Are they really so different? Climate change rule development in the USA and UK

Climate change is an increasingly complex and global environmental issue. As a result, scholars have begun to compare the efforts of specific countries such as the UK and the USA in dealing with climate change. However, missing within this comparative literature is a discussion of the important role that administrative agencies play in implementing climate change policy through rulemaking. More specifically, it is unclear how administrative processes may impact or explain variations in the policy implemented within a given country. In fact, it has been over 25 years since Vogel's work compared the regulatory processes of the USA and UK. As a result, this paper's interviews with agency rule writers in both countries provide an updated comparison of their rulemaking processes, which is essential to understanding why countries may vary in the climate change policy they implement. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why Theater? Sociological Reflections on Art and Freedom, and the Politics of Small Things

In this paper using reflections on a dramatic moment in the life of the author’s ethnographic study of theater in Poland as a starting point, the relationship between art and politics is analyzed. The relationship between two central propositions is explored, leading to a conclusion: (1) Cultural freedom is a definitive characteristic of modern social life and (2) the freedom constituted by culture as the arts and sciences opens up public space for alternative social and political practices, and thus: cultural freedom is a base for political freedom. Applying these propositions to a study of theater in Poland, it is shown that art constitutes cultural freedom through its relative autonomy, and the politics of small things results. Societies are transformed.     

A Comment on Stephen Page's "What's New about the New Public Management"

The authors observe that the attacks on the new public management often show a lack of familiarity with its theoretical base, ignore that it is a recognized management tool, and imagine dramaturgy when none exists.     

Involuntary outpatient treatment as “desintitutionalized coercion”: The net-widening concerns

In American jurisprudence, two justifications have traditionally been put forth to support the government's social control of persons with mental illness: police power and parens patriae. As public mental hospitals became less available as loci in which to exercise these functions, governments sought alternative means to achieve the same ends. One prominent but quite controversial means is involuntary outpatient treatment (IOT). While the concerns about IOT have been myriad, one often alluded to but never documented is that of “net-widening.” That is, once IOT became available, it would be applied to an ever greater number of individuals, progressively expanding the margins of the designated population to whom it is applied, despite the formal standard for its application remaining constant. We tested the net-widening belief in a naturalistic experiment in Massachusetts. We found that net-widening did not occur, despite an environment strongly conducive to that expansion. At this time, whatever the arguments against IOT might be, net-widening should not be one of them.     

Does involuntary outpatient commitment lead to more intensive treatment?

Studies of involuntary outpatient commitment (OPC) among persons with severe mental illness have concluded that OPC is only effective in improving treatment outcomes when it is sustained for 6 months or longer and is combined with frequent outpatient services. This article explores factors that influence the delivery of outpatient services to subjects in a randomized trial of OPC and finds 2 general patterns. Outpatient visits were more frequent among all subjects with apparent clinical need, regardless of study assignment, and among subjects whose OPC was sustained beyond an initial court order. These results suggest that, in practice, sustained OPC represents a consensual agreement between clinicians and the court to more intensively address the complex needs of persons with severe and persistent mental illness.     

A dynamic test of the marginality hypothesis

The marginality hypothesis is an attempt to relate the voting margins of members of Congress to their subsequent legislative behavior. A major corollary of the hypothesis is that members of Congress with small victory margins will be more responsive to constituents than those with large victory margins. This has been assumed to mean that electorally secure representatives can afford to be more loyal to their congressional parties, since they have less cause to worry about their chances for reelection. Previous empirical studies have produced mixed results. We ask the question in a different way: Do changes in marginality affect party voting within Congress? If so, major shifts in the electorate potentially can have a fundamental impact on the behavior of Congress itself. We find that this is not true. Electoral margin is simply not related to party loyalty.