Topic Modeling the Research‐Practice Gap in Public Administration

The possible existence of a research‐practice gap is the topic of a long‐standing debate in the field of public administration. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors examine the agendas of scholars and practitioners using the topic modeling technique of computational social science. Topic modeling a content analysis of 35 topics identified in Public Administration Review and PA Times (3,796 articles) showed that just over 50 percent of topics were common to both groups, indicating shared interests. There were, however, topics that the two groups distinctly focused on. Moreover, scholars and practitioners attached significant differences to the weights allocated to the prominent topics in their writing. Taken together, these findings indicate that topic modeling can shed new light on the research‐practice gap in public administration.     

Brazil and South Africa: the ‘odd couple’ of the South Atlantic?

Exploring the complexity of South Africa's and Brazil's ‘like-mindedness’ at the regional, multilateral, and bilateral levels, this article argues that shared middle power roles traceable to the pre-Cold War era and beyond set the scene for a great deal of political complementarity and cooperation at the multilateral level where Brazil and South Africa's shared identities drive an interest in reforming global governance processes. This complementarity does not, however, always spill over to the bilateral level, where trans-societal linkages are still relatively limited compared with state-to-state interactions.     

The Contingency of Voter Learning: How Election Debates Influenced Voters’ Ability and Accuracy to Position Parties in the 2010 Dutch Election Campaign

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties’ issue positions, thereby increasing voters’ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters’ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters’ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters’ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters’ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers’ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters’ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.     

Crime,Employment and Social Welfare: An Individual-Level Study on Disadvantaged Males

Objectives

We seek evidence for economic and social mechanisms that aim to explain the relationship between employment and crime. We use the distinctive features of social welfare for identification.

Methods

We consider a sample of disadvantaged males from The Netherlands who are observed between ages 18 and 32 on a monthly time scale. We simultaneously model the offending, employment and social welfare variables using a dynamic discrete choice model, where we allow for state dependence, reciprocal effects and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity.

Results

We find significant negative bi-directional structural effects between employment and property crime. Robustness checks show that only regular employment is able to significantly reduce the offending probability. Further, a significant uni-directional effect is found for the public assistance category of social welfare on property offending.

Conclusion

The results highlight the importance of economic incentives for explaining the relationship between employment and crime for disadvantaged individuals. For these individuals the crime reducing effects from the public assistance category of social welfare are statistically equivalent to those from employment, which suggests the importance of financial gains. Further, the results suggest that stigmatizing effects from offending severely reduce future employment probabilities.

     

Traits and states at work: lure,risk and personality as predictors of occupational crime

This study linked individual characteristics to proximate factors operating in the moment of decision-making to predict occupational crime. We distinguished between people’s task-related conscience, as embodied by the Conscientiousness personality trait, and a more general moral conscience as embodied by the Honesty-Humility trait, hypothesizing that both traits are differentially related to the way situational characteristics, such as costs and benefits, are perceived. We operationalized the concept of ‘felt lure’ emanating from the benefits of a crime, defining it as an affective state that tempts people to commit a criminal act, and examined it next to perceived risk of sanction as a proximate predictor of criminal choice. In line with our predictions, Conscientiousness and Honesty-Humility significantly predicted occupational criminal choice as did felt lure and perceived risk. Specifically, perceived risk and felt lure mediated the relations between Conscientiousness and Honesty-Humility on the one hand, and occupational criminal choice on the other.     

Indigenous People,Organized Crime and Natural Resources: Borders,Incentives and Relations

This article explores the relationship between the Emberá–Wounaan and Akha Indigenous people and organized crime groups vying for control over natural resources in the Darién Gap of East Panama and West Colombia and the Golden Triangle (the area where the borders of Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Thailand meet), respectively. From a southern green criminological perspective, we consider how organized crime groups trading in natural resources value Indigenous knowledge. We also examine the continued victimization of Indigenous people in relation to environmental harm and the tension between Indigenous peoples’ ecocentric values and the economic incentives presented to them for exploiting nature. By looking at the history of the coloniality and the socioeconomic context of these Indigenous communities, this article generates a discussion about the social framing of the Indigenous people as both victims and offenders in the illegal trade in natural resources, particularly considering the types of relationships established with dominant criminal groups present in their ancestral lands.

     

Specifying the information effect: reference points and procedural justifications affect legal attitudes in four survey experiments

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Providing detailed information about sentencing reduces punitive attitudes of laymen (the information effect). We assess whether this extends to modest...     

Reisverslag

SUMMARY

A new interest in and a consciousness of the ethics of public communication is noticable amongst scientists and practitioners in communication. In order to give depth to this consciousness it is necessary to address fundamental questions regarding the nature of ethics as such. In this article a constructive and contextual approach is followed to determine the nature of ethics, as it should be and its relation to the non-ethical. The nature of communication and how it should be ethical is also viewed contextually. Amongst others this means that the true humanitarian nature of man and its relation to public communication should also be considered. The ethical is related to the news responsibility of the media and the human interest served by this responsibility. Problems such as truth, objectivity, privacy and publicity is dealt with in the context of its ethical relevance. Finally, attention is given to the controversial problem of justification, where aspects such as the role of media councils is also dealt with.     

THE BATTLE FOR HISTORY AFTER SUHARTO: Beyond Sacred Dates,Great Men,and Legal Milestones

Historical discourse has become an important aspect of post-Suharto Indonesian politics. The nationalist instrumentalization of the past, always strong in Indonesia, took on a martial aspect under the New Order. Even today, the establishment remains reluctant to abandon it. But new visions of history have arisen out of the widespread protests against the New Order. Some preserve the form of a martial nationalist historiography, but displace it to the regions (especially Aceh and Papua), thus turning it against Jakarta. Others, both at a national and a local level, embrace more societal historiographies in which the state and national unity are not idealized, and in which internal conflict is not taboo.     

Priest,parishioner and posterity: A Dutch urban legend or historical fact?

This article analyzes the influence of priests on the number of children among Dutch Catholics between 1935 and 1970, based on a survey held among old retired priests and priests who had abandoned the priesthood as well as their parishioners. Whereas we heard dramatic testimonies of meddlesome priests, which are popularly considered to be undisputed fact, these practices were found to have disappeared earlier than generally assumed due to the process of modernization within the Church. Interviews with both priests and parishioners showed the prominent role played by the transfer of religious values in the parental home, sexual taboos and by the lack of information about sexuality and birth control.