characteristics of scientific evidence. The present paper studies some of the inferential difficulties associated with such operations. An analysis is proposed that breaks down the reasoning process into inference to common source, and inference to case linkage. The former requires an approach to the difficulty associated with evaluating the similarities of items of evidence from different cases with no putative source being available. The latter requires consideration to be given to the relevance of evidence. Throughout the paper, probability theory is used to describe the nature of the proposed inferences. Graphical models are also introduced with the aim of providing further insight into the dependence and independence relationships assumed to hold among the various propositions considered. Notions from decision theory are used to discuss ways in which intelligence analysts may assist investigators in deciding whether or not cases should be considered as linked.