Regulatory inspection and the changing legitimacy of health and safety

The regulation of conduct via law is a key mechanism through which broader social meanings are negotiated and expressed. The use of regulatory tools to bring about desired outcomes reflects existing social and political understandings of institutional legitimacy, the meanings attached to regulation, and the values it seeks to advance. But these contextual understandings are not static, and their evolution poses challenges for regulators, particularly when they reflect political framing processes. This paper shows how inspection has been reshaped as a tool within the United Kingdom's health and safety system by changes in the meanings attached to the concept of “risk‐based regulation.” While rates of inspection have fallen dramatically in recent years, the nature and quality of inspection have also been fundamentally reshaped via an increasingly procedural and economically rational “risk‐based” policy context. This has had consequences for the transformative and symbolic value of inspection as a tool of regulatory practice.     

Destabilizing Effects of Terrorism on Party System Stability

In democracies with stable party systems, voters can more easily trace policy decisions from parties and representatives within the government to specific policy outcomes. Consequently, party system stability (PSS) has been reportedly linked to a variety of factors including economic conditions, democratic performance, political institutions, and socioeconomic cleavages. While informative, these lessons offer precious little insight into other factors that can destabilize a party system. In this work, we surmise that terrorist attacks have important implications for two commonly used measures of PSS. The results of a pooled, cross-sectional time series analysis confirm our hypothesis: deadly attacks proximate to elections destabilize party systems, even when controlling for multiple standard controls. In addition, the level of democratic consolidation within states also influences the degree that fatal terrorist attacks affect party system stability. These findings are based on terrorism data collected from the Global Terrorism Database and from PSS data compiled by the authors.     

Reading's Impact on Democratic Citizenship in America

Polls conducted for the Times Mirror/Pew Research Center for The People & The Press enable us to explore reading's impact on democratic citizenship in the United States. After exploring literacy's meaning and significance, we assess how much Americans read and how reading affects key facets of democratic citizenship: attention to, knowledge of, and participation in public affairs and tolerance for unpopular groups. A measure of time spent reading the day before being interviewed is a significant predictor of democratic citizenship, even when other key factors' effects are taken into account. Reading remains essential to the quality of citizenship in modern democracy.     

Shoemaker on Sentiments and Quality of Will

In this comment, I raise a number of concerns about David Shoemaker’s adoption of the quality of will approach in his recent book, Responsibility from the Margins. I am not sure that the quality of will approach is given an adequate grounding that defends it against alternative models of moral responsibility; and it is unclear what the argument is for Shoemaker’s tripartite version of the quality of will approach. One possibility that might fit with Shoemaker’s text is that the tripartite model is meant to be grounded in empirical claims about the structure of encapsulated emotions; but I argue that those empirical claims are not made out, and that regardless it is doubtful whether this is the most helpful model of the emotions to deploy in this context. In contrast, I propose that the quality of will approach is better defended in ethical terms, by reference to the vision of the value of living together as equals (in some sense) that is embodied in P.F. Strawson’s picture of the engaged attitude, and the emotions involved in it.     

Old wine in new bottles: Re‐publishing African writers

Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe, 1986.150pp. £3.50pb

Arrow of God. Chinua Achebe, 1986. 230pp. £3.50pb

A Grain of Wheat. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1986. 247pp. £3.95pb

Petals of Blood. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1986. 250pp. £3.95pb

God's Bits of Wood. Sembene Ousmane, 1986. 245pp. £3.50pb

Estrangement. Elechi Amadi, 1986. 244pp. £3.95pb

London: Heinemann Educational Books (African Writers Series)

The Beggar's Strike. Aminata Sow Fall, London: Longman (African Classics). 1987.112pp. £2.95pb

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. Mario Vargas Llosa (Translated by Alfred MacAdam) New York: Vintage books. 1986. 309pp. $6.95pb

The Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry. Edited by Mahmood Jamal, Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1986. 165pp. £3.95pb     

“Broken Windows,” Urban Policing, and the Social Contexts of Race and Neighborhood (Dis-)Empowerment

Robert Sampson’s “Great American City” is a methodologically rich and theoretically broad contribution to the literature on durable inequality in US cities. While empirically clear on the causes and consequences of lasting social exclusion, the text’s insights remain somewhat trapped behind the “collective efficacy” language of the “broken windows” theories it attempts to shatter. In looking at community empowerment, or its lack, in the inner-city, the racialized role of urban police must be central to any analysis of the cycle of crime and poverty, and how to break it.     

Disruption is Not Permitted: The Policing and Social Control of Occupy Oakland

Negotiated management—various forms of communication, collaboration and cooperation between police and protest organizers, often taking the form of protest permits—has been mainly theorized as a means to mitigate police violence while respecting protesters’ 1st Amendment rights. A few theorists have problematized this view, suggesting that negotiated management is a form of social control that puts various restrictions on dissent. Drawing from my research on Occupy Oakland, I build upon these critiques to illustrate how negotiated management was used as a tool of repression in two key ways, and how newer forms of repression (strategic incapacitation) are still enmeshed in its logic. First, by criminalizing legal activity among protesters, through the use of a permit, who were then subjected to police repression. Second, I show how negotiated management as a normative structure of protest was used as a form of repression, even when communication and cooperation with police were clearly rejected by the movement. I illustrate how the refusal of negotiated management was used to discredit the movement and subject it to physical repression. Rather than seeing negotiated management as an alternative to police repression and strategic incapacitation, I argue that they are two sides of the same policing project, the primary aim of which is to prevent disruptive protest.     

Citizens’ knowledge and perceptions of legislatures in Canada,Britain and the United States

This study has two major parts. The first uses survey data to reveal what citizens in Britain, Canada and the United States know about their national legislatures and what factors ‐ including cognitive ability, opportunity, motivation and media exposure ‐ affect that knowledge. We find that US citizens are the least knowledgeable. The second part of the study looks at whether the level of knowledge in each country has any importance for understanding levels of public support for the national legislature. In the United States, the more knowledgeable citizens are less likely to support Congress, in sharp contrast to the tendency of knowledgeable Canadian citizens to be more supportive of their parliament. Knowledge is not a significant predictor of support in the British model. Some implications of the findings are discussed.