MP Firefighting and the Partisan Logic

Control of executive power is a central accountability concern. This article focuses on ways for parliament and MPs to assist the voter in this important task. Parliamentary systems empower parliaments by a range of control institutions, but the role of political parties challenges MPs incentives to engage in control of government. This article focuses on Fire Alarm control activity, but argues that Fire Alarms call for MP Firefighting. In parliament, MPs have the opportunity to respond to reports from decentral control institutions about government mal-administration. Building on models of rational politicians, this paper investigates when MPs in fact engage in Firefighting related to Fire Alarm cases from the Ombudsman and audit institution. The article argues that MPs engage in Firefighting when it serves partisan purposes. The paper relies on a medium-N dataset of reports from the Faroese Ombudsman and Audit General (52 cases) and applies a mixed-method research design. The results show that the partisan logic dominates MP Firefighting. Opposition MPs use government mistakes to damage government reputation. However, the paper argues of the possibility of a more parliamentarian outcome, since focus on Fire Alarm cases puts pressure on government to make amends.     

Developmental Pathways from Genetic,Prenatal, Parenting and Emotional/Behavioral Risk to Cortisol Reactivity and Adolescent Substance Use: A TRAILS Study

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Cortisol reactivity is a frequently studied biomarker of substance use, though infrequently examined in adolescence. However, past research provides evidence that...     

一次检测微量血痕的种属来源、ABO血型及红细胞酶EsD、PGM_1的表型

本文介绍一种一次检测微量血痕的种属来源、ABO 型、红细胞酶 EsD、PGM_1表型的方法。用盲法共测151份已知血痕种属来源 ABO 血型、EsD 与 PGM_1表型的血痕纤维,均能正确判型、吻合率为100％。     

The real costs of tuition tax credits

Calculations of the costs of tuition tax credits should include estimates of the induced migration from public to private schools. The estimate by the President's advisors that his 1983 tax credit proposal would cost up to $800 million by 1986 neglected the migration factor. It is demonstrated that a migration from public to private schools of about from 1 to 1.4% of the present public school enrollment is all that is necessary to secure savings from migrants that just offset the loss in federal tax revenue from tax credits granted to incumbent private school families. Greater migration will generate net revenue gains to governments as a whole.     

Ethnic differentials: Sri Lanka,Malaysia, and Israel

Studies in Comparative International Development -     

Towards a global critical justice problematic

This paper argues that a global perspective is demanded by neo-Marxist methodological considerations, pointing out that traditional comparative criminology has been seriously flawed in its assumptions and preconceptions. A critical comparative criminology must be based on a world system and/or dependency model, coupled with human rights concerns. The crucial concerns of critical criminology are re-identified within a problematic of the concepts: “reproduction”, “production”, “the state”, and “transformation”. Their relevance to a comparative criminology is underscored, by way of critiquing north/western (including Canadian) critical criminology. The paper ends by drawing out some of the implications of this approach for justice theory and research in Canada.     

Beyond over- and under-control: Behavioral observations of shelter children

A review of the available research on child witnesses of family violence reveals inconsistent results. It is proposed that this is due in part to varying methodologies including oversimplified data categories and unreliable sources of report. The current study utilizes a longitudinal naturalistic observation format of 75 children in 5 women's shelters. Results show first, the complexity of behaviors, second, fluctuating positive behaviors, third, the overall decline of negative behaviors, and fourth, the shelter worker's role as the victims' primary object. Conclusions emphasize the importance of early childhood development, the need for clinical support to child victims of violence, and the need for counselling models to facilitate the changes in child victims' behaviors.     

Dialogue and the Inquisitorial Tradition: French Defence Lawyers in the Pre-Trial Criminal Process

Recent years have seen an intermittent debate amongst journalists, policy-makers and academics in adversarial jurisdictions about the nature and quality of the inquisitorial tradition in criminal process. Much of the political impact of the debate in Britain has stemmed from the view asserted periodically by certain high profile figures that some form of judicial supervision of police investigation – as practised for example in France – might be introduced in England and Wales.¹ Such views tend to find expression when events call into question not just particular rules but also the underlying structures and assumptions of our adversarial tradition of criminal process. Thus in 1991 the public revelation of serious miscarriages of justice led to the appointment of a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in which the adversarial character of the pre-trial process seemed to be a key point of interrogation.² The police view, demonstrated in a number of key cases, was that once they were clear that a suspect was guilty they had no responsibility to pursue exculpatory lines of investigation. This, combined with the failure of defence lawyers to play the extensive, autonomous investigative role the adversarial system demanded of them, encouraged some to ask whether there might not be advantages in somehow ensuring that the resources and rights of the state were devoted to pursuing exonerating as well as incriminating evidence. Given the limited empirical evidence then available on the workings of judicial supervision in practice⁴ and the sometimes vehement dispute in France itself about the future of its pre-trial process and especially the juge d'instruction(examining magistrate), the proposals were perhaps not surprisingly rejected.⁵ But since the mid 1990s, British funders have begun to finance a number of empirical studies of French criminal justice.⁶ This paper reports the principal findings of a empirical study primarily funded by Britain's Economic and Social Research Council into the role of defence lawyers in France.⁷ Our focus and primary theme is the developing nature of their dialogue and exchanges with key state actors such as judges, prosecutors and the police on the one hand and with clients on the other. But in so doing we aim to cast light on the broader functioning of the pre-trial process in France.     

The Reconstitution of Law in Local Settings: Agency Discretion, Ambiguity, and a Surplus of Law in the Policing of Hate Crime

An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organizations is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff's agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called “hate crime general orders” from all 397 police and sheriff's departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies' responses to higher law. We also construct a “genealogy of law” to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies, some follow statewide guidelines, and others are oriented toward gaining legitimacy from national professional bodies or groups within their own community. The social mechanisms that produce the observed clustering patterns in terms of approach to hate crime law are mimetic (copying another department), normative (driven by professional standards about training and community social movement pressure), and actuarial (affected by the demands of the crime data collection system). Together these findings paint a picture of policing organizations as mediators between law‐on‐the‐books and law‐in‐action that are embedded in interorganizational networks with other departments, state and federal agencies, professional bodies, national social movement organizations, and local community groups. The implications of an interorganizational field perspective on law enforcement and implementation are discussed in relation to existing sociolegal research on policing, regulation, and recent neo‐institutional scholarship on law.     

糖原磷酸化酶同工酶BB与缺血性心肌损伤及法医学应用前景

糖原磷酸化酶同工酶BB(GPBB)是新近发现的心肌缺血性损伤的酶指标 ,作为糖原分解的关键酶 ,对缺血、缺氧导致的损伤高度敏感 ,对心肌梗死 (AMI)的早期诊断、不稳定心绞痛 (UA)与AMI的鉴别诊断等优于其他生化指标。在法医学中也有广泛的应用前景。