Political accountability for price stability and unemployment in a multi-party system with coalition governments

A model of party popularity for multi-party systems is presented and applied to the Netherlands. Main conclusions are: first, inflation and unemployment and their interaction affect the popularity of parties; second, it is important to take into account that voters may reckon with a trade-off between these variables; third, it is wrong to handle a coalition government as a homogeneous entity.     

The concept of forensic emergency medicine as illustrated by an unusual complication of pulmonary artery catheterization

Forensic pathologists are regularly confronted with emergency and invasive medical procedures performed on critically ill or traumatized patients. Basic knowledge of such procedures and their possible complications is therefore mandatory in medico-legal practice. In this article, we describe a very unusual complication of pulmonary artery catheterization: through-and-through perforation of the carotid artery, initially without hemodynamic consequence. Death resulted from an aggravation of the preexisting cerebral edema (secondary to a craniocerebral trauma). The misplacement of the pulmonary artery catheter was clinically missed because the guidewire was initially deflected on the cervical spine towards the subclavian vein where the catheter--by chance--entered the circulatory system and followed its normal route further. The forensic importance of leaving all invasive medical devices in situ on a deceased person when a medico-legal autopsy is to be expected and the mutual interaction between emergency and forensic medicine (forensic emergency medicine) are discussed.     

Narrative dynamics in European Commission AI policy—Sensemaking,agency construction,and anchoring

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is arguably one of the most powerful and disruptive technologies of our times which may pose challenges as well as opportunities to contemporary political organizations. Studying AI from a lens of perceived uncertainty, this article studies the policy response of the European Commission toward this fast-paced emerging technology. By empirically focusing on the Commission's policy process from start to end, from initial communication to concrete proposal, the article shows how different types of narratives are used to construct the new policy area of AI policy. A novel theoretical framework is constructed building on a combination of narrative organizational studies and narrative policy studies, displaying how narratives play a key role in organizational sensemaking, agency construction and anchoring. The paper finds that the Commission broadly makes sense of AI technologies with a future-oriented discourse, establishes agency to existing and new forms of political organizing and anchors the policy response within the overarching frame of the EU single market policy. The main contribution of the paper is that it shows how political organizations settles uncertainty through narratives and sketches a way forward through establishing policy goals and anchoring them within pre-existing lines of political mobilization.     

Executive Remuneration: Industry and Job Family Effects

This research explores the distribution of executive remuneration based on the type of industry and job family in South African state-owned enterprises. A regression analysis of secondary data collected on 222 executives was conducted. The overall results based on pairwise comparison suggest that the distribution of executive remuneration across various categories of industry was the same except between forestry—defense, forestry—telecommunications, defense—telecommunications, and energy—development funding. However, the results also indicated that there was no difference in the distribution of remuneration across various categories of job families in South African state-owned enterprises.     

From corporatism to lawyocracy? On liberalization and juridification

In 1997 Robert Kagan questioned whether European countries had to fear the coming of American style adversarial legalism. He answered this question with a qualified “no.” Today we are no longer so sure the answer is “no,” even in a country that Kagan considered the antipole of US adversarial legalism, the Netherlands, traditionally characterized by informal and consensual conflict resolution. In the present article we chart a trend of increasing juridification and legalism, that is, more formal and legal conflict resolution, in the Netherlands between 1970 and 2008. The trend is related to major changes in economic governance institutions, which generated a shift from corporatism toward lawyocracy; from power of the associations of civil society toward power of courts, lawyers, and judges. Yet the newly dominant system of governance is modified and merged with elements of the old system, producing a specific Dutch version, which one could call “corporatist lawyocracy.” We identify two types of liberalization as major driving forces: social liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by economic liberalization in the subsequent decades. If one considers economic liberalization a product of neoliberal “Reaganomics,” the legal changes are in a way an “American export product,” although a different one than the lawyering styles of large international American law firms mentioned by Kelemen and Sibbitt in 2004.     

Criminal law and mentally ill offenders in comparative perspective

Abstract

In this stick we compare legal arrangements dealing with mentally disordered offenders in the criminal law systems ct Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. To describe relevant diffesenoes and similarities in the arrangemeats, we used a checklist containing antral aspects of adjudication, assessment and treatment of mentally ill offenders. These aspects concern: (1) the legal classifications of mental illnesses that can lead to exclusion of criminal responsibility: (2) the acceptance of diminished capacity as a partial excuse; (3) the possibilities for imposing security measures of compulsory treatment instead of or next to criminal punishment; (4) the conditions for their imposition in terms of seriousness of crimes committed and dangerousness of offenders; (5) the available hospitals or special clinics for executing security measures; (6) the role and task of forensic mental health professionals in assessing the offender's state of mind and in advising compulsory treatment; (7) the rules for duration, prolongation and termination of the measures. The findings of this comparative analysis are evaluated in light of legal protection for mentally disordered offenders.     

Perceptions of Neighbourhood Safety and Policy Response: A Qualitative Approach

Safety perceptions of residents are often analysed through surveys and compared with factual crime developments. Using the Dutch city of Rotterdam as an urban context of improved crime levels, this article provides a critique on standardised surveys in the research of safety perceptions and its presupposed connection to factual crime. Contrasting survey results from the Rotterdam Safety Index with qualitative data from 64 in-depth interviews in four districts, the qualitative narrative contradicts findings from the survey and implies more nuanced and diversified policy responses to safety issues. Because of the tendency of surveys to connect safety perceptions to factual crime, their unsuitability to catch subtle perceptions and their inability to expose new viewpoints, we argue for de-quantification: a lesser dependency on—but not a repeal of—survey data in this area, supplemented by a periodic qualitative approach in the research of crime and safety information (qualitative monitoring).