Libya's Diplomatic Success in Africa: The Reemergence of Qadhafi on the International Stage

This article traces the development of Libya's African policy between 1996 and 2001, during which Qadhafi extricated his country from its pariah position to become a prominent player on the African stage. It analyzes the motives behind Libya's diplomatic encroachment into Africa, the tactics used by Qadhafi to crown this African policy with success, and the benefits garnered to Libyan interests far beyond the regional setting. The discussion is presented mostly from the Libyan point of view. Thus, particular emphasis is placed on the systematic and extensive coverage of Tripoli's African policy in the Libyan media. However, non-Libyan Arab and African sources are also thoroughly reviewed.     

Clinical practice guidelines: the warped incentives in the U.S. healthcare system

The healthcare system is sick. The players are incentivized to maximize their own benefit and externalize their costs onto the other parties. This paper examines the warped incentives that underlie the system. The tort system, lacking expertise and slow to adapt, is unable to overcome cognitive biases to adequately solve the problems. Clinical practice guidelines could pose a solution, but not as they are currently developed. Guidelines promulgated by healthcare associations are infected by a web of conflicts of interest with every player in the industry. Government agencies, and their revolving doors, are underfunded and also subject to the industry's web of conflicts. Even if adequate guidelines could consistently be produced, state legislatures and courts have been unwilling and unable to substantially incorporate guidelines into the legal landscape. Lastly, this article proposes a private regulation regime that could be a solution which would align all of the players' incentives to society's interests.     

Does inconvenience explain low take‐up? Evidence from unemployment insurance

Application inconvenience is one popular explanation for why many individuals do not receive the social benefits for which they are eligible. Applications take time and some individuals may decide that the financial benefits do not outweigh these time costs. This paper investigates this explanation using cross‐state variation in administrative changes that made applying for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits substantially more convenient over the past decade. We find that the introduction of phone‐ and Internet‐based claiming did not have an appreciable impact on overall UI take‐up, nor did it lead to a shift toward recipients that are higher income or likely to be receiving the maximum benefit amount. These findings are inconsistent with a time‐ and transaction‐cost explanation for low take‐up, since remote UI claiming is less time intensive. This suggests that reducing application barriers alone may not be an effective tool for increasing program participation. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

A dynamic theoretical framework of gradual institutional changes

How do institutions transform? To answer that question, this article introduces a dynamic theoretical framework of gradual institutional changes. Instead of looking at each mode of gradual change—like layering or drift—as a stand‐alone process, we examine how the application of one mode of change affects the opportunities of change agents to induce additional modes of gradual transformation. We first point to the fact that any single mode of change produces a real but limited transformation. Nevertheless, since the application of a gradual mode of change alters the institutional context, it opens new change opportunities by affecting the support in the targeted institution and/or its internal coherence. Consequently, change agents who aspire to comprehensive transformation will be able to use these new opportunities to implement additional modes of gradual transformation. Two case studies of gradual social policy transformations in Israel exemplify these theoretical assertions.     

The best of both worlds: scale economies and discriminatory policies in London’s global financial centre

From the early 1960s onwards London has managed to vie with New York for the top spot as an international financial centre. Ever since then, London has reigned as a leading global financial hub, despite not having behind it anything like the political or economic backing enjoyed by New York. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by building on Kindleberger’s classic analysis of financial centres as international hubs that arise due to economic, geographic and infrastructural advantages, and more recent theories of specialized financial centres which suggest that financial centres deploy discriminatory business practices in order to compete with the scale economy-based centres. Our central claim is that London’s continuing financial supremacy can be traced to the way that the opposing ‘economic’ and ‘political’ sets of criteria necessary for a financial centre are here inextricably fused together in a mutually reinforcing dynamic. Three case studies are used to support this claim: the market for international loans and deposits; the forex (FX) and over the counter (OTC) derivatives markets; and the area of asset and collateral management.     

Challenging the anocracy model: Iran’s foreign policy in Iraq as an obstacle to democracy?

