How Does Information About Elite Tax Evasion Affect Political Participation: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

We present results of a randomised field experiment where voters in Tanzania were given information about elite use of tax havens. Information provided in a neutral form had no effect, while information phrased in more morally charged terms led to a reduction in voting intentions. Rather than increase the perceived importance of voting, charged information tends to undermine confidence in political institutions and the social contract. The effects are particularly pronounced among the less well off, indicating that increased transparency in the absence of perceived agency may not improve political participation.     

Enforcing the Climate Regime: Game Theory and the Marrakesh Accords

This article reviews basic insights about compliance and "hard" enforcement that can be derived from various non-cooperative equilibrium concepts, and evaluates the Marrakesh Accords in light of these insights. Five different notions of equilibrium are considered – the Nash equilibrium, the subgame perfect equilibrium, the renegotiation proof equilibrium, the coalition proof equilibrium, and the perfect Bayesian equilibrium. These various types of equilibrium have a number of implications for effective enforcement: (1) Consequences of non-compliance should be more than proportionate. (2) Punishment needs to take place on the Pareto frontier, rather than by reversion to some suboptimal state. (3) An effective enforcement system must be able to curb collective as well as individual incentives to cheat. (4) A fully transparent enforcement regime is not unconditionally a good thing. It is concluded that constructing an effective system for "hard" enforcement of the Kyoto Protocol is a formidable task that has only partially been accomplished by the Marrakesh Accords. In practice, however, the design of the compliance system for the climate regime had to balance a desire to minimize non-compliance against other important goals, including the need for due process.     

The making of an expert detective: the role of experience in English and Norwegian police officers’ investigative decision-making

Biased decision-making in criminal investigations can impede or arrest the progress of justice. Previous research has not systematically addressed the effects of professional experience on the quality of detectives’ decision-making. Using a quasi-experimental design, this study compared the quality of investigative decisions made by experienced detectives and novice police officers in two countries with markedly different models for the development of investigative expertise (England and Norway). Participants (N?=?124) were presented with two semi-fictitious cases and were asked to report all relevant investigative hypotheses and necessary investigative actions in each case. The quality of participants’ responses was gauged against a gold standard established by a panel of senior homicide experts. In the English sample, experienced detectives vastly outperformed novice police officers in the number of reported gold-standard investigative hypotheses and actions. In the Norwegian sample, however, experienced detectives did not perform any better than novices. We argue that English (vs. Norwegian) detectives may benefit more from professional experience due to their Professionalising Investigation Programme and a nationwide accreditation program, requiring them to engage in extensive standardized training, systematic evaluation and synchronized development. In contrast, Norway lacks such requirements. Methodological limitations and implications for police training and accreditation policies are discussed.     

Does democracy reduce corruption?

While democracy is commonly believed to reduce corruption, there are obvious endogeneity problems in measuring the impact of democracy on corruption. This article attempts to address the endogeneity of democracy by exploiting the thesis that democracies seldom go to war against each other. We instrument for democracy using a dummy variable reflecting whether a country has been at war with a democracy in the period 1946–2008, while controlling for the extent to which countries have been at war in general. We find that democracy to a significant extent reduces corruption, and the effect is considerably larger than suggested by estimations not taking endogeneity into account. Democracy may hence be more important in combating corruption than previous studies would suggest.     

In Search of Indicators of Detective Aptitude: Police Recruits’ Logical Reasoning and Ability to Generate Investigative Hypotheses

Previous psychological research on criminal investigation has not systematically addressed the role of deductive and inductive reasoning skills in decision-making in detectives. This study examined the relationship between these skills derived from a cognitive ability test used for police recruitment and test scores from an investigative reasoning skills task (Fahsing and Ask 2016). Newly recruited students at the Norwegian Police University College (N = 166) were presented with two semi-fictitious missing-person cases and were asked to report all relevant hypotheses and necessary investigative actions in each case. The quality of participants’ responses was gauged by comparison with a gold standard established by a panel of senior police experts. The scores from the deductive and inductive reasoning test were not related to participants’ performance on the investigative reasoning task. However, the presence or absence of an investigative “tipping-point” (i.e. arrest decision) in the two cases was systematically associated with participants’ ability to generate investigative hypotheses. Methodological limitations and implications for police recruitment and criminal investigative practice are discussed.     

Human Rights and Assigned Duties: Implications for Corporations

Human rights imply duties. The question is, duties for whom? Without a well-defined scheme for assigning duties correlative to human rights, these rights remain illusory. This paper develops core elements of a general scheme of duty assignment and studies the implications for corporations. A key distinction in such an assignment is between unconditional and conditional duties. Unconditional duties apply to every agent regardless of the conduct of others. Conditional duties reflect a division of moral labour where different tasks are assigned to specific agents, whose default activates back-up duties of other agents. Corporations face unconditional duties to not directly violate the rights of others, and not undermine the division of moral labour through practices such as tax evasion or corruption. Being unconditional, these duties cannot be deviated from by reference to the misconduct of competitors. In addition, corporate conditional duties to protect, promote or fulfil rights can be activated if the state and other designated duty-bearers fail to discharge their duties.     

Coercion and patient satisfaction on psychiatric acute wards

Legal-, perceived- and objective coercion were examined both separately and together as a measure of accumulated coercion, to determine how coercion affected patient satisfaction in patients admitted for acute psychiatric care. Accumulated coercive events significantly reduced both overall satisfaction, and satisfaction in four of five subscales evaluating different aspects of treatment. Neither legal status nor perceived coercion affected patient satisfaction, while objective coercion had a significant negative effect on overall satisfaction when these measures were analysed separately. Overall patient satisfaction reported at discharge was low, while satisfaction with different aspects of treatment showed considerable variation. The observation that perceived coercion in the admission process did not affect satisfaction significantly underlines the need to further explore the interaction between subjective and objective measures for coercion. It appears that multiple measures for coercion should be used in future studies.     

Deaths after intravenous misuse of transdermal fentanyl

Fentanyl is a potent synthetic opioid used as a general anesthetic and analgetic. Fatal outcome from intravenous misuse of transdermal fentanyl is rare, and there are few such reports in literature. Here we report two cases of fatal intravenous injection of the content from fentanyl patches. Both were male drug addicts, found dead within a one week interval in the same apartment. Post-mortem femoral blood was screened for amphetamines, cannabinoids, cocaine, and opioids with immunological methods (EMIT II) and further with headspace gas chromatography for alcohol and with liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS) for different drugs, including fentanyl. Confirmatory analysis of fentanyl and morphine was performed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). In the first case, the toxicological analysis revealed fentanyl (2.7 ng/mL), morphine (31.4 ng/mL), and ethanol (1.1 g/L) in postmortem blood and amphetamine, cannabinoids, morphine, and ethanol (1.4 g/L) in postmortem urine. In the second case, the analysis revealed fentanyl (13.8 ng/mL), 7-aminoclonazepam (57.1 ng/mL), and sertralin (91.9 ng/mL) in postmortem blood and a small amount of ethanol (0.1 g/L) in postmortem urine. Police investigation revealed that both the deceased had bought the patches from the same source. The present cases demonstrate the possibility of intravenous misuse of transdermal patches and the risk of fatal outcome.