Federalism with a Russian face: regional inequality, administrative capacity and regional budgets in Russia

The paper reviews fiscal federalism in Russian practice. Central control over sub-national budgets has tended to increase. In the classic literature on fiscal federalism such centralisation is potentially damaging to both static efficiency and growth. The paper reviews the propositions in that literature and the assumptions made in it, and notes that weak administrative capacity at sub-regional level, weak electoral competition and extreme unevenness of economic development across regions may provide grounds for greater central control than is treated as desirable in the established literature. The patterns of budgetary transfers from national to regional level are analysed and conclusions drawn about the effectiveness of the evolving fiscal-federal system in Russia.     

Travelling law: Sex,drugs and Montesquieu

With thanks to Jatinder Barn with whom I have discussed this article throughout. Thanks also to Peter Fitzpatrick for his initial invitation and subsequent encouragement, and to my friend and colleague Paul Gilroy for introducingPersian Letters to our teaching syllabus and hence to my library. I retain sole responsibility for any inaccuracies arising from the research and any mistakes in argumentation.     

Reflections of a bourgeois Menshevik

He is author of The End of Ideology; The Radical Right; The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism;and The Social Sciences since World War Two.     

Police uniforms,attitudes, and citizens

This study focuses on identifying the relationship between the citizen's attitude toward the police and the police uniform and authoritarian attitude. The perceived authority associated with the police uniform has been an essential ingredient of the police role. Consequently, the police uniform influences attitudes and behaviors of the wearers as well as the citizens with whom they interact. The citizen's attitude is negatively affected by the traditional military style police uniform in conjunction with the authoritarian attitude exhibited by police officers in performance of their duties. Consequently, when the uniform and officer's attitude are altered, there will be a corresponding change in the citizen's attitude toward the police. The attitude of the officer, in conjunction with the uniform, exerts considerably more influence on the citizen's attitude than does the uniform, officer's attitude, or any additional factor acting independently.     

Hoebel's crucible

The study of subgroup law through recorded and reconstructed cases presents several analytic problems for the relationship between case content and subgroup practices. The greater the relative structural strength of a social system the greater the mythical content of its communications related to “outside” worlds. Constructing structural models of legal systems in contact, and typifying the information content of cases in structural situations, can inform analysis of case content as mythical, politically normative, or representative of subgroup behavior outside of legal forums. Anthropologists and French structural historians can work together to examine structural indicators which signify analytic boundaries for case analysis.     

Erewhon: A manifesto of the rehabilitative ideal

Samuel Butler's novel, Erewhon (1872) is well known as a minor literary classic. This article proposes that it is also important in criminological history, in epitomizing a generation of debate about the nature of criminal responsibility. Butler wished to illustrate a paradox: contemporary social and medical sciences showed the role of determinism in causing crime, yet the courts still acted on the myth of free will, individual choice, and responsibility. Butler satirized this by depicting an imaginary world where sick people were stigmatized and punished for a condition they could not help—just as real criminals were blamed for factors beyond their control. The novel is a call for the replacement of deterrent or retributive punishment by rehabilitation and a medical model. It was especially important in the early twentieth century in helping to popularize the attack on free will and deterrence, and in propagandizing for the new discretionary penology.