The Blameworthiness of Health and Safety Rule Violations*

Man‐made disasters usually lead to the tightening of safety regulations, because rule breaking is seen as a major cause of them. This reaction is based on the assumptions that the safety rules are good and that the rule‐breakers are wrong. The reasons the personnel of a coke factory gave for breaking rules raise doubt about the tenability of these assumptions. It is unlikely that this result would have been achieved on the basis of a disaster evaluation, or high‐reliability theory. In both approaches, knowledge of the consequences of human conduct hinders an unprejudiced judgement about where the blame for rule breaking lies.     

REASSESSING NONLINEARITY IN THE URBAN DISADVANTAGE/VIOLENT CRIME RELATIONSHIP: AN EXAMPLE OF METHODOLOGICAL BIAS FROM LOG TRANSFORMATION*

Sociologists and criminologists have become increasingly concerned with nonlinear relationships and interaction effects. For example, some recent studies suggest that the positive relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and violent crime is nonlinear with an accelerating slope, whereas other research indicates a nonlinear decelerating slope. The present paper considers the possibility that this inconsistency in findings is partially caused by lack of attention to an important methodological concern. Specifically, we argue that researchers have not been sensitive to the ways in which logarithmic transformation of the dependent variable can bias tests for nonlinearity and statistical interaction. We illustrate this point using demographic and violent crime data for urban neighborhoods, and we propose an alternative procedure to log transformation that involves the use of weighted least‐squares regression, heteroscedasticity consistent standard errors, and diagnostics for influential observations.     

“It's the Central Government's Fault”: Elected Regional Officials' Use of Blame‐Shifting Rhetoric

This article investigates regional officials' use of blame‐shifting rhetoric in times of heated public criticism of unpopular regional policy decisions. Based on a content coding of nearly 500 political accounts from elected regional officials it is shown that “it's the central government's fault” is the most frequently used excuse when regional officials publicly defend unpopular decisions to cut public health care. The article finds that this excuse is used more by regional leaders (mayors and chairmen of regional boards) than by other elected officials and that partisan competition affects how often this excuse is used.