How Financial Managers Deal with Ethical Stress

This article explores the way public-sector financial managers cope with ethical challenges created by undue political pressure and demands for special treatment. A nationwide survey of financial managers revealed that fiscal stress exacerbates ethical pressure for most financial managers, including chief financial officers (CFOs) and those who report to CFOs. Financial managers do not work in an ethical vacuum; they respond to supervisors who encourage ethical action and to coworkers who demonstrate high standards of personal integrity. Supervisors of CFOs who emphasize political responsiveness in employee evaluations can threaten the ethical behavior of CFOs, while timely feedback can mitigate ethical pressure. In turn, CFOs as supervisors can temper the harsh work environment in fiscally stressed times by encouraging ethical action and by giving adequate feedback to those who report to them.     

Race,Interracial Families,and Political Advertising in the Obama Era: Experimental Evidence

Across two studies of race and interracial families in political advertising, this article finds that significant benefits accrue to Black candidates who present themselves as part of interracial families. These findings suggest Black candidates are more likely to succeed when they engage in displays of “racial novelty,” or counter-stereotypical behavior, provided that behavior signals closer affinity to White voters. For Study 1, we tested four original advertisements for a fictitious political candidate, in which we varied only the candidate’s race and the race of his son. The Black candidate with the White son prevailed over all other combinations, with respondents finding him the most trustworthy, most qualified for office, most likely to share their values, and most likely to care about people like them. For Study 2, we tested four new original advertisements for a fictitious Black candidate, varying only the candidate’s profession and the race of his son. We find, again, that Black candidates who display non-Black children do significantly better than Black candidates who display racially homogeneous families. However, we observe much more modest benefits for a Black candidate who practices a racially novel profession. We view these results as demonstrating that Black candidates are more likely to reap the rewards of racial novelty only when they are willing to provide a personal, rather than professional, signal of their affinity for Whites. As Study 2 shows, White voters in particular are responsive to personal (rather than professional) demonstrations of racial novelty. This affirms the logic of “New Racism,” whereby Blacks are looked favorably upon if they exhibit behavior associated with Whites, but penalized otherwise.     

The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding Ten Years on: Critical Reflections and Stimulating Ideas on an Evolving Scholarship

ABSTRACT

The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This special volume opens up with a selection of nine of the most influential articles published in the journal. JISB's editorial team has asked the authors for their reflections on their original articles, telling us more about the writing process at that time, what they would do differently (with hindsight), or how they see their articles contributing to current debates on intervention and statebuilding. We have selected one article per volume, and we have ordered the contribution starting from volume 1 (2007) to volume 9 (2015). The articles will be made open access for the year, and we highly recommend (re-)reading the original articles along with the comments from the authors.     

Dangerous decisions: A theoretical framework for understanding how judges assess credibility in the courtroom

Purpose. Numerous wrongful convictions have brought into question the ability of judges and juries to accurately evaluate the credibility of witnesses, including defendants. Dangerous decisions theory (DDT) offers a theoretical framework to build our understanding of the decision‐making process that can culminate in such injustices. Arguments. According to DDT, the reading of a defendant's face and emotional expressions play a major role in initiating a series of ‘dangerous’ decisions concerning his/her credibility. Specifically, potent judgments of trustworthiness occur rapidly upon seeing a defendant's face, subjectively experienced as intuition. Originally evolved to reduce the danger to the observer, the initial judgment – which may be unreliable – will be enduring and have a powerful influence on the interpretation and assimilation of incoming evidence concerning the defendant. Ensuing inferences will be irrational, but rationalized by the decision maker through his/her subjective schemas about trustworthiness and heuristics for identifying deceptive behaviour. Facilitated by a high level of motivation, a non‐critical, tunnel vision assimilation of potentially disconfirming or ambiguous target information can culminate in a mistaken evaluation of guilt or innocence. Conclusions. Empirically based education and responsible expert testimony could serve to reduce such biases and improve legal decision‐making.     

