Psychological Assessment of Chief of Police Candidates: Scientific and Practice Issues

This report examines issues associated with the selection of a Chief of Police. A review of the literature indicates minimal progress in specifying appropriate objective selection procedures for the Police Chief. This is attributable to a research focus on broad leadership styles, rather than specific competencies, and an inattention to the unique needs of individual jurisdictions. As a potential alternative, a hiring process model is offered that includes a systematic job analysis within the given jurisdiction, and the use of a reliable and well-validated instrument to assess job candidates’ leadership potential and skills. This approach is illustrated by a case study of a medium-size city that followed the recommended procedures to make a hiring decision that has been sustained across more than a year’s time, and which appears to be working out. The uses of testing results to help the Chief of Police to enhance personal capabilities within the new position also are discussed.     

The perils of hyper-vigilance: the war on terrorism and the surveillance state in South-East Asia

The analysis examines the puzzle as to why the intelligence structures of South-East Asia largely failed to detect the evolving threat of violently inclined radical Islamic groups, despite the existence of elaborate and pervasive internal security arrangements within the states of the region. The article explores this issue by positing contending viewpoints about how authoritarianism in South-East Asia might have affected the awareness of such threats. Answers to these questions enable an assessment of the current ASEAN response to the ‘war on terrorism’ and to discern whether South-East Asia's elites will move either to improve the quality of their intelligence and threat analysis in the future, or whether they will, instead, extend the instruments of authoritarian rule, further curtailing civil and political space under the rubric of combating terrorism. The evidence so far suggests that the latter outcome is the more likely.     

State Performance‐Based Budgeting in Boom and Bust Years: An Analytical Framework and Survey of the States

The authors examine the track record of applying performance‐based budgeting (PBB) across three time periods within a sample of U.S. state governments: (1) throughout the 1990s, (2) in the early 2000s, and (3) during the Great Recession. State‐level PBB is analyzed according to four elements: (1) the development of performance measures, (2) its applicability to budgeting and management processes, (3) its utility across the business cycle, and (4) its usefulness for budget players. An analytical framework is devised that highlights the “publicness” of American government, draws on the principal–agent model, and considers incentive mechanisms theory. Findings confirm that a good performance measurement system takes time to develop and operate well and that PBB functions more effectively for executive management than legislative purposes. PBB is used more by the states during strong economic times as opposed to during economic downturns. More importantly, PBB is only selectively applied by legislators in most states, whereas top executive policy makers, middle managers, and staff embrace and utilize PBB systems more extensively.     

Veto Players Revisited: Internal and External Factors Influencing Policy Production

Veto player models generally rely on two assumptions: (1) collective actors like political parties behave as individual actors; and (2) all actors influencing policy production are domestic. Yet these are often violated by empirical reality. Under certain institutions, parties are less cohesive and may not behave as individuals, and international regimes can have considerable influence over legislation. Using data on labor‐law production in Europe, we find that the effects of veto players are conditional on both party cohesion and international regimes. Future conceptualizations of veto players should be more sensitive to both internal and external institutional configurations.     

An Integrated Theory of Budgetary Politics and Some Empirical Tests: The U.S. National Budget, 1791–2010

We develop a general theory of budgetary politics and examine its implications on a new data set on U.S. government expenditures from 1791 to 2010. We draw on three major approaches to budgeting: decision‐making theories, primarily incrementalism and serial processing; policy process models; and path dependency. We show that the incrementalist budget model is recursive and that its solution is exponential growth, and isolate three periods in which it operates in pure form. The equilibrium periods are separated by critical junctures, associated with wars or economic collapse. We assess policy process dynamics by examining the deviations within equilibrium periods. We offer three takeaways: (1) exponential incrementalism is fundamental to a theory of budgeting; (2) disjoint shifts in the level of exponential incrementalism are caused only by critical moments; (3) temporally localized dynamics cause bends in the exponential path, longer returns to the path within budgetary eras, and annual punctuations in budget changes.     

Concentrations of zolpidem and zopiclone in venous blood samples from impaired drivers compared with femoral blood from forensic autopsies

The concentrations of zolpidem and zopiclone were determined in peripheral blood samples in two forensic materials collected over a 10-year period (2001-2010). The z-hypnotics were determined in venous blood from living subjects (impaired drivers) and in femoral blood from deceased persons (forensic autopsies), with the latter classified as intoxication or other causes of death. The z-hypnotics were determined in blood by capillary column gas chromatography (GC) with a nitrogen-phosphorous (N-P) detector after solvent extraction with n-butyl acetate. The analytical limit of quantitation (LOQ) was 0.02mg/L for zopiclone and 0.05mg/L for zolpidem and these have remained unchanged throughout the study. When death was attributed to drug intoxication (N=918), the median concentration of zopiclone in blood was 0.20mg/L compared with 0.06mg/L for other causes of death (N=1215) and 0.07mg/L in traffic offenders (N=691) (p<0.001). Likewise, a higher median concentration (0.30mg/L) was found in intoxication deaths involving zolpidem (N=357) compared with 0.13mg/L for other causes of death (N=397) or 0.19mg/L in impaired drivers (N=837) (p<0.001). Median concentration in blood of both z-hypnotics were appreciably higher in intoxication deaths when no other substances were identified; 0 70mg/L (N=12) for zopiclone and 1.35mg/L (N=12) for zolpidem. The median concentrations of z-hypnotics in blood decreased as the number of co-ingested substances increased for intoxication deaths but not other causes of death. The most prevalent co-ingested substances were ethanol in autopsy cases and diazepam in the motorists. This large compilation of forensic cases should prove useful when toxicologists are required to interpret concentrations of z-hypnotics in blood samples in relation to cause of death.     

Certainty of Terms and Leases: Curiouser and Curiouser

The common law rule that requires leases to have a fixed terminus from the outset is one that has been much criticised. In Berrisford v Mexfield Housing Co‐operative Ltd, the Supreme Court managed to blunt its effect by suggesting that most leases of uncertain duration can be transformed into 90‐year tenancies. However, it is suggested that their Lordships have possibly misunderstood and overstretched an ancient common law ‘rule’ and have not fully considered some of the implications of their decision.