GC Analysis of Black Gel Pen Ink Stored under Different Conditions

In many criminal and civil cases in China, the most commonly questioned documents are those written with gel pen ink. An important task for forensic document examiners is to identify whether two or more ink entries in one or more documents were written with the same ink type. The identification of the age of gel ink entries made poses an important and difficult problem for forensic document examiners. In this paper, the volatile components of gel ink were determined and the gel ink was classified by gas chromatography with a flame ionization detector. Calibration curves were created to express the relationship between the content of volatile gel ink components and the age of gel ink entries stored under natural and UV‐induced aging conditions. The correspondence between the natural and UV‐induced aging conditions was also established. The experimental results showed that GC was useful in the analysis of black gel ink and applicable for determining the relative age of gel ink entries under certain conditions.     

Welfare Nationalism and Popular Support for Raising the Child Allowance: Evidence from a Norwegian Survey Experiment

Refugee and labour immigration have placed the issue of immigrants’ access to welfare benefits high on the political agenda. This article explores how voter preferences for increases in the child benefit change when respondents are reminded about immigrants’ access to benefits. The survey experiment shows that information about newly arrived immigrants’ access to child benefit has only a small impact on support for increasing the child allowance. By contrast, information about labour migrants’ access to benefits for children living in another European Union country has a strong impact, and the observed sensitivity to this cue is not to the same extent confined to respondents who otherwise support welfare dualism.     

Who Inherits the State? Colonial Rule and Postcolonial Conflict

Postulating grievance‐based mechanisms, several recent studies show that politically excluded ethnic groups are more likely to experience civil conflict. However, critics argue that endogeneity may undermine this finding since governments' decisions to include or exclude could be motivated by the anticipation of conflict. We counter this threat to inference by articulating a causal pathway that explains ethnic groups' access to power independently of conflict. Focusing on postcolonial states, we exploit differences in colonial empires' strategies of rule to model which ethnic groups were represented in government at the time of independence. This identification strategy allows estimating the exogenous effect of inclusiveness on conflict. We find that previous studies have tended to understate the conflict‐dampening impact of political inclusion. This finding suggests that grievances have been prematurely dismissed from conventional explanations of conflict, and that policy makers should consider conflict resolution methods based on power sharing and group rights.     

Bridge or buffer: two ideas of effective corporate governance and public engagement

This study identifies organizational factors that influence corporatate governance and formulation of public relations strategies for public enagement. This study explores intertwined relationships between public relations strategies and organizational factors. A total of 22 qualitative interviews were conducted with a diverse pool of communication consultants. Results show that the two public relations strategies, bridging and buffering, are frequently observed and linked with key factors such as size, organizational culture, environment specificity, and strategic orientation. Implications for future public relations and corporate governance research are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Norm Diffusion and Reputation: The Rise of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative

Transparency in the extractives sector is widely seen as an important tool for improving accountability and deterring corruption. Yet for those very reasons, it is a puzzle that so many governments in corruption‐prone countries have voluntarily signed up to greater scrutiny in this area by joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). We argue that EITI serves as a reputational intermediary, whereby reformers can signal good intentions and international actors can reward achievement. International and domestic actors thus utilize EITI to diffuse the norm of resource transparency and to advance reformist aims in a highly problematic policy area.     

Is Public Management Neglecting the State?

Public management is a domain of research that is now roughly three decades old. Researchers in this area have made important advances in understanding about the performance of public organizations. But questions have been raised about the scope and methods of public management research (PMR). Does it neglect important questions about the development of major institutions of the modern state? Has it focused unduly on problems of the advanced democracies? Has it made itself irrelevant to public debates about the role and design of government, and the capacity of public institutions to deal with emerging challenges? This set of eight short essays were prepared for a roundtable held at the research conference of the PMR Association at the University of Aarhus in June 2016. Contributors were asked to consider the question: Is PMR neglecting the state?     

The Impact of Funding Modalities on the Performance of Indigenous Organisations

Governments’ choice of funding modality can produce powerful incentives for organisations to perform in preferred ways, but it can also divert limited resources, narrow accountability, and undermine capability. Through literature review and interviews, the research explored the international literature on public finance management in developing country contexts, and compared this to case studies of Indigenous organisations. The situation in Australia was found to differ in three ways: (1) performance indicators are imposed, rather than negotiated; (2) few existing public funding modalities reward performance or provide incentives; and (3) funding arrangements do not generally require receiving organisations to be accountable to their constituents. Stability and durability of funding modalities, and clarity in functions and jurisdictional boundaries, were also found to positively influence performance. Further research is required to design new performance frameworks that build around the organisation, rather than the grant, with indicators of governance capability and downward accountability to constituents.