Legislating on occupational safety and health: a comparison of the British and American experience

Abstract. In the early 1970s both the United Kingdom and the United States legislated new occupational safety regulations. Enforcement strategies varied considerably: the British chose a persuasive, the Americans a coercive approach. The legislative process was characterized by consensus in the first case, by conflict in the second. Consequentially the UK regulation appears to have been quite effective, while the US one led only to negligible results. This difference can be mainly explained by the different strength of the interest groups involved in the regulation's implementation.     

A rising generation of Europeans? Revisited

The EJPR article ‘A rising generation of Europeans?’ provided systematic evidence for the existence of generational differences in attitudes towards the European Union (EU). In this research note, it is argued that identifying generational differences in specifically affective orientations is the crucial issue for the future of the EU. Drawing on and extending the earlier work expectations in respect to generational and life‐cycle differences in affective orientations are developed and tested, highlighting the existence of the former, their consistency across a range of indicators, and the absence of the latter. The results are an important counterpoint to the growth in ambivalence in attitudes towards the EU.     

CAN RATIONAL CHOICE BE CONSIDERED A GENERAL THEORY OF CRIME? EVIDENCE FROM INDIVIDUAL‐LEVEL PANEL DATA

In the last few decades, rational choice theory has emerged as a bedrock theory in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and political science. Although rational choice theory has been available to criminologists for many years now, the field has not embraced it as other disciplines have. Moreover, rational choice scholars have fueled this skepticism of the theory's generality by modeling offender decision making that is one‐sided—large on the costs of crime (sanction threats), short on the benefits of crime. In this article, we directly assess the generality of rational choice theory by examining a fully specified model in a population that is often presumed to be less rational—adolescents from lower socioeconomic families who commit both instrumental (property) and expressive crimes (violence/drugs). By using a panel of N = 1,354 individuals, we find that offending behavior is consistent with rational responses to changes in the perceived costs and benefits of crime even after eliminating fixed unobserved heterogeneity and other time‐varying confounders, and these results are robust across different subgroups. The findings support our argument that rational choice theory is a general theory of crime.     

From the Drawing Room to the Stage: Performing Sexuality in Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet

Ann E. Imbrie. Spoken in Darkness: Small‐Town Murder and a Friendship Beyond Death. New York: Hyperion, 1993. Pp. 261.