The Growing Power and Autonomy of House of Commons Select Committees: Causes and Effects

This article is an examination of the rising prominence of House of Commons select committees during the 2010–2015 Parliament, which takes into account the impact of the Wright reforms. The new system of electing committee chairs and members is explored as a central reform that has burnished the autonomy, independence and credibility of the committees. In addition, the characteristics of the coalition government and circumstances entailed by a two‐party executive are seen as factors that have made more robust the neutrality of the committees, which have been looked to ever more urgently as impartial scrutineers of government policy and personnel. As the system has been strengthened and received greater attention from the government, the public and the media, select committees have also come to present a platform upon which certain members and chairs have grown their profile. This phenomenon in turn has added to the desirability of roles on committees, which now present an alternative career route to the ministerial ladder.     

Personalizing solidarity? The role of self-tracking in health insurance pricing

Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health insurance prices? The emergence of self-tracking technologies and their adoption and promotion in health insurance products has been characterized as a threat to solidaristic models of healthcare provision. If individual behaviour rather than group membership were to become the basis of risk assessment, the social, economic and political consequences would be far-reaching. It would disrupt the distributive, solidaristic character that is expressed within all health insurance schemes, even in those nominally designated as private or commercial. Personalized risk pricing is at odds with the infrastructures that presently define, regulate and deliver health insurance. Self-tracking can be readily imagined as an element in an ongoing bio-political redistribution of the burden of responsibility from the state to citizens but it is not clear that such a scenario could be delivered within existing individual private health insurance operational and regulatory infrastructures. In what can be gleaned from publicly available sources discussing pricing experience in the individual markets established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 (ACA), widely known as ‘Obamacare’, it appears unlikely that it can provide the means to personalize price. Using the case of Oscar Health, a technology driven start-up trading in the ACA marketplaces, I explore the concepts, politics and infrastructures at work in health insurance markets.     

Opportunity and Self-Control: Do they Predict Multiple Forms of Online Victimization?

This study investigates the predictors of four types of cybercrime victimization/experiences: online harassment, hacking, identity theft, and receiving nude photos or explicit content. The effects of victimization opportunity and low self-control are examined as the primary independent variables in logistic regression analyses of data collected from a large sample of undergraduates enrolled at two universities in the United States. Results suggest that opportunity is positively related to each of the four types of online victimization, and that low self-control is associated with person-based, but not computer-based, forms of cybercrime. These findings speak to the utility, and also the limitations, of these perspectives in understanding cybercrime victimization risk among college students, and to the potentially criminogenic nature of the Internet.

     

Commons as possessions: The path to protection of the commons in the ECHR system

The ‘commons’ is not mentioned in the texts of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) or Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 (P‐1). This essay argues that ‘possessions’ — which does appear in the latter — should be interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to protect commons against national governments' undue interferences. The argument comprises two parts. First, we analyse the polysemic term ‘possessions’ to show how the current understanding of this category is marred by flawed assumptions and by false dichotomies. Then, we propose an ‘ecological’ construction of legal relationships between subjects and objects. We find support in the ECtHR case law on Article 8. We argue this approach should be extended to Article 1 P‐1: once disentangled from possessive individualism and market paradigms, ‘possessions’ encompass the commons and the category offers a solid legal basis toward the justiciability in Strasbourg of privatisations.     

Interpersonal Violence Among College Students: Does Sexual Orientation Impact Risk of Victimization?

Researchers have shown that college students are at an increased risk of experiencing interpersonal violence (IV). One factor that appears to play a role in shaping their likelihood of IV is sexual orientation. However, little is known about this relationship and how IV risk varies across categories of sexual orientation. Utilizing a sample of approximately 43,000 college students from the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment II, this study examined the prevalence of IV across five categories of self-identified sexual orientation and examined whether sexual orientation was a predictor of IV. Results indicated that, on average, students who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning were significantly more likely to experience IV than their heterosexual counterparts. Implications for prevention and future research are discussed.