Social disorganization, marriage, and reported crime: A spatial econometrics examination of family formation and criminal offending

It has long been documented that “marriage matters” for a variety of reasons. Furthermore, there has been considerable debate over the causal relationship between marriage and a number of its associated correlates, most often related to social processes of health behaviors, criminal involvement, and achievement. While most research associated with marriage and crime is concerned with the individual, little is understood concerning the ecological effect of marriage rates. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the F.B.I.'s Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), this study tests such relationships through the implementation of spatially-centered analytic approaches concerning the potential independent effects of marriage rates within a social disorganization context. It is important to understand such aggregate level effects in the face of the existing literature, which relies heavily on relational associations and is subject to ecological fallacy. Analytic techniques incorporate Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) and spatial regression.     

Identifying Media Effects Through Low-Cost,Multiwave Field Experiments

Field experiments are notoriously difficult to implement when studying media effects. They are often prohibitively expensive, require the cooperation of a nonacademic entity, and measure effects some time after exposure to treatment. In this article, we outline a design for low-cost, multiwave field experiments of media effects. Researchers can implement this design on their own and can control the timing of when they measure effects. We demonstrate the feasibility of the design with an application to the study of presidential debates.     

Why monarchy persists in small states: the cases of Tonga,Bhutan and Liechtenstein

Monarchical rule is said to have become anachronistic in a modern age of legal rational orders and representative institutions. And yet, despite successive waves of democratization having usurped their authority across much of the globe, a select few monarchs remain defiant, especially in small states. This stubborn persistence raises questions about the application of Huntington’s “King’s Dilemma” in which modern monarchs are apparently trapped in a historical cycle that will ultimately strip them of meaningful power. Drawing on in-depth historical research in three small states that have sought to combine democratic and monarchical rule – Tonga, Bhutan, and Liechtenstein – we argue that, contra Huntington, monarchs in small states are neither doomed to disappear nor are they likely to be overwhelmed by the dilemma posed by modernist development. The lesson is that the size of political units is a critical variable too often overlooked in existing studies.     

Politicians,professionalization and anti-politics: why we want leaders who act like professionals but are paid like amateurs

Why are politicians so unpopular? One common explanation blames a professionalized political class that is increasingly detached from ‘ordinary citizens’. But, there is very little empirical investigation of what it is about the professionalization of politics that engenders distrust. This article uses 12 focus groups and 15 interviews with civil servants from the Australian Public Service—‘insiders’ with first-hand knowledge and experience of the political system—to reflect on political professionalization and its impacts. As a group, civil servants’ views on this question remain largely unexplored yet their proximity to the political process gives them a distinct vantage point from which to reflect on current explanations for rising anti-political sentiment. We find both positive and negative attitudes towards professionalization that destabilize prevailing explanations: on the demand side, civil servants share first-hand experience and knowledge of how the political process works but remain cynical about politicians, whilst on the supply side, they value governing competence more than demographic representation yet still want more ‘amateur’ politicians. Our reflections on these findings highlight contradictory expectations: we want politicians who act like professionals, but who are paid like amateurs.     

Transaction Costs and the Perceived Effectiveness of Complex Institutional Systems

This article studies factors affecting how policy actors perceive the effectiveness of political institutions involved in complex water governance systems. The ecology of games framework argues that participants are more likely to perceive institutions as effective when the benefits of solving collective action problems outweigh the transaction costs of developing political contracts within these institutions. The authors hypothesize that transaction costs are a function of conflict, type of participation, political knowledge, scientific knowledge, and actor resources. Survey results suggest that the importance of these different sources of transaction costs varies across study sites in the Tampa Bay watershed in Florida, the Sacramento–San Joaquin River delta in California, and the Paraná River delta in Argentina. Based on the observed differences, some initial ideas are sketched about the evolution of complex governance systems from fairly simple and informal rules and networks to well‐established tapestries of many formal institutions.