Private gains and public losses: The distributive impact of urban zoning

The zoning process is a distributive process in which benefits are conferred on some and denied to others. Because zoning decisions are not neutral in their consequences, politicians must take responsibility for the patterns of benefits and costs which result from particular zoning policies. Technical expertise and planning principles cannot be regarded as sufficient grounds on which to base inherently distributive policies. This paper analyses the distributional consequences of two rezoning cases in Toronto to illustrate the trade-offs between neighbourhood preservation and housing opportunity.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, London, Ontario, May 1978.     

Issue competition in the 1993 Norwegian national election

Public Choice - We investigate the role of issues in the 1993 Norwegian election. We are interested in comparing two spatial models of issue evaluation, the directional model and the familiar...     

Institutions and intellectual property: The influence of institutional forces on university patenting

Over the past 20 years, the number of patents assigned to universities has increased dramatically. This increase coincided with several policy initiatives, such as the Bayh‐Dole Act of 1980, designed to foster technology transfer between universities and the private sector. This paper examines the effect of such policies using an institutional framework, designed to illustrate how factors both from inside and outside of academia influence the decision to patent university research. We find passage of the Bayh‐Dole Act spurred university patenting, but did not induce additional applied research funding. Thus, Bayh‐Dole fostered technology transfer, but did not result in more applied research at universities. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Notes on contributors

The process whereby queen Athaliah was deposed and replaced as monarch of Judah by the boy‐king Joash in the seventh century bce warrants analysis as a typical ‘coup d'etat’. The purpose of the present article is to interpret the relevant biblical narratives (II Kings II and 11 Chron. 23) in terms relevant to that political concept. Specifically, it posits that the organization and implementation of this highly successful coup can be illuminated by reference to modern political science literature on regime change. Thus read, the biblical records of the episode constitute a detailed ‘how to’ manual of political action.     

Circle sentencing in Canada: A partnership of the community and the criminal justice system

Throughout North America, there has been an increasing interest in the development of alternative forums for dispute resolution that may more effectively address the needs of victims, offenders, and the community. Concurrent with this has been an attempt to alter the adversarial framework of the criminal justice system. This has included the development and implementation of case processing strategies premised on restorative justice and attempting to secure the participation of communities as partners in the resolution of disputes. One particularly innovative initiative is circle sentencing, which has been implemented in several communities in the Yukon, Canada. The procedure by which cases are processed in circle sentencing is outlined and the involvement of the offender, the victim, the community, and the territorial court are discussed.     

Police Perceptions of Irrational Unstable Behaviours and Use of Force

Police identification of people experiencing mental illness is usually based on either the person having an official contact history with police or through observing behavioural indicators commonly associated with mental illness during an encounter. Police have voiced concerns with their ability to identify and respond to people experiencing mental illness in a timely way and report that they commonly resort to more coercive tactical options to resolve encounters. The present study employed a mixed method design to examine 286 police use of force incidents to investigate the association between force used on and by offenders displaying irrational-unstable behavioural characteristics. The irrational-unstable offenders were two times more likely to be perceived by police to have an apparent mental disorder and almost four times more likely to have a known mental health history; one in six had an official record of contact with mental health services. There were few differences in police and offender use of force, considering force as both a categorical and a continuous variable, while incident-level comparisons suggested that police force was generally proportional to offender resistance. Implications are discussed in terms of the need to redress limitations with the traditional police approach style.