The Centralisation of Parliamentary Policy Statements in Western European Parliaments

Parliamentarians and their party groups can employ many different instruments to communicate policy statements to their electorate (debates in plenary, presentations of committee reports, oral questions, written questions, and interpellations). Therefore, the design of these instruments should be analysed in one common framework. This paper seeks to provide a first step towards this goal by mapping and explaining the centralisation of parliamentary policy statements in all western European countries with a parliamentary system. It is argued that, on a theoretical level, there are two different causes for a stronger or weaker centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements: the electoral connection and efficiency. Empirically, it is shown that there are striking differences in centralisation both within and between countries which are worth exploring further. Moreover, the results of the statistical models suggest that the electoral connection is the driving factor behind the centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements.     

Negotiated Case-ending Settlements: Ways of Speeding up the (Court) Process

The subject of this article is a special type of fast-tracked case-ending decisions called “negotiated case-ending settlements”. Those proceedings are based on a kind of agreement between the parties, end with a real conviction of the offender and their legal consequence is a true but mitigated punishment. They can be found in six of 11 countries studied, namely, in England & Wales, Croatia, France, Hungary, Poland and Spain. The English guilty plea procedures, the French appearance before a court after prior admission of guilt and the Polish prosecutor’s application for a conviction to be rendered without a trial as well as the voluntary submission to penalty are examined more closely here. The comparative study focuses on the stage, where the negotiation is made, the conditions for the use of these settlements and the PPS’s role therein.     

Research Note: Randomized field experiments published in the British Journal of Criminology, 1960–2004

Randomized controlled trials have become an important component of evidence-based policy in criminal justice. Because searches of electronic bibliographic databases often miss relevant trials, handsearch – or the visual inspection of the contents of an article – is recommended as an additional search strategy. In this paper, we conducted an electronic handsearch of every available issue of the British Journal of Criminology (1960–2004) to determine how many randomized field experiments were published. We compare these results to earlier manual handsearch efforts to augment the Campbell Collaboration Social, Psychological, Educational and Criminological Trials Register (C2-SPECTR). We find only nine trials (although two used quasi-random allocation such as alternation), and just one published in the past 20 years. We discuss some possible reasons for this, and conclude with a modest agenda for improving the reporting of evidence in the age of evidence-based policy.     

Professionalism and campus police officers

Survey research was conducted to examine the effects of education, perceptions of community attitudes, and career commitment upon overall job satisfaction of campus law enforcement officers in North Carolina. Thirteen (13) campus departments participated in the 1984 study. Findings revealed both significant and insignificant relationships. The attained level of post-secondary education was not significantly related to an officer’s perception of having his/her authority questioned, nor was education related to an officer’s feeling of boredom with the job. However, significant relationships were found between several variables including an officer’s willingness to recommend the job to another person and his/her perceptions of community attitudes and the rank of the officer and his/her commitment to the current position.(1)