A voice or a choice? Children’s views on participating in decisions about post-separation contact with domestically abusive fathers

ABSTRACT

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child explicitly calls for children to be granted the right to participate in legal proceedings that affect them. Despite this legal obligation and an evolving consensus that recognises children as social and competent actors, this rhetoric has struggled to achieve translation into meaningful practice reality, particularly when decisions are being made about contact arrangements for children where there has been a prior history of domestic violence. Drawing on the narratives of children who participated in three separate research projects in Ireland between 2009 and 2015, this paper will consider the manner in which they were involved in the decision-making process and the extent to which their views were ascertained and their voices heard. This paper concludes by raising the key question of how the child’s best interests can be served if the child’s views are not sought, heard or considered.     

Immature offenders. A critical history of the representations of the offender in restorative justice

This paper reconstructs and discusses how the ‘offender’ is represented within policy documents, legal statutes and scholarly literature on restorative justice, published and circulated in England and Wales over the last thirty years. The research first outlines the most wide-ranging and recurrent images and implicit assumptions of the offender in restorative justice. A set of specific offender’s features will be singled out, and the ‘ideal offender’ of restorative justice will be profiled. The final step of this work consists of mapping out the cultural context within which this ideal has emerged, in a historical perspective. The overall goal is to shed light on some taken-for-granted images surrounding the offender in restorative justice, and on the cultural context within which they have developed. In this way, it is possible to contribute toward the critical re-assessment of restorative justice whilst considering implications beyond the British context.     

On the constitutional foundations of Hong Kong

Hong Kong law is characterized by a mixture of legal sources and traditions, originating from the constitutional government-based structure in the mid-1800s to the new laws, which were promulgated at the beginning of the 20th century. Since Hong Kong’s return into the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the development and forms of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Laws have been influenced by the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China of 1982, the Sino-British Joint Declaration of Hong Kong issues of 1984 as well as the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of 1990. The government of China continues to undertake measures, promoting a high degree of autonomy within the Hong Kong as well as its political stability and economic prosperity. All these measures contribute to the promotion of the rule of law and unification of China.     

ECJ provides further guidance on the ambit of database right

Following on from the European Court of Justice's ruling on database right in the Directmedia case, the Court has looked in more detail at the protection afforded by database right, and provided further clarification of the meaning of ‘extraction’ and ‘substantial’, particularly in relation to modular databases comprised of several sections. The ECJ's ruling is positive for database owners for the most part, bolstering its previous broad interpretation of the acts of ‘extraction’ that can infringe and considering in more detail other points touched on in the Directmedia, British Horseracing Board and Fixtures Marketing cases. This article discusses the outcome and implications of the ruling.     

Partisanship,attribution and approval in a public health shock

Political scientists have long agreed that partisanship can bias how voters evaluate government performance and attribute responsibility. However, less is known about how – and to what extent – these biases work across different types of voters, or how they respond to positive or non-partisan policy outcomes. In this research note we address these questions, focusing on how voters respond to a positive, non-partisan public health shock: the successful early rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations in England. Through a pre-registered information experiment embedded in the British Election Study (N > 6000), we test how voters respond to claims that the quasi-independent National Health Service, rather than the government, deserved credit for the success of the programme. On average, subjects do attribute less responsibility to government, but this has no downstream effect on general approval. Exploratory heterogeneity analyses suggest that government and opposition supporters, as well as historic swing voters, respond homogeneously to our intervention. Our findings are not fully explained by rational or selective frameworks of responsibility attribution, and add nuance to existing experimental work on the political effects of the pandemic.     

Introduction: The Future of British Political History

Politics and history are closely intertwined and historians play a vital role in British public life. Yet, British political history, which has a critical contribution to make for understanding British politics today, faces two urgent challenges. First, academic history has retreated from subjects that remain hugely popular in media and trade publishing and of interest to social scientists, such as the histories of political institutions and formal power structures. Second, political history is disconnected from innovative trends in the wider historiography of modern Britain. Combined, these issues leave political historians in an ambiguous position in relation to the wider field, to other academic disciplines and to contemporary political debates. After discussing these challenges, this introduction surveys this special issue, which reflects on what (if anything) is distinctive about political history as practised today, and what its contribution to historiography, social science and public life should be. It ends by posing key questions for historians of all methodological stripes who investigate Britain's political past.     

