Regulating transnational corporate bribery: Anti-bribery and corruption in the UK and Germany

Recent large-scale cases involving multi-national corporations such as the BAE Systems and Siemens bribery scandals illustrate the difficulties faced by the UK and German sovereign states in controlling complex trans-national and multi-jurisdictional crimes. This article analyses the mixture of enforcement, self-regulatory and hybrid mechanisms that are emerging as part of UK and German responses to controlling transnational corporate bribery. This regulatory landscape incorporates a diverse array of direct and indirect state and non-state ‘regulatory’ actors of varying levels of formality. Mechanisms of a self-regulatory nature vary in terms of their mandatory/voluntary requirements and manufactured/organic formation. However, there is an assumption that the emergence of a variety of enforcement, self-regulatory and innovative hybrid mechanisms is sufficient but in reality this is not the case. Instead, the key argument of the article is that while these mechanisms are aiding the response, they are likely to fail leading to the default position of accommodation by state agencies, even where the will to enforce the law is high.     

A New Ethical World of British MPs?

Following a series of financial scandals in the early 1990s, the House of Commons implemented new ethics rules and regulatory procedures, including a Code of Conduct, a ban on paid advocacy, a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and a Select Committee on Standards and Privileges. In the absence of hard data about parliamentary integrity and the prevalence or otherwise of unethical parliamentary conduct, this paper explores the possible effects of the new rules and procedures on MPs' attitudes by comparing data from the 2005 British Representation Study with research conducted in the late 1980s. The evidence suggests that there has been some attitudinal change at the aggregate level, although it remains unclear how much of this change can be attributed directly to the Nolan reforms.     

The Correlates of Corruption in India: Analysis and Evidence from the States

Robert Bartley, Chan Heng Chee, Samuel P. Huntington and Shijuro Ogata, Democracy and Capitalism: Asian and American Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of South East Asian Studies, 1993), 81 pp.

Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes and Karl Hutterer (eds.), with the assistance of G. Carter Bently, Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America (Ann Arbor: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992), 146 pp.

S. Gordon Redding, The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism, (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 267 pp.

Zhongguo Quanli Jigou yu Lingdaoren (Power Structure and Leadership in the People's Republic of China) (Hong Kong: Ming Pao China Study Research Unit, 1993), 277 pp.

Robert Cottrell, The End of Hong Kong: The Secret Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat (London: John Murray, 1993), xi, 244 pp.

John Andrews, The Asian Challenge ‐ Looking Beyond 2000 (Hong Kong: Longman, 1992), 218 pp.     

A Spiral of Cynicism for Some: The Contingent Effects of Campaign News Frames on Participation and Confidence in Government

This article explores the impact of strategy-based campaign coverage on turnout and confidence in government. Recent theoretical advances suggest that variables such as sophistication and involvement frequently moderate media exposure effects. We hypothesize that the impact of strategy frames will be moderated by political involvement and sophistication. In an experiment, we precisely isolate and manipulate particular story elements that have been said to foster public cynicism: the strategic interpretation of candidate motives, the presence of polling results, and the use of war or game metaphors to describe the campaign. Relative to the issue-oriented coverage, strategy frames boost the number of strategy-based comments people offer when describing the campaign and depress issue-based commentary. As expected, framing effects on turnout, trust in government, civic duty, and the perceived meaningfulness of elections are moderated by involvement and sophistication. Nonpartisans and those with less than a college degree are significantly demobilized and alienated by strategy-based coverage, while partisans and the highly educated are mostly unaffected.     

Democracy-Speak: Party Manifestos and Democratic Values in Britain,France and Germany

This article analyses changes in party-manifesto references to democracy in post-war Britain, the French Fifth Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in order to explore changes in political parties' statements about democracy. It finds that in recent decades parties in all three countries have generally become more supportive of and more vocal in their calls for citizen participation in political decision-making, with a related increase in expressed support for direct democracy and other opportunities for participation. It also finds that left-wing parties have tended to be more enthusiastic than right-wing parties. The article suggests that changes are most likely parties' responses to wider shifts in societal values, and it concludes with a discussion of the significance of democracy-speak for both parties and citizens.     

Introduction to Neumann: law and socialist political theory

Abstract

Regulators attempt to understand financial markets and their risks in terms of categories of knowledge and datasets that are defined and produced by the markets. However, regulators cannot adequately interpret or utilize such knowledge, for reasons including their social distance from the sites of knowledge production, the diversity of financial firms’ proprietary risk models, firms’ abilities to game the rules thus rendering the ‘metrics’ meaningless and several backfiring aspects of global regulatory networking and reform. Calls for yet more information about trading, posed in terms of the merits of transparency, result in information swamping of regulators. Meanwhile, while policy-makers tinker with regulatory structures (‘architecture’), political reaction to the crisis de-legitimizes public regulation as a project. Yet there is one positive aspect of the reforms – enhancing powers for ‘resolution’ of financial firms in ways that impact upon investors while minimizing wider destabilization – upon which the regulatory information requirement can and should be refocused. To protect the public interest, legal transparency is required, trading transparency is not. This paper introduces these issues by drawing on critical work on transparency and markets.