Predicting norm enforcement: the individual and joint predictive power of economic preferences,personality, and self-control

This paper explores the individual and joint predictive power of concepts from economics, psychology, and criminology for individual norm enforcement behavior. More specifically, we consider economic preferences (patience and attitudes towards risk), personality traits from psychology (Big Five and locus of control), and a self-control scale from criminology. Using survey data, we show that the various concepts complement each other in predicting self-reported norm enforcement behavior. The most significant predictors stem from all three disciplines: stronger risk aversion, conscientiousness and neuroticism as well as higher levels of self-control increase an individual’s willingness to enforce norms. Taking a broader perspective, our results illustrate that integrating concepts from different disciplines may enhance our understanding of heterogeneity in individual behavior.     

Legislative Practice as Discursive Action: A Performance in Three Parts

Paralleling Henry and Milovanovic’s theory of constitutive criminology this paper considers several dialogic relationships created in and through an engagement with the Governing Principles of the Penalties and Sentences Act, an example of penal legislation practiced in the Australian State of Queensland. Fairclough’s method of Critical Discourse Analysis is enlisted providing the discussion with three prominent discourses performed in the text: purposive, individualising and moral/behavioural. The discussion proposes that dealings with the text both inform and prepare responses across a variety of relational situations involving the State, society, those directly engaged with the criminal justice system and the Act itself. Of specific concern is how the legislation discursively limits or permits action within these relationships whilst ignoring its own constitutive force and relational responsibilities.     

The Police and the New Magistracy: Independent Members and the New Police Authorities

Independent appointed members to police authorities were introduced as part of the reforms brought about by the Police and Magistrates' Courts Act 1994. This radical change to the make-up of police authorities was defended by government ministers as a necessary reform in order to broaden the expertise and experience available in such bodies. Critics, by contrast, saw the change as a move to further centralise control, and as a means of reducing local democratic input, over policing. Using data from a national telephone survey of police authority clerks, and case studies of three police force areas, this article examines the role of `independent' appointed members to local police authorities. We argue that the early signs are that the new members are becoming well integrated into police authorities, although such bodies have been significantly depoliticised as a result of this and other changes. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.