Assessing the developing knowledge-base of product counterfeiting: a content analysis of four decades of research

Considering the steady and rapid growth of product counterfeiting and the damage it causes to society, it is important for criminology and criminal justice scholars to assist criminal justice officials, industry practitioners, and law makers in understanding the product counterfeiting problem and developing strategies to combat it. However, for researchers to be effective in their advisory role they must first establish what is known about product counterfeiting. As a first step in this process, we investigated relevant published research through a content analysis of 47 articles discussing product counterfeiting published in criminal justice and criminology journals through 2014. We analyzed various characteristics about the articles themselves, their authors, the journals they appeared in, and the nature and extent of their focus on product counterfeiting. We conclude this study with an evaluation of the state of product counterfeiting research and recommendations for future research.     

Rewarding Dysfunction: Interest Groups and Intended Legislative Failure

Why do majority parties choose to add extreme dead on arrival bills to their legislative agendas rather than enactable legislation? Majorities in Congress choose this strategy in order to accrue political support from their allied interest groups who reliably reward this legislative behavior. By examining all bills that receive floor consideration from 2003 through 2012, as well as interest group scorecards and campaign commercials, I find support for my theory. Dead‐on‐arrival bills generate electoral benefits for majority‐party lawmakers, are more politically valuable than other bills, and are more often used to credit rather than punish legislators.     

POLICY LEARNING

The Comparative History of Public Policy. Edited by Francis G. Castles Trends in British Public Policy: Do Governments Make any Difference? Brian W. Hogwood Public Policy in Britain. Martin Burch & Bruce Wood     

Advances in the assessment and prediction of interpersonal violence

This article underscores the weakness of clinical judgment as a mechanism for prediction with examples from other areas in the psychological literature. Clinical judgment has as its Achilles'heel the reliance on a person to incorporate multiple pieces of information while overcoming human judgment errors--a feat insurmountable thus far. The actuarial approach to risk assessment has overcome many of the weaknesses of clinical judgment and has been shown to be a much superior method. Nonetheless, the static/historical nature of the risk factors associated with most actuarial approaches is limiting. Advances in risk prediction will be found in part in the development of dynamic actuarial instruments that will measure both static/historical and changeable risk factors. The dynamic risk factors can be reevaluated on an ongoing basis, and it is proposed that the level of change in dynamic factors necessary to represent a significant change in overall risk will be an interactive function with static risk factors.     

Understanding the historical turn in the policy sciences: A critique of stochastic, narrative, path dependency and process-sequencing models of policy-making over time

This article evaluates four general models of historical change processes which have emerged in various fields in the social sciences – namely stochastic, historical narrative, path dependency and process sequencing – and their application to the study of public policy-making. The article sets out and assesses the merits and evidence for each, both in general social research and in the policy sciences. The article suggests that more work needs to be done examining the assumptions and presuppositions of each model before it can be concluded that any represents the general case in policy processes. However, since neither the irreversible linear reality assumed by narrative models, nor the random and chaotic world assumed by stochastic models, nor the contingent turning points and irreversible trajectories required of the path dependency model are found very often in policy-making, these models are likely to remain less significant than process-sequencing models in describing the overall general pattern of policy dynamics.     

All Together Now? An Empirical Study of the Voting Behaviors of Homeowner Association Members in St. Louis County

Homeowner associations (HOAs), by design, collect homogenous members of a community into a residential development with defined boundaries and contain at least some very active individuals. This implies that HOAs may lower the transaction costs involved with voting resulting in HOA membership increasing voter participation. Further, as more HOAs provide goods and services to their members as substitutes for goods and services provided by the public sector, one would expect HOA members to vote more conservatively and in support of more privatization. Using a detailed population database constructed for Saint Louis County, Missouri, and results from the November 2004 general election, this article analyzes the effect that living in an HOA has on voter participation and on the results of several election issues. Following a similar study by the Public Policy Institute of California, the results show that, once population characteristics are controlled for, there is no HOA effect on the likelihood of HOA members to vote Republican. Unlike previous work, this study shows that if the vote reporting districts are broken into five mutually exclusive categories rather than using the 60% rule used in other studies, areas with more HOAs do show an increase in participation rates and an increased likelihood to vote against property tax increases. The results hold up even after the presence of spatial autocorrelation is confirmed and controlled for.