VIOLENCE AND THE COSTS OF HONESTY: RETHINKING BUREAUCRATS' CHOICES TO TAKE BRIBES

Explanations of bureaucrats' decisions to take bribes include accounts of incentives as well as expectations. However, there are further considerations in violent contexts, where refusal of bribes may have dire consequences. Yet, insight into this topic is limited. This article investigates how violence upholds bribery, through interviews with South African officials who enforce regulations in communities where gangs operate. The investigation shows that when citizens offer bribes to enable rule violations, this is a process of both temptation and threats: officials who refuse bribes face intimidation by both citizens and colluding colleagues. This illustrates how violence may function as a mechanism to enforce corrupt contracts between bureaucrats and criminal citizens. Through reducing costs in such settings, bribe‐taking is partly a strategy of social protection. This has implications for policy and suggests that, besides incentives and expectations, administrative reforms may benefit from ‘fixing the security’ of bureaucrats in violent contexts.     

Explaining Quality Management in the Danish and Swedish Public Health Sectors: Unintended Learning and Deliberate Co-Optation

This article examines the development of diverse quality systems in the otherwise quite similar Danish and Swedish public health sectors. After decades of numerous piecemeal medical and managerial quality development programs in both countries, a nationwide mandatory accreditation system was introduced in the Danish health services in 2009. Nationwide quality indicator projects are also found in Sweden, but there has been political attempt to introduce a compulsory system. This article seeks to explain this difference. It argues, first, that resistance from the medical professions blocked the introduction of compulsory, nationwide quality systems in both countries for decades. Second, the implementation of the Danish accreditation system was triggered by a combination of unintended policy learning produced by local reforms in two counties and of the Ministry of Health’s carefully orchestrated policy process that served to co-opt critical voices in the medical profession.     

Decoupling trends: Drivers of agency independence in telecommunications: An analysis of high and middle-income countries

Global diffusion of regulatory reforms in telecommunications has prevailed in many countries, engendering major institutional changes and entailing the establishment and/or reform of regulatory agencies. Although the triggers and timing of such agentification processes have been more or less similar, agency independence displays significant cross-country variation. Seeking to explain such variation based on a sample incorporating middle-income countries (MICs), this paper examines the impact of political-institutional settings in which the agencies operate, in addition to the impact of economic parameters. Regression analysis reveals that political rights appear as the central parameter, while their impact is more robust in MICs than in advanced countries. The results underscore considerable cross-national variation in regulatory governance, along with a noteworthy decoupling between MICs and advanced countries. Concurring with the regulatory regionalism perspective, the paper delineates distinct regional clusters, albeit remaining agnostic about the determinants of such clusters.     

Broker Organizations to Facilitate Cross-Sector Collaboration: At the Crossroad of Strengthening and Weakening Effects

Cross-sector collaboration has emerged as an important way for public management to address complex social issues. Given the manifold challenges of governing and implementing such collaborations, scholars emphasize the benefits of using broker organizations to facilitate and strengthen cross-sector collaboration. However, this comparative longitudinal case study of broker organizations that support global health partnerships shows a less straightforward pattern: despite their good intentions, two of the four broker organizations analyzed subtly weakened the collaboration by gradually replacing the partners’ cross-sector tasks and decision-making with unilateral, broker-based ones. By juxtaposing this pattern with the other two broker organizations’ trajectories, this study reveals the processes underlying brokers’ role drift and unintended collaborative weakening and those allowing them to maintain their facilitation role. On this basis, the study exposes overlooked collaboration dynamics to reveal the boundaries of using broker organizations as a mechanism to facilitate cross-sector collaboration.     

The Freedom of Seduction

For most of human history, the other half of the species, women, were on the sidelines. Now they are central actors in all our societies as we negotiate the fraught transition from male‐dominated tradition to modernity and beyond. In this section we hear the voices of powerful women who in their own lives are making this historic shift.     

Peer Victimization Exposure and Subsequent Substance Use in Early Adolescence: The Role of Sleep Problems

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - While sleep problems are positively associated with both peer victimization and substance use, previous studies largely have ignored the indirect role sleep...     

论《民法典》个人信息保护规则蕴含的权利——以分析法学的权利理论为视角

在分析法学的权利理论中,权利和义务的关联性原理得到了普遍认可.当然,这种关联性也存在例外.不存在对应权利的义务类型可被归纳为"对世义务".《民法典》第1035条第1款第1项是一个义务性规则,确立了个人信息处理者在通常情况下征得自然人或其监护人同意的义务.该义务具有明确的相对人,不属于"对世义务",应存在对应的权利,即信息主体对同意与否的决定权.《民法典》第1037条更是采用授权性规则的立法表达,赋予了自然人查阅、复制、更正、删除个人信息的权利.可见,我国《民法典》虽然没有明确使用"个人信息权"一词,但在个人信息保护规则中已经存在具体的权利内容.《民法典》分别使用义务性规则和授权性规则的立法表达,有其合理性和重要意义.我国正在制定中的个人信息保护法拟设专章规定"个人在个人信息处理活动中的权利",其中明示的权利有着《民法典》上的渊源,在性质上具有私权属性.     

红外差谱技术用于微量混合油漆的比对检验

对交通事故中的漆片检材进行同一物质比对时,某些情况下难以提取到单一的油漆碎片而是两辆车的油漆混合在一起,给物证比对带来困难。红外差谱技术具有辨别混合物中不同成分的功能,因此可应用于交通事故中混合油漆检材的比对检验。本文对一起交通事故的漆片检材,分别用三种方式提取、制样,用红外光谱仪进行分析,借助红外差谱技术对谱图进行处理,排除混合油漆的干扰。处理后得到的谱图与样本的谱图进行比对,结果显示两者主要官能团吸收峰位置、峰型、峰强度基本一致,可出具比对一致的结论。针对混合油漆检材的比对检验,红外差谱技术可提供支持。     

Do young female candidates face double barriers or an outgroup advantage? The case of the European Parliament

While intersectionality is a recurrent theme in the literature on women's political representation, few studies empirically disentangle who are the women who get elected to parliaments. An argument on biases in recruitment practices suggests that those who are members of more than one outgroup, such as young women, benefit from an ‘outgroup advantage’. In elections, a candidate with two outgroup features might attract more voter support than a candidate with just one outgroup feature. Hence, nominating a candidate that is both young and female could be a rational move by (male) elites in political parties that allows them to open fewer seats to newcomers. These expectations are tested on data for all members of the European Parliament since 1979. Not only is it found that women's presence increased steadily throughout the parliament's history, but also that women's representation is consistently highest among the group of young representatives, lower among middle-aged Members of the European Parliament and lowest among older representatives.