Hot spots policing and crime prevention: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials

Crime scholars and practitioners have argued that police actions should be focused on high-risk crime places rather than spread thinly across the urban landscape. This review examines five randomized controlled trials of the effects of concentrating police enforcement efforts on crime hot spots. The findings of these evaluations suggest that focused police actions can prevent crime and disorder in crime hot spots. A meta-analysis of the effect sizes from the five experiments reveals a statistically significant mean effect size for hot spots policing interventions; this suggests overall reductions in citizen calls for service in the treatment hot spots relative to the control hot spots. These studies also suggest that focused police actions at specific locations do not necessarily result in crime displacement. Although these evaluations reveal that these programs work in preventing crime, additional research is needed to unravel other important policy-relevant issues such as community reaction to focused police enforcement efforts.     

Corruption and support for decentralisation

Existing explanations of individual preferences for decentralisation and secession focus on collective identity, economic considerations and party politics. This paper contributes to this literature by showing that preferences for fiscal and political decentralisation are also driven by concern about the quality of government in the face of corruption. It makes two claims. Firstly, information on national-level corruption decreases satisfaction with national politicians, and subsequently increases preferences for decentralisation and secession. Secondly, information on regional-level corruption pushes citizens of highly corrupt regions to prefer national retrenchment and unitary states. The effects of this political compensation mechanism crosscut national identities and involve regions that are not ethnically or economically different from the core. We test our argument using a survey experiment in Spain and confirm its cross-national generalisability with data from the European Values Study.     

Stakeholder consultations and the legitimacy of regulatory decision-making: A survey experiment in Belgium

Agencies consult extensively with stakeholders such as industry associations, nongovernmental organizations, and trade unions. One rationale for consultations is that these improve procedural legitimacy and lead to greater acceptance of regulatory outcomes by citizens and the regulated industry. While this presumption of a positive relation between stakeholder consultations and the legitimacy of agencies is widespread, research analyzing this relationship remains scarce. Using a survey experiment, we examine the effect of open and closed consultations on the acceptance of procedures and regulatory outcomes in the field of environmental politics. The results demonstrate that consultation arrangements positively affect the acceptance of decision-making procedures, especially when regulators grant access to different types of stakeholders. However, although the consultation arrangement itself does not directly affect acceptance of the regulatory outcome, procedural legitimacy matters, as it increases decision acceptance among individuals who are negatively disposed toward government regulation.     

The ratio of vision to data: Promoting emergent science and technologies through promissory regulation,the case of the FDA and personalised medicine

Pharmacogenetic tests provide genetic data to tailor drug treatment and were widely predicted to be one of the first fruits of the Human Genome Project. In the mid-2000s, the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) became an advocate for pharmacogenetic testing, but its efforts to build a market for this new technology brought the agency into dispute with other regulatory actors over the type of evidence needed for the adoption of pharmacogenetic testing, in particular the importance of randomized control trials. The warfarin case highlights the tension between a new form of promissory regulation driven by future expectations and FDA's established role as protector of public health; and the controversy can be conceptualized as a struggle over regulatory epistemologies within a complex polycentric regulatory space. Our case study addresses two themes central to the burgeoning scholarship on the governance of emergent science and technologies (EST): the political economy of regulation, in particular the role that regulators play in creating markets for EST; and the epistemological politics of regulatory science, in particular the controversy that arises when regulators modify scientific standards to accommodate EST. Linking these two themes is the concept of promissory regulation: the idea that regulatory policy may be shaped by an institutional commitment to the transformational potential of EST. This concept sheds new light on the neo-mercantilist nature of contemporary regulatory capitalism.     

Commentary on “Studying Eyewitness Investigations in the Field”: A Look Forward

Schacter et al. (2007, this issue) address the controversy surrounding an Illinois pilot project that attempted to compare sequential versus simultaneous police lineup formats. The statement by these experts will guide the design and execution of future field lineup experiments. This commentary discusses three aspects of field studies that pose challenges as lineup experiments are interpreted: the imprecise meaning of the dependent measure (eyewitness decisions), the limitations of single studies, and the necessity to devise public policy from incomplete knowledge. A combination of laboratory and field information provides the means to determine best practices in eyewitness identification procedures.     

