The Political Frame for Negotiated Capitalism: Electoral Reform and the Politics of Crisis in Japan and Sweden

This article examines the impact of political institutions on the strength of executive governments as well as the consequences of that strength for policymaking. It argues that both political changes and electoral reforms in Japan and Sweden have weakened the political frame for “negotiated” or “coordinated” decision making in these nations. In Sweden, however, the complete demolition of the old political frame has opened up opportunities and incentives for new modes of governance. In Japan, by contrast, reforms have buttressed rather than dismantled the old frame, impeding the transition to a new approach.     

Partnerships in the Development and Implementation of Canadian Air Quality Regulation

This case study focuses on how the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment combined consultative processes with federal provincial negotiations to develop a policy for reducing emissions of nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds. The paper argues that the relationship among the parties was not characterized by the reciprocity required for a partnership, and that the process employed was insensitive to inequalities in regulatory capacity. As a result, too little attention was devoted to the question of how regulatory capacities can be continuously improved.     

PRETRIAL RELEASE AND BAIL DECISIONS

This study examines the relative effects of a number of legal and extralegal factors on (1) the decision to release on recognizance and (2) the decision on amount of money bail. Social science research on these issues has been sparse compared to that on other phases of the criminal justice process. Findings from a regression analysis show that the first step of the bond disposition process, the recognizance decision, is influenced by several factors. The demeanor of defendants in open court is the most important. Net of other influences, good demeanor increases the probability of release on recognizance by 34.8%. In cases where recognizance is denied, only two variables are related significantly to the amount of money bond. Net of other influences, a felony offense (as opposed to a misdemeanor) increases predicted bail by $2300, and poor demeanor increases the predicted bail required by $1600.     

SPECIFIC DETERRENCE IN A SAMPLE OF OFFENDERS CONVICTED OF WHITE COLLAR CRIMES*

It is generally argued that white-collar criminals will be particularly influenced by punishment policies. White-collar crime is seen as a highly rational form of criminality, in which the risks and rewards are carefully evaluated by potential offenders, and white-collar criminals are assumed to have much more to lose through sanctions than more common law violators. In this article we examine the impact of sanctions on the criminal careers of 742 offenders convicted of white-collar crimes in seven US. district courts between fiscal years 1976 and 1978. Utilizing data on court-imposed sanctions originally compiled by Wheeler et al. (1988b), as well as information on subsequent criminal behavior provided by the Identification Bureau of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we assess the effect of imprisonment upon the oficial criminal records of people convicted of white-collar crimes. Comparing prison and no-prison groups that were matched in terms of factors that led to their receipt of a prison sanction, we find that prison does not have a specific deterrent impact upon the likelihood of rearrest over a 126-month follow-up period.     

Effects of Court Officials on Sentence Severity: Do Judges Make a Difference?

The present article examines the effects on sentencing of a number of variables measuring court actors and their traits. Sentencing patterns were shown to vary substantially from judge to judge but the differences were found to be related more to the types of cases judges received than to sentencing styles of individual judges. Independent of traditional sociodemographic traits of offenders and legal variables, individual judges do not appear to sentence differently. Moreover, when we estimated equations which included judicial background characteristics, there were no discernible independent effects. These findings differ from both informed intuition and inferences one might draw from previous research. Consideration of subcultures of justice and cases on which court officials disagree about sentences may help explain differences between present and past research.     

PROSECUTORIAL DISCRETION IN FILING CHARGES IN DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CASES*

Based on data collected from prosecutors' files on domestic violence cases, the research reported here attempts to isolate variables associated with a decision to issue criminal charges in a case. The analysis reveals that variables reflective of the defendant's current or past choices were most strongly associated with the charging decision. Specifically, the defendant's appearing at the charging conference and his use of drugs or alcohol at the time of the violence were the factors most strongly associated with the decision to issue a criminal charge. Other related factors were also reflective of choices made by the defendant: degree of injury inflicted, the instrument used, the fact of prior offenses, and prior abuse of the particular victim.     

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.