Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Tags in Reducing Belief in False Stories on Social Media

Political Behavior - Social media has increasingly enabled “fake news” to circulate widely, most notably during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. These intentionally false...     

Municipal Activism on Irregular Migrants: The Framing of Inclusive Approaches at the Local Level

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which city policymakers in Europe frame the reasons for provision of welfare services to migrants with irregular status. In the context of restrictive national legal and policy frameworks, the article explores a tendency toward municipal activism in extending access to services, providing a typology of six policy frames used by policy makers that identify the intended beneficiaries and stated policy aims. Drawing on interviews with local policymakers and documentary sources, the article contributes to our understanding of the reasons why some European cities provide services to this particular section of the migrant population.     

Critical Incidents in emergency relief work

The ethos of technical assistance in emergency relief work has emphasised the importance of recruiting people with appropriate professional and technical skills to work under the difficult circumstances of disasters. The authors used the Critical Incident Technique to assess jobrelated skills that were seen to be crucial for the achievement of the objectives towards which emergency relief personnel were working. Fifteen Irish nurses, working predominantly in refugee camps, identified over 60 different work objectives and 54 distinct job-related skills. It is argued that greater account should be taken of the variety of objectives which motivates such fieldworkers. The job-related skills identified were primarily process- rather than outcome-oriented skills, and the authors hold that a greater emphasis should be placed on the development of fluid as opposed to crystallised skills. The possibilities of using the Critical Incident Technique as a mechanism for feeding back authentic field experience and operationalising effective process skills are discussed.     

A Primer on State Insurance Guaranty Associations

In the wake of our nation's financial crisis, protection against insurer insolvency is more critical than ever to the insurance-buying public. All U.S. jurisdictions provide partial statutory protection in the event of insurer insolvency through the creation of various state insurance guaranty associations that are governed by statutes primarily based on a model act promulgated by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Guaranty associations are an integral part of each state's regulatory process for addressing insurer insolvency. Through a matrix of state-specific enabling statutes, state insurance guaranty associations levy and collect assessments from member insurers, pay statutorily defined “covered” claims, and defend against appropriate claims that are in litigation. Together with the domestic regulator of the insolvent insurer (usually the commissioner or superintendent of insurance) and the deputy liquidator (typically approved by the court presiding over the liquidation process and selected by the commissioner or superintendent of insurance as statutory liquidator), the guaranty association community (comprised of associations located in virtually each state in which a policyholder resides) functions as a unified system to manage and at least partially mitigate the impact of an insurer insolvency.     

Success and design of local referenda for land conservation

From 1998 to 2006, over three‐quarters of the more than 1,550 U.S. referenda targeting open space passed. We analyze the success of the conservation movement at holding referenda in areas with greater ecological value and greater likelihood of supporting conservation. To do so, we first analyze the patterns in where referenda are held and in which finance mechanisms they employ. Controlling for these two selection patterns, we then investigate the factors determining the success of the referenda. Our findings suggest that conservation groups are pursuing a successful strategy, targeting communities with above‐average probabilities of passing referenda and higher ecological value. Nevertheless, our results suggest that overlooked opportunities exist in minority and middle‐class neighborhoods, in suburban fringe areas, and in the Southeast. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Survival and song: Women poets of the Harlem Renaissance

This paper concerns Black women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Considered by modern critics to have adopted anachronistic subject matter and to be out of step with the militant race‐consciousness of the period, these poets have been largely neglected in discussions of the 1920's, despite the fact that this was the most significant flowering of Black women's writing until the 1960's. I provide an interpretive model that reveals the rebellious messages in this verse, one that helps explain the poets’ imaginative choices by placing them in their historical context and linking them to a female poetic tradition. This approach makes clear the affirming nature of Renaissance poetry by women and makes it accessible to us today, anticipating as it does contemporary issues and forging a modern sensibility.     

Looking Forward to Cuts: A Simulation Decision Tool for Cutback Management

This study addresses managerial strategies to adapt public spending in anticipation of fiscal stress. It simulates a cutback to a federal agency, providing a decision tool that applies normative recommendations from the cutback management literature. Using agency data, we develop a menu of options that illustrate how different distributions of budget reductions affect organizational goals. We show five alternatives that consider the political, legal, and fiscal implications of the agency's responses to anticipated budgetary pressure. This simulation demonstrates that public agencies can apply existing data to generate rational and viable strategic plans for weathering fiscal stress.     

A Crisis of Empire: The Anglo–Ottoman Dispute Over the Aden Frontier, 1901–1905

The crises which accompanied the rise and decline of the European empires have not been the object of systematic study in the manner of superpower crises of the Cold War period. Many of the techniques used to study Cold War crises have broader scope, including the models of governmental politics and organisational process developed by Graham Allison. The application of the Allison models to the events surrounding the delimitation of the Aden frontier between 1901 and 1905 illuminates significant aspects of the Anglo–Ottoman confrontation: they explain the manner in which non-rational elements in the policy-making process transformed a relatively insignificant issue into a crisis situation. Such insights also require a detailed examination of the documentary record which in this instance reveals the discord amongst British policy-makers and the organisational imperfections of the bureaucracy. The frontier Commissioners, the Aden Resident, the Government of India, the metropolitan government in London and the embassy in Constantinople were involved in a series of factional squabbles over the Aden frontier, the resolution of which often required the coercion of the Ottomans by the deployment of warships along the Yemen coast. Coordination amongst these different elements in the bureaucracy also played a role in generating tensions between London and Constantinople. The case of the Anglo–Ottoman dispute over the Aden frontier suggests that the analysis of internal governmental politics and organisational processes can be applied successfully to crises of empire which predate the Cold War era.     

The organizational justice effect among criminal justice employees: A meta-analysis*

Organizational justice has been shown to be an important predictor of criminal justice employees’ work-related perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. In this study, we take stock of the organizational justice effect on criminal justice employees’ work outcomes by subjecting the literature to a meta-analysis. Multilevel modeling based on 1,924 effect size estimates drawn from 143 studies (95 independent data sets) was used to establish the empirical status of the organizational justice effect. The results indicate a sizeable relationship between organizational justice and justice system employee work outcomes (Mz = .256, CI = [.230, .283]). The findings also demonstrate that the organizational justice effect size varies slightly across several methodological variations. Specifically, the organizational justice effect size is larger when the concept is measured with scales that contain survey items tapping into all four dimensions of justice. Also, we found that outcome type, presence of confounding mechanisms, research design, and sample characteristics moderate the justice effect. We conclude that organizational justice theory is a useful framework for developing a more theoretically informed understanding of justice system employees’ work outcomes. We discuss the theoretical implications of the meta-analytic findings and avenues for future research based on the results.