THE EYE OF DOUBT: NEUTRALITY,RESPONSIBILITY, AND MORALITY*

Abstract: The conditions of employment of a professional public service together with the wide-ranging consequences of the actions of public servants combine to require considerable moral responsibility. Whatever political neutrality means for public servants, it does not mean moral neutrality. If public servants were never to exercise moral judgement in moments of truth there would be little justification for endowing the profession with the status and security it now enjoys. After some discussion of the origins of the professional public service, several recent cases of morally responsible public servants are reviewed and the arguments frequently given to avoid or trivialise morality are evaluated. My claim is that courage is the key to morality. The ordinary moral obligations that lie upon us all apply with added force to public servants. The truth that the eye of doubt beholds is that political neutrality brings moral responsibility. … the more civil servants, the more thieves… The Great Elector … not from the Castle … not from the village… Kafka … polite, upright, and mild… Hegel     

Privatization as institutional choice

A model based upon the common concept of rent-seeking behavior avoids an exclusive focus on the pecuniary motive in private institutions and the power motive in public institutions. Using this model, the case for privatization ranges from very strong to unpersuasive, with some fascinating intermediate cases. Where purchases are frequent, information is abundant, costs of a bad decision are small, externalities are minimal, and competition is the norm, privatization ought to be pursued. At the other extreme, in situations where externalities and collective interests abound, natural monopolies are dominant, distributional goals are important, or debate and experience will alter preferences, governmental determination of service levels and public provision should continue. Intermediate situations such as those involving education, health, and some aspects of enterprise development provide the most interesting and hotly debated areas. These intermediate situations have both private and collective characteristics, choices are made infrequently with little information, have monumental consequences, distributional considerations are critical, and public debate about the level and type of service substantially affects individual behavior.     

Value orientations,life transitions,and desistance: Assessing competing perspectives

Laub and Sampson (2003) and Paternoster and Bushway (2009) offered opposing explanations of desistance from crime. Yet, extant research has failed to test the key theoretical differences that distinguish these perspectives: 1) the temporal ordering of internal changes in identity/values and life transitions and 2) the impact of values/life transitions on offending conditional on key predictors from the opposing theory (e.g., whether marriage contributes to desistance among individuals who already hold prosocial values). We assess competing claims using data from the Pathways to Desistance. We find that within-person changes in prosocial value orientations are significantly related to within-person changes in one's likelihood of entering into serious romantic relationships and becoming employed. Conversely, life transitions are unrelated to changes in one's values. The results derived from fixed-effects Poisson models indicate high or increasing prosocial value orientations help explain offending patterns among those who enter into serious romantic relationships/get employed and help explain changes in offending among those who do not experience structural “turning points.” Marriage/cohabitation is unrelated to within-person changes in offending, whereas the impact of employment has an inconsistent relationship. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.     

Police Legitimacy and the Norm to Cooperate: Using a Mixed Effects Location-Scale Model to Estimate the Strength of Social Norms at a Small Spatial Scale

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - Test whether cooperation with the police can be modelled as a place-based norm that varies in strength from one neighborhood to the next. Estimate whether...     

How Safe Do Majority Group Members,Ethnic Minorities,and Muslims Feel in Multicultural European Societies?

London elected a Muslim mayor in 2016, less than a year after Germany took the lead in welcoming Syrian refugees. What accounts, then, for political leaders’ public assertions of the death of multiculturalism and the resurgence of far-right parties? We examine the possibility that some areas of multicultural policy foster a sense of discrimination on the part of majority populations and reduce their sense of safety, putting pressure on political leaders for assurances and providing the impetus for populist political party agendas, even to the point of Brexit. Data from the Banting/Kymlicka Multiculturalism Policy Index project and from the European Social Survey allow us to explore the impact of specific areas of multicultural policy on those who identify as majority group members, ethnic minorities, and Muslims in fourteen European states. We provide a quantitative multivariate analysis of the influence of key areas of state-level multicultural policy on individuals’ sense of being in a group that is discriminated against, as well as their feelings of safety, satisfaction with life, and satisfaction with the national government. Background factors, including respondents’ education, are controlled. For each of the three groups of respondents, the article offers conclusions as to which areas of multicultural policy seem to contribute to the most adverse reactions. Our findings help to explain the backlash against multiculturalism and the shift in focus in European states toward “mainstreaming” integration programs. They also provide a contextual background for understanding the increasing sway of rightist party demands and cautions for the development of programs to counter violent extremism.