The Quality Assurance Agency and the Politics of Audit

Audit is an increasingly ubiquitous feature of academic life with the Quality Assurance Agency to the forefront in its implementation. This article argues that, far from being an objective assessment of the quality of learning and teaching in universities, the Quality Assurance Agency's audit role relates to political attempts to change the educational agenda of universities and alter the nature of academic life.     

Forgetting the Führer: the Recent History of the Holocaust Denial Movement in Germany

The crimes committed by National Socialist Germany during the Second World War place Germany in a unique position for the Holocaust denial movement, and combine its so-called "academic" aspect with its political core. In no other country has the movement attracted so much publicity for its pernicious mixture of lies, distortions and half-truths as it has in Germany since the late 1980s. The introduction of laws in 1985 and 1994 that target " die Auschwitzlüge " (Auschwitz-Lie) changed the frequency of Holocaust denial in German public life, if not its nature. This article is an analysis of the German Holocaust denial movement since 1988, with an emphasis on the most important individuals and events that have influenced the movement's direction in this period. It also includes an examination of the laws that seek to stop its spread.     

Democratic Legitimacy and the 2000 Election

Law and Philosophy -     

Mass Administrative Reorganization,Media Attention,and the Paradox of Information

How does media attention influence government decisions about whether to terminate independent administrative agencies? The authors argue that an agency's salience with partisan audiences has a direct effect, but a high media profile can disrupt normal government monitoring processes and obfuscate termination decisions. This argument is evaluated in the context of a recent mass administrative reorganization by the British coalition government using probit and heteroscedastic probit regression models. The evidence suggests that termination is less likely for agencies salient in newspapers popular with the government's core supporters but not those read by its minority coalition partner. We also find that agencies with greater overall newspaper salience as well as younger agencies have a higher error variance.     

Unity of effort requires unity of object: why industry should not be involved in formulating public health policy

This paper provides a framework for examining the general issue of public health authorities' collaboration with industry. The framework distinguishes between industry involvement in the development of public health policy and the implementation of policy‐driven interventions. A distinction is also made between industries marketing products conducive to good health versus products that impact negatively on public health (e.g. alcohol and energy‐dense, nutrition‐poor food and beverage industries). Drawing on concepts with respect to the effectiveness of military coalitions, it is argued that a common goal (i.e. ‘unity of object’) is a prerequisite for optimal co‐operation (i.e. ‘unity of effort’) between collaborators in any sphere of activity. However, this vital precondition does not exist in the public health arena because the end goals of industry and those of public health are fundamentally different, if not opposed (i.e. profits to owners/shareholders versus the social good). It is argued that because of this fundamental disjunct between industry profit goals and the public good, unity of effort will always be compromised in any form of collaboration with industry, and particularly where public health policies and interventions are designed to negatively impact on product consumption. Hence, while industry can be asked to co‐operate in implementing public health policy initiatives, industry should never be involved in developing policy initiatives. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.