Vehicle Theft Reduction in Germany: The Long-Term Effectiveness of Electronic Immobilisation

From 1995 on all new vehicles sold in Germany must be fitted with an electronic immobiliser. This measure was part of a comprehensive police plan which, adopted in 1994, reacted to the unprecedented increase in vehicle theft after German re-unification and the breakdown of the former USSR. Whilst international research has already shown that electronic immobilisation is an effective tool to reduce vehicle thefts, comparable studies for Germany have not existed. Based on the situational crime prevention approach, this study indicates that the substantial vehicle theft reductions recorded over the last 15 years in Germany can be explained in particular by the introduction of electronic immobilisers as a ‘target hardening’ mechanism. It will be shown that immobilisers not only effectively obstruct opportunistic vehicle thieves, but also increase the efforts of professional vehicle trafficking groups. Since an external impact evaluation has never been planned for this measure, the study followed a mixed methods approach in using available police data as well as complementary interviews with key experts.     

Responsibilities for Human Capabilities: Avoiding a Comprehensive Global Program

Violence, poverty, and illness are all too prevalent in our world. In order to alleviate their hold systematically, we need normative schemes with a global reach and with definite responsibilities. Martha Nussbaum’s human capabilities theory (Martha Nussbaum 2006) provides us with an insightful example. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (The United Nations 1948), however, already includes most of the human capabilities central to Nussbaum’s theory, and violence, poverty, and illness usually appear as objectionable enough without any additional reference to capabilities. In the current article, the author argues that the primary global responsibilities can mainly be established without Nussbaum’s account of capabilities. The human rights-based approach is more promising for this purpose (Jack Donnelly 2007; Abigail Gosselin, Human Rights Review 8:35–52, 2006; Ivar Kolstad, Human Rights Review, doi:, 2008). However, the author also contends that Nussbaum’s theory may be very instructive as a relatively comprehensive moral approach that supplements the human rights view and inspires its adherents to assume secondary responsibilities in addition to the primary ones. Once we learn to see Nussbaum’s agenda in this way, not as the global program, but as one of the many reasonable and relatively comprehensive views in the global background culture, we can also learn to cultivate the responsibilities it implies in a duly dialogical way.     

Two Challenges for Dignity as an Expressive Norm

The concept of dignity figures prominently in legal and moral discussion on such topics as human rights, euthanasia, abortion, and criminal punishment. Yet the notion has been criticized for being indeterminate and either insufficient or redundant (or both) in justifying the kinds of legal and moral rights and views its proponents use it to vindicate. The criticisms have inspired some novel conceptions of dignity. One of them is Tarunabh Khaitan??s proposal that dignity should be understood as an expressive norm. In this article, I assess Khaitan??s suggestion. I maintain that it faces two challenges that its advocates should be able to solve for the proposal to be plausible.     

The Politics of Competitive Tendering: Political Orientation and Attitudes towards Contracting Out among Finnish Local Politicians

Using survey data on Finnish local politicians (n = 364) we examine the extent to which political orientation affects attitudes towards and perceptions of competitive tendering in social and health service provision. Expectation of cost benefits turns out to be the most important factor accounting for willingness to increase the usage of competitive tendering. The perceived positive impact of tendering on local democracy is also related to local politicians' readiness to implement reforms. However, political orientation does have a strong effect on politicians' perceptions. We also consider whether there are mitigating factors that could mask the relationship between political orientation and attitudes towards tendering. We identify one such factor, municipal employment: public-sector employees form a kind of informal ‘interest group’ resisting public-sector reforms in municipal decision making. In general, our results suggest that macro-level studies on competitive tendering underestimate the effects of political ideology on local decision making.     

The Passionate Text. The Pending Narrative as a Macrostructure of Persuasion

The pending narrative is an important macrostructure of persuasive speech. With it, the speaker not only describes the world and its social phenomena, but also lays a foundation for transforming the world to conform with the objective imposed in the narrative. The rhetorical force of the pending narrative comes from its sudden interruption: as soon as the motivation for an action has been created and as soon as identities have been established for the actors involved in the action, the story is interrupted, brought to a halt. This article outlines the basic mechanisms of the pending narrative and illustrates them using one alcohol policy editorial and two introductory chapters from scientific texts: Erik Allartd's The Structure of Society and Social Pressure and C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination.