The social willingness to comply with the law: The effect of social attitudes on traffic fatalities

This paper investigates the effect of the social willingness to comply with the law on driver behavior and traffic fatalities. We analyze a panel of 15 European Union states for 1996–2002, a period for which consistent attitudinal data are available. Using corruption indices, we find that the social willingness to comply with the law has significant positive effects on traffic fatalities with an elasticity estimated between −0.207 and −0.217. Other significant factors are traffic exposure, economic growth, speed, and alcohol consumption. We also find that, whatever benefits laws produce, differences in national traffic rules do not explain divergences in road safety. This result seems to indicate that willingness to comply matters more than legal specificity.     

An Economic Theory of Court Delay

Delay undermines the performance of courts around the world. Its implications and possible solutions, however, are not so widely understood. The assessment of the efficiency of delay as a rationing mechanism requires a general theory, which looks at the effect on the number of conflicts, suits, settlements and trials. The outcome is somewhat disturbing: delay may be socially beneficial, but the assumptions seem prohibitively strict. The policy implications are that court delay is best reduced via increases in court fees and improvements in legislative and judicial quality.     

适用恢复性司法而非施以痛苦

刑事司法最重要的功能可能是标识社会的谴责,表明所有人应当遵守的界限.传统的刑事司法将惩罚看作是实现多种可能目标先验性的干涉手段.恢复性制裁不会将犯罪的严重性与合乎比例的惩罚相联系,而是将损害的种类、严重性与最大程度的合理修复努力相联系.恢复性司法的经验价值和附加的社会伦理价值应当得到最大程度的执行,而不应局限或服从于先验的惩罚.先验地选择惩罚导致沟通匮乏,尤其对修复的有效性不利.在道德层面上,恢复性司法比报应性司法更能促进社会道德观念诸如尊重、团结和承担责任等美德的培养,因而更可能积极促进社会生活和关系的建设.     

How preferences,information and institutions interactively drive agenda‐setting: Questions in the Belgian parliament, 1993–2000

In this article an integrated framework of agenda‐setting is proposed that incorporates the two main accounts of agenda‐setting: the information‐processing approach by Comparative Agenda Project scholars and the preference‐centred account advanced by Comparative Manifestoes Project scholars. The study claims that attention allocation is determined at the same time by preferences, information and institutions, and that attention allocation is affected by the interactions between these three factors. An empirical test is conducted that draws upon a dataset of parliamentary questions/interpellations in Belgium in the period 1993–2000. It is found that attention in parliament is indeed driven by preceding party manifestos (preferences), by available information (media coverage) and by institutional position (government or opposition party). The evidence establishes that agenda‐setting is also affected by the interactions between preferences, information and institutions. Actors, given their preferences, treat information in a biased fashion, and institutions moderate information's role.     

The Conceptualisation and Measurement of Issue Ownership

Issue ownership means that some parties are considered by the public at large as being more able to deal with, or more attentive to, certain issues. The theory has been used to explain both party behaviour – parties are expected to focus on owned issues – and voter behaviour – when a voter considers a party to own an issue, this affects the odds of voting for that party. The purpose of this article is, first, to provide a look backward at the existing research through a literature review of the studies that were conducted in the past decade-and-a-half. Secondly, it takes stock of the current conceptualisation and argues that issue ownership is a multidimensional concept. Thereafter the article discusses how this multidimensionality affects both the role of issue ownership in voter and in party behaviour. Finally, the article outlines a number of shortcomings of the extant literature and discusses potential avenues for future research.     

Friction and Party Manifesto Change in 25 Countries, 1945–98

Political processes are affected by "friction." Due to cognitive limitations and institutional delays, political agendas do not adapt smoothly to real-world impulses; political agendas either ignore them or overreact. The first question this article tackles is whether the same punctuated change process can be observed in party manifestos. Secondly, it examines whether there are differences across political systems and across party lines. Thirdly, the study tries to account for differences in the degree of "punctuatedness" of party manifestos. Drawing on the vast dataset of the Manifesto Research Group, the article shows that party manifestos are indeed characterized by friction and resistance to change; it also establishes that there are considerable differences in frictional patterns between parties and political systems; and it finds that electoral fragmentation, government participation, and electoral volatility are key to understanding these differences.     

Punctuated Equilibrium in Comparative Perspective

We explore the impact of institutional design on the distribution of changes in outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. Using comprehensive indicators of governmental actions over several decades, we show that in each country the level of institutional friction increases as we look at processes further along the policy cycle. Assessing multiple policymaking institutions in each country allows us to control for the nature of the policy inputs, as all the institutions we consider cover the full range of social and political issues in the country. We find that all distributions exhibit high kurtosis values, significantly higher than the Normal distribution which would be expected if changes in government attention and activities were proportionate to changes in social inputs. Further, in each country, those institutions that impose higher decision-making costs show progressively higher kurtosis values. The results suggest general patterns that we hypothesize to be related to boundedly rational behavior in a complex social environment.     

The First Time is the Hardest? A Cross-National and Cross-Issue Comparison of First-Time Protest Participants

The study aims to extend the existing knowledge about the dynamics of first-time participation in protest events. To tackle that puzzle we rely on extensive and innovative protest survey evidence covering 18 separate demonstrations in eight countries across nine different issues. On the individual level, age, motivation, and non-organizational mobilization appear to be consistent and robust predictors of first-timership. On the aggregate level, demonstrations staged just after or during a protest wave, large demonstrations, and demonstrations of old or new emotional movements are attended by a relatively larger share of first-timers. We conclude that it is thus the interplay of individual- and aggregate-level determinants that produces first-time participation.