The Prefect and State Reform

The article intends to explain why although tremendous changes have occurred in the structure of government – especially the laws organizing decentralization since 1982 – the institution of the Prefect is still alive in the year 2000. Created in 1800, the institution of the Prefect derives from the will of the central authority to rely on its own representatives to ensure that public policies will be equally implemented over the whole territory. This objective remains but it has to be combined with the objectives of decentralization which are to transfer a number of responsibilities to elected bodies. Consequently, the task of the Prefect is to co-ordinate locally the action of the representatives of the ministers with the action of the elected body. To study the conditions under which the institution carries out this task the article focuses primarily on the limited capacity of the Prefect to mobilize the relevant actors. The second point concerns the difficulty of bringing together the information produced by field services. The third point considers the valuation of proximity and its impact on the action of the Prefect. The article concludes that the function of the Prefect is still the framing of local action but within the new context this can be done more often through the diffusion of information and less often through authority.     

An American Perestroika in Dutch Cities? Urban Policy in the Netherlands at the End of a Millennium

This paper discusses the implications of the recent adoption of interactive forms of governance in Dutch urban policy. Advocates of this new approach claim that interactive governance will have positive effects for (1) the quality of urban democracy and urban governability and (2) for the solution of the information problems inherent in coping with (wicked) urban problems. On the basis of an extensive evaluation of the implementation of the new policies in four of the 25 Dutch municipalities involved, these claims are critically assessed.     

Of Athenians and Spartans: Profiles of freedom and enlightenment in the leadership styles of criminal justice academic administrators: An essay

This essay examines the dubious relationship between the quality of criminal justice education and the kind of treatment faculty members and students receive from their academic administrators. It is based on three premises: criminal justice colleges and departments should be held to higher rational and moral standards not because they are qualitatively different from other liberal arts departments, but because they teach justice; if the virtues of criminal justice are worth teaching, then criminal justice faculty members and students should be treated in a manner consistent with these virtues; and treating criminal justice faculty members and students unfairly, disrespectfully, or irresponsibly makes them unable or disinterested in endorsing the noble nature of criminal justice. This article categorizes academic administrators as either Athenians or Spartans. The former are best suited intellectually and temperamentally to administer because they possess a talent for reasoning and act in good faith. The latter are unsuited because, regardless of how well they mask it, they practice domination, deception, favoritism, and indignity.This essay is a theoretical discourse based on the contiguity of modalities, experiences, and impressions generally shared by criminal justice educators and graduate students. Its logic is Humeian and its method is broadly ethnographic.     

Provisional Court Protection in Administrative Disputes in Europe: The Constitutional Status of Interim Measures Deriving from the Right to Effective Court Protection. A Comparative Approach

Abstract: Interim protection in remedies against the public administration has proved to be one of the key issues in today's justice. In effect, the slowness of judicial proceedings means that final judicial decisions cannot guarantee the rights and interests of the litigants any more, because those decisions arrive too late. Thus, effective judicial protection is at stake. On the other hand, public administrations have traditionally disposed of privileges, one of the most important of them being the so‐called executive character of administrative acts. The national debate on the equilibrium between both principles—effective judicial protection and the executive character of administrative acts—needs to be exported to the Community law context. Community law should therefore learn from national experiences, as other legal orders, such as the Spanish one, have done, turning to comparative law in order to improve their own model of interim protection.     

The Dictator Game, Fairness and Ethnicity in Postwar Bosnia

This study considers the effects of ethnic violence on norms of fairness. Once violence is a foregone conclusion, will cooperative norms ever (re‐)emerge beyond ethnic boundaries? We use an experiment that measures how fairly individuals in a postconflict setting treat their own ingroup in comparison to the outgroups—in this case, examining the behavior of 681 Muslims, Croats, and Serbs in postwar Bosnia‐Herzegovina. To assess fairness, we use the dictator game wherein subjects decide how to allocate a sum of money between themselves and an anonymous counterpart of varying ethnicity. We find that the effects of ethnicity on decision making are captured by our experiments. Although results indicate preferential ingroup treatment, the incidence and magnitude of outgroup bias is much less than expected. We conclude that norms of fairness across ethnicity are remarkably strong in Bosnia, and we take this to be a positive sign for reconciliation after violent conflict.     

Social and Political Cultural Effects on the Outcomes of Mediation in Militarized Interstate Disputes

The article investigates the relationship between cultural similarities and differences on the part of the representatives of contending states and mediators, and outcomes of mediation efforts in militarized disputes. A distinction is made between social culture, defined primarily in terms of religious identity, and political culture, defined according to the state's political system. Analysis of 752 mediation attempts in militarized disputes occurring between 1945 and 1995 yields support for the hypothesis that mediation is more likely to succeed when the parties are from similar social cultures. The results, however, suggest that the relationship is more complex than that suggested by a simple categorization of states based on Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. We also find that mediation is more likely to succeed when the parties share democratic political cultures, a finding that is consistent with the cultural/normative explanation for the democratic peace.     

New Nonlinear Approaches for the Adjustment and Updating of a SAM

Many structural relationships should be taken into account in any reasonable adjustment and updating process. These structural relationships are mainly represented by ratios of different types, such as technical coefficients or the proportion of the cell value in relation to its row or column total. We believe that in many cases (either because of lack of information or when the time elapsed for the estimation of a social accounting matrix is not long enough to allow for any significant structural change) the updating process should try to minimize the rela- tive deviation of the new coefficients from the initial ones in a homogeneous way. This homogeneity would mean that the magnitude of this relative deviation is similar among the elements of each row or column, therefore avoiding the concentration of the changes in particular cells of the SAM. In this work, we propose some new adjustment criteria in order to obtain a more homogeneous relative adjustment of the structural coefficients. These criteria combine the adjustment method proposed by Matuszewski et al. (1964) with other deviation functions. Each of the adjustment criteria proposed leads to a nonlinear optimization problem which is reformulated as a linear program. We test the usefulness of this proposal by comparing its results with the ones obtained by more standard approaches and we are able to show that these approaches tend to produce a less homogeneous pattern of coefficient adjustment, under certain circumstances, than the ones we put forward.     

Allele frequencies of nine STR loci—D16S539, D7S820, D13S317, CSF1PO, TPOX, TH01, F13A01, FESFPS and vWA—in the population from Alagoas, northeastern Brazil

The polymorphism of nine STR loci has been studied in a sample of 598 individuals from the population of Alagoas, Northeastern Brazil. Determination of the allele frequencies as well as of several commonly used statistics in forensic and paternity testing were defined. The most polymorphic loci were TH01 and D7S317. The exact test demonstrated that the nine loci analyzed in the population have no deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium (P>0.05).