The Obama Administration and United States Trade Policy

For all the focus on economic issues in the wake of the crisis of 2008 the Obama administration has remained ambiguous about a central component of economic policy. As both candidate and President, Obama has sent mixed messages about trade policy. This ambiguity reflects wider uncertainty within the Democratic Party about global trading relationships and this paper explores and assesses the reasons for this uncertainty. A large part of the answer lies in the disparate sources of support for the Democrats. That is, the party has courted support from interest groups and core groups of voters that have widely divergent views about the value of trade liberalisation.     

Bewitched—The Tea Party Movement: Ideas,Interests and Institutions

This article considers the development of the Tea Party movement, the character of its thinking and the nature of the interests and constituencies to which it is tied. The article suggests that despite the importance of ideas and interests, and the process of interaction between them, the movement has also been shaped and energised by institutional arrangements. In particular, it argues that there are significant numbers of independent or ‘detached’ conservatives and that the institutional architecture draws them towards political engagement but at the same time imposes constraints. The political friction that this creates has contributed to the anger that has characterised the movement. While the Tea Party movement may, as such, have only an ephemeral existence, independent conservatives are likely to remain a significant and potent constituency and will, within the institutional structures that define the American political process, give rise to other movements and protests.     

Trauma Interventions and Systems Change in Rural Areas: The Role of the Juvenile Court Judge in Collaboration with Mental Health Professionals

This article will focus on the evolution of the collaborative work of the Louisiana Rural Trauma Services Center (LRTSC), a Center within the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, and the 23rd Judicial District, a jurisdiction in south Louisiana serving three rural parishes. We will describe how the collaboration and joint efforts, and the changes that have been made in terms of availability of evaluation and treatment resources, seem to be influencing both the educational and judicial systems in St. James Parish and potential sustainability of some of the identified resources. The article will examine how the court and the LRTSC work together with emphasis on the evaluation, reporting and recommendation processes, outcomes and benefits to date, and challenges for the future.     

Reflexive Adaptation of Business to Regulation and Regulation to Business

Regulatory change is driven by competitive struggle. Regulatees struggle with each other for customers and with regulators to lessen the burden of the rules being enforced. Regulators compete for regulatees and for the confidence of customers and the general public.
Competition among regulators is imperfect. Along with better rules, new entrants must offer reputational capital, financial strength, and recognized enforcement powers. These entry requirements have supported a secular expansion of government suppliers relative to private suppliers. Principal-agent conflicts inherent in representative democracy establish incentives for this expanding sector to produce regulatory services of poor quality. Finding ways to make top government regulators economically accountable for acts of misregulation is a critical problem.     

Legislating for a Pandemic: Exposing the Stateless State

Initially the subject of widespread consensus, legislative and policy responses to COVID-19 are increasingly provoking predictable reactions. Right and left are united by concern that essential freedoms are being eroded by a state utilizing the opportunity of the pandemic to make a power grab. Focused on the Coronavirus Act 2020, this article takes a more cautious approach, suggesting that the law should be understood not as the product of a hierarchical state but as a demonstration of the ‘statelessness’ of the contemporary state. It examines the Act with particular focus on open justice, adult social care, and Business Improvement Districts. Reading this unique piece of legislation through the lens of the stateless state reveals the complexities, ambiguities, and contestations within contemporary policy making. Dismissing the Act as unnecessarily authoritarian is an insufficiently nuanced response; furthermore, this exploration of the law allows us to develop and complicate scholarship on the stateless state.     

A Methodology for Improving the Investment Portfolio Management Process for the Homeland Security Department using Quality Function Deployment

In this paper, we describe a methodology for improving homeland security investment decisions. The objective is to evaluate multitechnology, multiyear investment choices and the associated development and deployment risks associated with new technologies. The budgeting process in the Homeland Security Department is a complex multicriteria decision problem involving a distributed network of decision makers with diverse areas of expertise. The decision problem in Homeland Security involves game‐theoretic aspects as the terrorists are likely to alter their strategies depending on the defensive counter measures selected in the budget. We propose a two‐phased systems approach. The first phase employs a visualization tool based on Quality Function Deployment to develop an initial budget allocation. The second phase involves an iterative approach to project selection that dynamically adjusts the investment portfolio based on anticipated reactions taken by the terrorists. This paper is based on a study done as part of a research project for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We present a high‐level view of the methodology and illustrate it with examples.