Harming America: Corporate Crime in a Context of Deregulation

ABSTRACT

Like many Republican presidential candidates before him, Donald J. Trump campaigned on a pro-business, anti-regulation platform, and since his election in November 2016, he has directed his administration to move forward with deregulation in many arenas, including consumer financial protections, environmental controls, and workplace safety among others. Past efforts to roll back regulations governing certain industries, such as the savings and loan and the mortgage industries, have had harmful consequences for the general public or for specific interest groups. In this study, we review what the Trump administration has accomplished with regard to deregulation to date. Then, based on past deregulatory fiascos, we theorize the harmful collateral consequences that may result from this most recent swing of the regulatory-deregulatory pendulum.     

The importance of industry compliance in improving advertising self‐regulatory processes

As the most visible element of the marketing communications mix, advertising has had its critics and, given the choice, developed countries usually select a self‐regulatory approach to deal with unacceptable advertising. The recent breakdown of one of the world's longest established advertising self‐regulatory programmes in Australia has reopened the 20‐year old debate that has taken place in the leading academic and business journals concerned with enhancing understanding of such regulatory systems. This paper focuses on the activity of code enforcement in improving the effectiveness of advertising self‐regulatory frameworks. The key findings of an Australian study, where its scheme has recently failed, are presented and discussed in this context and a key concept is developed. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

浅谈走私犯罪案件侦查中的追缉堵截

在走私犯罪案件侦查中经常会遇到犯罪嫌疑人逃跑或查缉运载走私货物车辆的情况，如何迅速抓获逃跑的犯罪嫌疑人和缉获私货与正确实施追缉堵截这一紧急性侦查措施是紧密联系在一起的。在抓捕逃跑的走私犯罪嫌疑人和截获运载私货的车辆时，这两种方法结合使用，可形成前堵后追，前后夹击的格局，便于迅速抓获走私犯罪嫌疑人和截获运载私货的车辆。     

Australia's Political Institutions and the Corruption of Public Opinion1

This article explores structural causes for the decline in the quality of Australia's political and policy conversations. Three are nominated. The first concerns the changing role of the major party organisations. These no longer contribute to agenda setting; they are no longer forums for activist and interest mobilisation; they no longer mobilise and cue a mass base. The second structural change concerns the rise in the role of the media. This is now the primary bridge between the formal political system and the surrounding society, a role for which it is singularly ill‐equipped. The third change concerns the misalignment between the formal political system and Australian society. The formal system was formed in the early twentieth century when Australian society was broadly divided by class allegiance. Those days are long gone. Class has decomposed. A variety of new concerns differentiate and pluralise social attitudes. Possible remedies are then discussed.     

Determinants of legislative turnover in Western Europe, 1945–2015

This article explains legislative turnover in eight West European legislatures over 152 general elections in the period 1945–2015. Turnover is measured as the rate of individual membership change in unicameral or lower chambers. It is the outcome of a legislative recruitment process with a supply and a demand side. Decisions made by contenders affect supply, while decisions made by parties and voters influence demand. Such decisions are shaped by four political and institutional factors: the institutional context of political careers, or structure of political career opportunities; political party characteristics; electoral swings; and electoral systems. Ten specific hypotheses are tested within this theoretical framework. The structure of political career opportunities is the most decisive factor explaining variability in turnover rates, followed by electoral swings and political parties. Electoral systems show less substantive effects. Electoral volatility is the predictor with the most substantive effects, followed by duration of legislative term, strength of bicameralism, regional authority, gender quotas, level of legislative income and district magnitude.     

Autocratic legitimation in Iran: Ali Khamenei’s discourse on regime “insiders” and “outsiders”

The article analyses Ali Khamenei’s discourse on insiders and outsiders in the Islamic Republic of Iran, arguing that it shows the leader of an electoral revolutionary regime striving to counter elite fragmentation and growing democratic demands. It studies identity demarcation as a tool of autocratic legitimation. In a political system where the possibility to access political positions depends on supporting a belief-system, all cadres share a basic identity, which rulers can exploit to draw boundaries between “us” and “them”. The analysis reveals how Iran’s leader capitalizes on the existence of an insider-outsider divide to promote ideas about an imagined “we” of the regime. The “we” is portrayed as an Islamic we, fully committed to his rule. The article maintains that Khamenei developed this discourse in response to the challenge of the Iranian reform movement. It analyses, first, the context in which the discourse emerged and, second, the discursive strategy itself, to substantiate the claim. It concludes that the discourse had two essential aims in the containment (1997–2003) and crushing (2009–2010) of the pro-democracy reformist and Green movements: to de-legitimate Khamenei’s opponents through othering and to legitimate the counter-mobilization of repressive agents.     

Ideology,Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand how political ideology affects policymakers’ willingness to learn from one another's experiences. Our two experiments–embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials–expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, offering opportunities to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy's success or on its adoption by co‐partisans in other communities. We also find a similar partisan‐based bias among traditional ideological supporters, who are less willing to learn from those in the opposing party. The experimental approach offered here provides numerous new opportunities for scholars of policy diffusion.     

A Comparative Assessment of Elite Policy Recruits in Canada

Recent case studies and large-N survey evidence has confirmed long-suspected shortages of public sector “policy capacity”. Studies have found that government policy workers in various jurisdictions differ considerably with respect to types of policy work they undertake, and have identified uneven capacity for policy workers to access and apply technical and scientific knowledge to public issues. This suggests considerable difficulties for government’s ability to meet contemporary policy and governance challenges. Despite growing attention to these matters, studies have not examined the “elite” policy workers many governments recruit to address these capacity shortages. Using an established survey instrument, this study of two Canadian recruitment programs provides the first comparative analysis of elite policy recruits, as policy workers. Three research questions anchor the study: (1) What is the profile of these actors? (2) What types of policy work do “elite” policy analysts actually engage in? (3) How does their policy work compare by recruitment program? The article provides fresh comparative data on the nature of elite policy work and policy analytical capacity, but, more importantly, a crucial baseline for future comparative study of how elite recruitment may facilitate “supply-side” capacity gains expected from recruitment programs.     

Ethnic diversity and development in Kenya: limitations of ethnicity as a category of analysis

This paper challenges the relevance of ethnic diversity in explaining the development impasse in Africa, using Kenya as a case study and arguing that the neopatrimonial and ethnic diversity theses are contradictory as explanatory variables of Africa's development crisis. The former speaks to homogeneity while the latter implies heterogeneity in the public policy process. This paper singles out the ethnic diversity thesis as the weaker of the two, arguing that ethnic groups lack a collective ethnic agenda that can be flagged as consequential for the political economy of the polity. Ethnic group intervention in the political arena is not determined by innate ethnic characteristics: it is due to the tendency for certain actors in the body politic to exploit institutional failure. With proper institutions, the assumed burden of ethnicity in African development would naturally evaporate. Focusing on supposedly ethnic problems is the wrong target.     

Why are public offices sold in Kyrgyzstan?

Why are public offices for sale in Kyrgyzstan? To address this question, this article attempts to set out a new logic for understanding the motives, nature, and consequences of corruption in the country. Rather than securing access to a single favor through bribery, officials invest in political and administrative posts in order to obtain access to stream of rents associated with an office. Political and administrative corruption is organically linked in this system, and corruption stems not so much from weak monitoring as from being a franchise-like arrangement, where officials are required to pay continuous “fees” to their bosses. The key is to be the public official influencing the redistribution of rents as well as participating in the informal market where “public” goods are privatized and exchanged for informal payments. Thus, instead of control over the pure economic assets of the state, influence over the state's institutional and organizational framework is the dominant strategy for earning and investing in the country.