Do technocrats boost the acceptance of policy proposals among the citizenry? Evidence from a survey experiment in Italy

Are policies proposed by technocrats more easily accepted by citizens than those proposed by traditional partisan actors? This is a crucial question, as politicians increasingly rely on technocrats for resolving “wicked problems” such as financial, environmental, and health crises. To answer this question, we conducted a survey experiment among 5000 Italian respondents. At the time of our experiment, Italy was governed by a “grand coalition” of various technocratic and partisan actors, enabling us to realistically vary the proponents of different policy proposals. Overall, citizens are more likely to accept policies proposed by technocrats as opposed to party leaders. In particular, we find that technocratic proponents boost policy acceptance even more for economic and valence issues. Furthermore, we find that this “technocratic effect” is generally stronger among citizens who are more likely to disagree with the policy content.     

Accelerating COVID-19 testing: An experimental approach

The COVID-19 pandemic, ever since its global outbreak in 2020, has continued to wreak havoc. Governments across the world were compelled to enforce strict nation-wide lockdowns, while emphasising on social distancing and quarantining suspected people in order to slow down the spread of the virus. During this time, there was a massive increase in demand for COVID-19 test kits. However, given the limited supply, countries were finding it hard to test enough people. This study proposes an approach called Encoded Blending (EB) to increase the number of tests drastically, without increasing the number of test kits. EB modifies the pooled testing method; this has been followed by countries like Germany, Israel and South Korea for mass testing their citizens. EB has the potential to reduce test kits requirement by up to 85% and 80% in a population with 5% and 10% affected cases, respectively.     

If you ask,they will come (to register and vote): Field experiments with state election agencies on encouraging voter registration

We address the frequent critique that voter registration is a barrier to participation in the US. Institutional reforms to voter registration produce only small impacts on participation. We show the registration barrier can be reduced without changing laws or administrative processes using official communication seeking to change individual political behavior. In collaboration with state election agencies in two states, we conducted large-scale field experiments using low cost postcards aimed at increasing registration among eligible but unregistered citizens. The experiments find statistically and substantively significant effects on registration and turnout in subsequent elections. The research partnership with election officials is unusual and important for understanding electoral participation. Further, the population targeted for registration is broader than prior experiments on voter registration in the US. The results provide important insights about voter registration as a barrier to political participation, plus practical guidance for election officials to reduce this barrier.     

Can parties recruit postal voters? Experimental evidence from Britain

While easily-accessible postal voting is on the rise in many countries, the implications for electoral campaigns are largely under-researched. Indeed, parties actively try to sign supporters up to postal votes to make it easier for them to turn out. But how effective are these efforts to recruit supporters on to postal votes? We present an original, pre-registered postal voter recruitment experiment – the first conducted outside the US – completed during the May 2018 UK elections. We test the effect of a common recruitment tactic – letters and application forms sent to supporters. Despite being widely used by parties, we find that these efforts are ineffective at both recruiting and mobilising supporters. While the rewards of successfully signing supporters up to postal voting are potentially substantial, our results suggest that parties should consider the most effective ways of doing so.     

Voters’ evaluation of (contra-)prototypical political candidates. An experimental test of the interaction of candidate gender and policy positions cues in Flanders (Belgium)

Following social psychological models of impression formation, information about candidates' policy positions shapes voters' impressions of their personal qualities (Rahn et al., 1990). This paper presents an experimental test of the impact of the inclusion of information about candidates' policy positions on the prevalence of issue competence stereotypes in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. the idea that male and female candidates have different areas of issue competence. Respondents are found to primarily base their evaluation of the presented candidates on the policy positions presented by the candidate and the extent to which they agree with the presented policy positions. It can therefore be concluded that the inclusion of information about candidates' policy positions trumps the effects of candidate gender on voters’ preferences. This decreased stereotype reliance is potentially beneficial for female candidates because it also decreases the chances of a voter bias.