Taxpayer governmentality: governing government in Metro Vancouver’s transit tax debate

In a 2015 plebiscite, voters in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia rejected a proposed sales tax dedicated to funding a regional transportation plan. Opposition was spearheaded by a taxpayer group that focused on the perceived incompetence and wastefulness of the region’s transportation authority. Exercising a liberal imperative of ‘permanent critique of government’, the taxpayer group assembled evidence addressed to ‘taxpayers’. Developing a theoretical account of ‘taxpayer governmentality’, the paper analyses how people are addressed and fashioned as taxpayer subjects, empowered and responsibilized to govern government, and their own political conduct, as sceptical, calculating, non-political, economic actors. The paper concludes by suggesting that this taxpayer subject may be productive for understanding the practice of liberal critique and limitations of the state.     

Revisiting the role of distributive justice in Tyler’s legitimacy theory

Objectives

Tyler’s theory of legitimacy identified procedural justice and distributive justice as antecedents of legitimacy, but placed distributive justice in a relatively minor position compared with procedural justice. This has led to researchers paying less attention to distributive justice in the development of theory, despite consistent findings that distributive justice is important to a number of outcomes for criminal justice authorities. This report uses uncertainty management theory to revisit Tyler’s legitimacy model and gain a more nuanced understanding of distributive justice.

Methods

The proposed model is tested using a series of latent variable analyses conducted on a sample of 2169 adults and a factorial vignette design. The vignette design randomly manipulates outcome favorability and officer behavior during a hypothetical traffic stop. Multiple indicator multiple cause (MIMIC) models are then utilized to test the impact of these manipulations on perceptions of procedural justice and distributive justice. This is followed by a structural equation model that tests the relationships between procedural justice, distributive justice, and legitimacy.

Results

Officer behavior is a primary predictor of both procedural justice and distributive justice. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that distributive justice judgments are shaped by perceptions of procedural justice. Accordingly, distributive justice mediates the relationship between procedural justice and legitimacy.

Conclusions

Distributive justice should not be treated as a competing explanation for legitimacy evaluations, but as a concept that contextualizes why procedural justice is important.

     

Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing: Token Gestures or Informed Policymaking?

Since the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 (2000), which is referenced in most of the mandates for peacekeeping authorizations and renewals as of its adoption, UN peacekeeping forces have begun a process of gender balancing. While we have seen an increase in the numbers of female peacekeepers during the decade 2000–2010 and variation in the distribution patterns of female military personnel, we do not know if female military peacekeepers are deploying to areas that are safest or to areas with the greatest need for gender-balanced international involvement. Because the decision-making authority in the allocation of peacekeeping forces rests with the troop-contributing countries, which might not have bought into the gender balancing and mainstreaming initiatives mandated by the UN Security Council, we propose and find evidence that female military personnel tend to deploy to areas where there is least risk. They tend not to deploy where they may be most needed—where sexual violence and gender equity has been a major problem—and we find only a modest effect of having specific language in the mandates related to gender issues.     

The Last Slave Market: Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to End the African Slave Trade

The climax of the battle of Kohima was in June 1944, 70 years ago. This article is about the part played in that victory by Ursula Graham Bower, an English woman subsequently honoured by the RSAA. She led a team of Naga tribesmen from North East India who acted as intelligence scouts, feeding the 14th Army with information about the Japanese, acting as guides for British units and providing a security network against spies. Graham Bower was effective because she had lived amongst the Nagas before the war and gained their trust. Inevitably she was glamourised in the media and hailed as the Jungle Queen or the Naga Queen, a Western beauty fighting against the Japanese. In reality, with the Nagas, she performed a intelligence role, not a fighting role, but it was a vital contribution to victory.     

Too Many People and Too Few Livestock in West Africa? An Evaluation of Sandford's Thesis

We examine whether Stephen Sandford's (2006 Sandford, S. 2006b. “Too many people, too few livestock: the crisis affecting pastoralists in the Greater Horn of Africa”. Accessed at: http://www.future-agricultures.org/pdf%20files/Sandford_thesis.pdf [Google Scholar]b) ‘too many people, too few livestock’ thesis for the Greater Horn of Africa applies to West Africa. In a comparative study of seven pastoral systems across West Africa we found that pastoralists have generally successfully adapted to pressures on grazing resources. We describe three adaptive strategies: 1) integration and intensification in the Sudanian zone; 2) movement to the Sub-Humid zone; and 3) extensification in the Sahelian zone. We end by proposing four interrelated factors that account for the differences in pastoral systems between West Africa and the Greater Horn of Africa.     

Testing a rational choice model of “desistance:” Decomposing changing expectations and changing utilities

We argue that a rational choice framework can be used to explain declines in offending from adolescence to young adulthood in two ways. First, subjective expectations of offending can be age graded such that perceptions of rewards decrease and perceptions of risks and costs increase. Second, the marginal (dis)utility of crime may be age graded (e.g., preferences for risks, costs, and rewards). We examine changes in offending from adolescence to young adulthood among a subset of individuals from the Pathways to Desistance Study (N = 585) and employ a nonlinear decomposition model to partition differences in offending attributable to changing subjective expectations (X) and changing marginal utilities (β). The results indicate that both have direct and independent effects on changes in offending over time. The results of a detailed decomposition on the subjective expectations also indicate that differences exist across the type of incentives. That is, the effect of changing expectations is attributed mainly to changes in perceived rewards (both social and intrinsic). Changing expectations of social costs and risk of arrest from offending have weak effects on changes in criminal behavior, which suggests that they must be accompanied by increases in the weight placed on these expectations to promote appreciable declines in offending.