TRANSPARENCY IN PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS: NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL?

Scholars' criticism of transparency in public–private partnerships (PPPs) often focuses on ‘external’ transparency, that is, the extent to which internal information is visible to the outside world. However, to achieve external transparency, internal transparency – the availability and inferability of information for the public procurer and the private party – is crucial. In this article we analyse input, process, and output transparency from three different perspectives (institutional, cognitive, and strategic) in four PPPs in the Netherlands. We conclude that input transparency is high, but process and output transparency less so. Moreover, output transparency has gained importance in PPPs. Whether this is problematic depends on the PPPs' institutional environment. In some partnerships the desired output is uncontested and predetermined by clear standards in the institutional environment, whereas other PPPs deal with contested output norms, decreasing the partnerships' transparency. These results nuance the current debate on the lack of transparency in PPPs.     

INSTITUTIONAL LAYERING IN GOVERNING HEALTHCARE QUALITY

Since the 1980s, regulated markets and New Public Management have been introduced in the public sector across the world. How they have affected existing governance mechanisms such as self‐regulation and state regulation has remained largely unexplored, however. This article examines the origins and consequences of institutional layering in governing healthcare quality. Dutch health care, where a market‐based system has been introduced, is used as a case study. The results show that this market‐based system did not replace but modified existing institutional arrangements. As a result, hospitals have to deal with the fragmentation of quality demands. Using the concept of institutional layering, this study shows how different arrangements interact. As a consequence, the introduction of a certain policy reform will work out differently in different countries and policy sectors. Our ‘archaeological’ study in this layering can be seen as an example of how such incremental change can be studied in detail.     

PROFILING AND POLICE LEGITIMACY: PROCEDURAL JUSTICE,ATTRIBUTIONS OF MOTIVE,AND ACCEPTANCE OF POLICE AUTHORITY*

This paper reports the results of four studies that investigate racial profiling as an attribution about police motives. Each study explores, first, the types of police behavior that heighten or lessen the occurrence of profiling attributions and, second, the consequences of such attributions. Results support prior studies in finding that judgments about whether the police are profiling are associated with the level of public support for the police. The studies then extend the analysis of subjective profiling judgments by examining their antecedents. The findings support the procedural justice hypothesis that the fairness with which the police exercise their authority influences whether members of the public view the police as profiling.     

DIFFERENTIAL SUSCEPTIBILITY? IMMIGRANT YOUTH AND PEER INFLUENCE*

There is reason to suspect that lower levels of exposure to criminogenic peer‐based risks help explain why immigrant youth are less involved in crime and violence. However, it also is possible that if and when they do encounter these risks, immigrant youth are more vulnerable to them than are native‐born youth. Drawing from literature on the adaptation experiences of immigrant adolescents, we hypothesize that immigrant youth will be relatively more susceptible to the effects of both 1) exposure to deviant peers and 2) unstructured and unsupervised socializing with peers when compared with their nonimmigrant counterparts. Using a sample of approximately 1,800 adolescents from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) study, we find support for our first hypothesis but not the second. Specifically, in both cross‐sectional and longitudinal models, we find that exposure to deviant peers has a greater impact on violence among immigrant youth than it does for native‐born youth. Furthermore, this pattern of results is supported with supplemental, sensitivity analysis using the AddHealth data. In contrast, there are no statistically significant differences across immigrant generation status with regard to the effect of informal socializing with peers on violence.