Majority representation and legitimacy: Survey-experimental evidence from the European Union

What can policy makers do in day-to-day decision making to strengthen citizens' belief that the political system is legitimate? Much literature has highlighted that the realization of citizens' personal preferences in policy making is an important driver of legitimacy beliefs. We argue that citizens, in addition, also care about whether a policy represents the preferences of the majority of citizens, even if their personal preference diverges from the majority's. Using the case of the European Union (EU) as a system that has recurringly experienced crises of public legitimacy, we conduct a vignette survey experiment in which respondents assess the legitimacy of fictitious EU decisions that vary in how they were taken and whose preferences they represent. Results from original surveys conducted in the five largest EU countries show that the congruence of EU decisions not only with personal opinion but also with different forms of majority opinion significantly strengthens legitimacy beliefs. We also show that the most likely mechanism behind this finding is the application of a ‘consensus heuristic’, by which respondents use majority opinion as a cue to identify legitimate decisions. In contrast, procedural features such as the consultation of interest groups or the inclusiveness of decision making in the institutions have little effect on legitimacy beliefs. These findings suggest that policy makers can address legitimacy deficits by strengthening majority representation, which will have both egotropic and sociotropic effects.     

Hardening foreign corporate accountability through mandatory due diligence in the European Union? New trends and persisting challenges

The negative externalities of global commodity chains and existing governance gaps have received wide scholarly attention. Indeed, many sectors including forest-risk commodities (FRCs) like soy and beef from Brazil remain largely unregulated. This article analyzes ongoing policy-making processes at European Union level to adopt new regulations for reducing accountability gaps: one regulation of FRCs and one general, cross-sectoral directive on human rights and environmental due diligence. This article draws on and aims to contribute to previous research into foreign corporate accountability, therein analytically distinguishing between input, output, and surrogate accountability. This study shows that new policies will likely be more comprehensive than previous supply chain regulations, while their specific institutional design and stringency are highly contested. More in general, we argue that for hardening corporate accountability, due diligence politics will need to confront important governance challenges that have limited the potential of previous regulations, such as a lack of consequentiality of reporting obligations, weak state monitoring, limited stakeholder involvement, and difficulties to establish legal liability.     

Nordic Cultural Baselines: Accounting for Domestic Convergence and Foreign Policy Divergence

The five Nordic countries converged remarkably when developing domestic institutions, but they diverged significantly when developing foreign policies. Grid-group theory prescribes four contending cultures—hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism—and offers a basis for understanding the structure of political coalitions and conflicts. Surveys from the five Nordic countries measuring cultural baselines are used to estimate the degree of convergence and divergence. The countries converge with reference to high agreement with egalitarianism, individualism, and hierarchy, and disagreement with fatalism. This concords with the historically strong regime of social democracy in this region. The five countries diverge with reference to their foreign policy in that they polarize along two dimensions. To the east, there is increasing fatalism associated with countries not being members of NATO; to the north, there is increasing egalitarianism associated with countries not being members of the European Union. Given the importance of popular support through referenda, an eventual accession of Norway and Iceland to the EU cannot happen unless egalitarianism diminishes among their publics.     

中国共产党自身建设规律的体系建构与实践创新

中国共产党之所以能够领导广大人民群众创造彪炳史册的千秋伟业,归根结底是因为中国共产党能够主动认识、始终遵循和自觉运用党的自身建设规律来领导革命、建设和改革。中国共产党自身建设规律科学回答了“建设什么样的党、怎样建设党”这个重大课题,是对共产党执政规律、社会主义建设规律、人类社会发展规律的创新发展。从党的建设百年光辉历程探索党的自身建设规律的历史脉络,探讨党的自身建设规律理论体系的建构逻辑,探析党的自身建设规律的实践要求,有利于促进党的自身建设规律理论研究与实践应用的贯通融合,持续提高党的建设质量,坚定不移建设世界上最强大的政党、领导人民实现中华民族伟大复兴的中国梦。