Capital united? Business unity in regulatory politics and the special place of finance

While organized business is a key actor in regulatory politics, its influence is often conditional on the level of unity or conflict occurring within the business community at any given time. Most contemporary regulatory policy interventions put pressure on the normal mechanisms of business unity, as they are highly targeted and sector‐specific. This raises the question of how business unity operates across a highly variegated economic terrain in which costs are asymmetric and free‐riding incentives are high. In this paper, we empirically assess patterns of business unity within regulatory policymaking across different regulated sectors. Our analysis utilizes data from hundreds of regulatory policy proposals and business community reactions to them in the telecommunications, energy, agriculture, pharmaceutical, and financial sectors over a variety of institutional contexts. We find considerable empirical support for the “finance capital unity” hypothesis – the notion that the financial sector enjoys more business unity than other regulated sectors of the economy. When the financial sector is faced with new regulations, business groups from other sectors frequently come to its aid.     

Tools of single party hegemony in Tanzania: evidence from surveys and survey experiments

Political systems dominated by a single party are common in the developing world, including in countries that hold regular elections. Yet we lack knowledge about the strategies by which these regimes maintain political dominance. This article presents evidence from Tanzania, a paradigmatic dominant party regime, to demonstrate how party institutions are used instrumentally to ensure the regime's sustained control. First, I show that the ruling party maintains a large infrastructure of neighbourhood representatives, and that in the presence of these agents, citizens self-censor about their political views. Second, I provide estimates of the frequency with which politicians give goods to voters around elections, demonstrating that such gifts are more common in Tanzania than previous surveys suggest. Third, I use a survey experiment to test respondents’ reaction to information about corruption. Few voters change their preferences upon receipt of this information. Taken together, this article provides a detailed picture of ruling party activities at the micro-level in Tanzania. Citizens conceal opposition sympathies from ten cell leaders, either because they fear punishment or seek benefits. These party agents can monitor citizens’ political views, facilitating clientelist exchange. Finally, citizens’ relative insensitivity to clientelism helps explain why politicians are not punished for these strategies.     

Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech: Fifty Years On

Fifty years ago, Enoch Powell made what still is one of the most notorious speeches in postwar British politics. Its tone was shocking for its use of inflammatory references to ethnic minority immigrants. Immigration continues to be divisive and references to it by politicians inevitably lead to comparisons with Powell. The aim of the collection is to examine Powell's speech from a number of perspectives, exploring how it was viewed both by contemporaries and in the light of subsequent developments. The objective of this article is to examine Powell's motivations, impact and legacy.     

Legal Cynicism,Antisocial Attitudes,and Recidivism: Implications for a Procedurally Just Community Corrections

The current approach to supervising offenders in the community has produced disappointing results in terms of reduced recidivism. In response to this, a number of scholars have turned their attention to the role that community corrections officers (CCOs) may play in ensuring successful community supervision. Early evaluations of CCO training have shown promising results, yet missing from this knowledge is a consideration for the legal cynicism that may be held by offenders. It may be unreasonable to expect CCOs to change the antisocial attitudes of offenders when those negative attitudes are directed toward them. The purpose of the current work, therefore, is to integrate ideas about legal cynicism into the knowledge about effective supervision to promote a more procedurally just community corrections. Our broader purpose is to encourage a more realistic understanding of the challenges of the officer-offender relationship in order to improve the efficacy of existing models of effective community supervision practice.     

Racial/Ethnic Disproportionality in Psychiatric Diagnoses and Treatment in a Sample of Serious Juvenile Offenders

Psychiatric disorder prevalence has been shown demonstrably higher among justice-involved adolescents than youth in the general population. Yet, among arrested juveniles, little is known regarding racial/ethnic differences in disorder prevalence, the role of trauma exposure in the diagnosis of behavioral disorders, or subsequent psychiatric treatment provided to adolescents with such diagnoses. The current study examines racial/ethnic disparity in psychiatric diagnoses and treatment of behavioral disorders associated with delinquency, controlling for traumatic experiences, behavioral indicators, and prior offending among serious juvenile offenders. Logistic regression is employed to explore the racial/ethnic disproportionality in behavioral disorder diagnoses and psychiatric treatment provision among 8763 males (57.7?% Black, 11.8?% Hispanic) and 1,347 females (53.7?% Black, 7.6?% Hispanic) admitted to long-term juvenile justice residential placements in Florida. The results indicate Black males are 40?% more likely, and Black females 54?% more likely to be diagnosed with conduct disorder than Whites, even upon considerations of trauma, behavioral indicators, and criminal offending. Black and Hispanic males are approximately 40?% less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than White males, with no racial/ethnic differences for females. Importantly, Black males are 32?% less likely to receive psychiatric treatment than White males, with no differences between White and Hispanic males, or any female subgroups. Traumatic exposures increased the odds of oppositional defiant disorder and ADHD, but not conduct disorder for males, though adverse childhood experiences were unrelated to behavioral disorder diagnoses among females.     