ABSTRACT

Since America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the consequent partial collapse of the state Iraq has been undergoing a process of deterioration and disintegration mainly because America’s vision of establishing a new, more democratic political order there encountered a lack of readiness to understand what the structure of a democratic state should be. The political process that Iraq has been going through – that is the transition from autocratic dictatorship to adopting a kind of democratic system is called anocracy, which means a political system that is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic.

Furthermore, the Iranian intervention into Iraqi politics that took place after 2003 has led to the creation of a virtually imperial model of regional power (Iran’s) that has turned Iraq into a kind of informal protectorate in ethnic and religious issues. This article wishes to offer a better understanding of the anocratic political shift that Iraq has been going through by adding the component of Iran’s influence and foreign policy upon it as an ambivalent factor that is both accelerating yet also preventing the process of democratization from properly establishing itself in Iraq.     

It's a wonderful life: is it possible to say that a severely disabled child has been harmed by the mere fact of being born?

"It's a Wonderful Life," the title of Frank Capra's classic 1946 movie, seems to encapsulate a fundamental all-American conviction. Unsurprisingly, several courts and jurists have applied the movie-title maxim as the ultimate retort to one of the most intriguing questions in modern tort discourse: Is it possible to say that a severely disabled child has been harmed by the mere fact of being born? Wrongful life claimants answer in the affirmative, whereas Capra's aphorism makes a compelling counter-argument. In my opinion, the contrasting views represent equally legitimate subjective beliefs rather than objective truths, so neither may ever prevail. Without a satisfactory solution from conventional wisdom, the life-as-injury debate may be the Gordian knot of tort law. The purpose of this Article is to cut, rather than untie, the knot: Allow the child to recover without challenging or validating the deep-seated perception of life. Part I shows that hostility to liability in tort for wrongful life is almost universal, crossing lands and seas. Part II argues that this demurral is ultimately rooted in the absence of one of the central components of the cause of action. A tort action must fail because of the inability--both logical and practical--to establish "harm" under the traditional definition of this term. Part III opines that because the Gordian knot of tort law cannot be untied, it must be cut altogether. We must replace the traditional tort framework, which gives rise to an insoluble problem, with a more promising contractual framework inspired by the celebrated case of Hawkins v. McGee. In my view, the child may base an action on the claim that the defendant promised the parents that the child would be born without a certain defect and that the promise went unfulfilled. In formal terms, the child is an intended third party beneficiary of the contract between the parents and the consultant in which the latter warranted birth without a particular disability. The warranty of the future child's physical integrity and health, an integral and inseparable part of the contract, should form the basis of the child's cause of action.     

Research note: evidence for moving to an 84-person photo lineup

The traditional six-to-ten person lineup is known to be extremely unreliable. Witnesses who choose someone when the suspect is innocent are too likely to choose that suspect. One solution is to enlarge the lineup in a manner that reduces mistaken identification far more than it lowers correct identification of the culprit. This experiment was built on past research, and it displayed to witnesses lineups consisting of sets of 12 photographs in an album, either two sets (24 photos) or seven sets (84 photos). No difference was found between witnesses for the 24-person lineup or the 84-person lineup in either their ability to identify the target whom they had seen previously, or in the number of mistaken choices of someone in lineups where the target was absent. Since the chance that the witness might mistakenly identify the suspect is far less in the 84-person lineup, lineups should consist of at least that number.

The technocratic tendencies of economists in government bureaucracy

Economists are by many accounts the most influential group of experts in contemporary political decision-making. While the literature on the power of economists mostly focuses on the policy ideas of economic experts, some recent studies suggest that economists also hold particular technocratic ideas about the policy process. The article systematically tests this argument. Focusing on economists within government bureaucracy, the study is based on a quantitative analysis of a large-scale survey of Norwegian ministerial civil servants. It finds that economists are more likely to hold technocratic role perceptions than officials with other educational backgrounds only if they work in the finance ministry or in higher administrative grades. The findings contribute to scholarship on the political sway of economists and to debates about technocracy and the technocratic views of civil servants.