Jan Smuts house news

Hungary, a Central European success story, is taking a closer look at its African ties following its accession to the European Union and has a range of useful experience and skills to offer African countries. The article asks whether it might provide a model for other new EU members’ engagement with the continent.     

Parliament and foreign policy 1739–1763

Summary

An assessment of the influence of Parliament in a crucial period for the development of British foreign policy. Aside from its formal role, Parliament had an important indirect influence. Parliament was frequently cited in contemporary discussion of foreign policy, whether by ministers stressing the need to settle matters before the session, British diplomats concerned about the detrimental consequences for their government's image of parliamentary contention, or foreign diplomats seeking to assess the stability and intentions of the British Ministry. Parliament's role can only be understood in the context of British foreign policy and of other domestic political struggles, especially those within the Ministry. The parliamentary history of the period and the nature of the eighteenth‐century British state in general can be better understood through offering such an assessment.     

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.