The Relative Influence of Appropriation Subcommittees: Institutional Structure and Program Performance

Unlike previous analyses that evaluate the influence of the authorization committees on government agency management, we examine the US congressional appropriation subcommittees to see how their structural characteristics affect the performance of the programs that they fund. Specifically, we look at whether the competition for resources and member workload within subcommittees affects the effectiveness and efficiency of the programs under their purview. As part of the Congressional budget process, appropriation subcommittees are annually allocated new budgets from which they must fund a set of government programs. We find that the level of resources in a subcommittee affects program performance. Greater subcommittee resources are negatively correlated with program performance. We also find that workload matters—programs in subcommittees with fewer issue areas and programs per member are more effective and efficient. A subcommittee's capacity to focus on management problems and issue areas leads to better program performance.     

The Elephant, Umbrella, and Quarrelling Cocks: Disaggregating Partisanship in Ghana's Fourth Republic

Within the literature on Ghanaian partisanship, a healthy debatehas arisen between those viewing Ghana’s two dominantparties as cleaved along socioeconomic lines and those suggestingthat this cleavage runs along ethnic lines. Using election results,constituency maps, census data, and a survey of voters’‘cognitive shortcuts’, this article weighs in withthe debate. The findings suggest that ethnicity matters in Ghanaianelections far more than socioeconomic variables. The findingsdo not, however, lead easily towards the gloomy predictionsthat often accompany ethnic politics. The relationship betweenethnicity and partisanship in Ghana is far more complex. Datapresented here suggest that Asante and Ewe voters are likelyto vote for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National DemocraticCongress (NDC), respectively, regardless of the candidates theyselect. Voters of other ethnic backgrounds, who make up thevast majority of Ghanaian voters, view the dominant partiesas representative of Asante and Ewe interests but do not themselvesvote as a block and base their evaluations of the ‘Asante’and ‘Ewe’ parties ultimately on things other thanethnicity. It is this latter group of voters that makes Ghanaianelections unpredictable and discourages politicians from turningnational votes into a zero-sum ethnic censes.     

Access and allocation in climate change adaptation

As climate change impacts become increasingly apparent, adaptation becomes increasingly urgent. Accordingly, adaptation to climate change has shifted towards the centre of attention in both policy and research. In this article, we review the last 10 years of adaptation research (2008–2018), with a focus on work within the Earth System Governance network. We use the lens of access and allocation to structure our review and examine how adaptation affects, and is affected by, access to basic needs, basic rights, and decision-making on the one hand, as well as allocation of responsibilities, resources, and risks on the other. We find that questions of justice, equity, and fairness are fundamental to all dimensions of adaptation. The access perspective, for example, suggests that we need to assess vulnerability, understood broadly, while the allocation perspective focuses on questions of responsibility for being vulnerable, e.g. when people live, or move to, hazard-prone areas exposed to climate risk. This also relates to questions of who is responsible for selecting, implementing, and funding adaptation measures. Overall, we find that the framework of “access and allocation” and its subcategories offer a detailed approach to adaptation and adaptation research, but that it is not intuitive. The notion of “climate justice” seems to resonate more with both academic and policy debates.

     

The Cyberterrorism Threat: Findings from a Survey of Researchers

This article reports on a recent research project exploring academic perspectives on the threat posed by cyberterrorism. The project employed a survey method, which returned 118 responses from researchers working across 24 different countries. The article begins with a brief review of existing literature on this topic, distinguishing between those concerned by an imminent threat of cyberterrorism, and other, more skeptical, views. Following a discussion on method, the article's analysis section then details findings from three research questions: (1) Does cyberterrorism constitute a significant threat? If so, against whom or what?; (2) Has a cyberterrorism attack ever taken place?; and (3) What are the most effective countermeasures against cyberterrorism? Are there significant differences to more traditional forms of anti- or counterterrorism? The article concludes by reflecting on areas of continuity and discontinuity between academic debate on cyberterrorism and on terrorism more broadly.