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Regulatory capture generally evokes negative images of private interests exerting excessive influence on government action to advance their own agendas at the expense of the public interest. There are some cases, however, where this conventional wisdom is exactly backwards. This Article explores the first verifiable case, taken from healthcare cybersecurity, where regulatory capture enabled regulators to harness private expertise to advance exclusively public goals. Comparing this example to other attempts at harnessing industry expertise reveals a set of characteristics under which regulatory capture can be used in the public interest: (1) legislatively mandated adoption of recommendations by an advisory committee comprising private interests and "reduced-bias" subject matter experts; (2) relaxed procedural constraints for committee action to prevent internal committee capture; and (3) opportunities for committee participation to be worthwhile for representatives of private parties beyond the mere opportunity to advance their own interests. This Article presents recommendations based on those characteristics as to how and when legislatures may endeavor to replicate this success in other industries to improve both the legitimacy and efficacy of the regulatory process.

This paper sets out to analyses and present trends in investments in agriculture in the SADC region. In pursuing this goal the paper empirically highlights the importance of disaggregating expenditure data when examining its links to measures of productivity and poverty. This is important because not all types of expenditure have the potential to positively impact on productivity and poverty. In order to pursue the goals set out in this paper, analysis focused mainly on data on agricultural public expenditure for Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Trend analysis leads to the following main findings: Various countries have tended to invest in their agricultural sectors differently across time, but investments have been limited and volatile, while the quality of spending has also gone down. There is also public agricultural expenditure bias towards crops at the expense of other sectors. The major implication is that there is need for more concerted efforts in the SADC to ensure more and better-targeted agricultural growth enhancing investments

To what extent do we need a 'second-wave' of writing on depoliticisation to correct the biases of the first and thereby to improve our capacity to gain analytical traction on the dynamic interplay between politicising and depoliticising tendencies in contemporary liberal democracies? In this article I welcome the debate this special issue has opened, but defend the first wave against its critics. More specifically, I argue that the first wave literature provides ample analytical and theoretical resources to capture the dynamic interplay between depoliticising tendencies and politicising or repoliticising counter-tendencies which its critics rightly place at centre stage. Indeed, I go further, suggesting that the more empirical contributions of the special issue, while bringing a series of new and important insights to the analysis of politicisation–depoliticisation dynamics, in fact do so by drawing extensively on first wave depoliticisation theory. Such work is very necessary and advances significantly our understanding of depoliticising, but it extends rather than challenges first wave perspectives and is ultimately better characterised as 'second generation' rather than 'second wave'.

Институт присяжных заседателей называют инструментом народного суверенитета, источником демократической легитимности. Независимый, свободный от корыстных интересов и политических симпатий суд должен выступать гарантом законности и справедливости. Осуществление правосудия всегда напрямую связано с политическим строем в государстве. Основной проблемой судебной системы России остается её обвинительный уклон и отсутствие независимости. Реформа судебной власти, предпринятая в 1993 г., завершена не была, а позже были проведены контрреформы, направленные на достижение других целей, но не на слом негативных явлений, унаследованных от советских судов. ; Institute of jurors is called a tool of popular sovereignty, the source of democratic legitimacy. Independent and free from vested interests and political leanings court must act as a guarantor of law and justice. The administration of justice is always directly connected with the political system in the state. The main problem of the Russian judicial system remains its prosecutorial bias and lack of independence. The reform of the judiciary, which began in 1993 has not been completed, and were subsequently conducted counter-reforms aimed at achieving other goals, but not as scrapping negative events inherited from the Soviet ships.

Whether individual characteristics and preferences of journalists affect their work has long been an issue of scientific debate. Oftentimes those discussions center around the potential impact of individual political attitudes that sometimes are identified as a reason for an alleged 'liberal bias' in journalism and media coverage. Against that backdrop, this paper critically reviews the relevant literature in order to answer the question what we really know about the impact of journalists' individual political attitudes on their work. To do so the paper first theoretically reflects on the significance of both individual and contextual meso- and macro-level characteristics in journalism. From an empirical perspective, then, data on political attitudes of German journalists are presented followed by a review of studies that actually investigated the connection between attitudes, journalistic work and coverage. Finally we discuss what the recent changes of working conditions in journalism (e.g., commercialization, increasing orientation towards audiences, acceleration of news cycles, increasing coorientation within journalism) mean for the potential relevance of individual political attitudes. The paper ends with suggestions for future research on the topic. Adapted from the source document.

My PhD research deals with the use of presidential powers in Central and Eastern Europe during the first 20 years since the end of Communism. While previous research mostly debated the nature of the new regime types and measured presidents' powers, I wanted to explore and explain how presidents actually use their constitutional prerogatives. My study uses a mixed-methods approach that combines statistical analysis of an original data set on the use of presidential powers in nine Central and Eastern European democracies with qualitative elite interviews in four selected countries. This case focuses on the 65 semi-structured interviews that I conducted with political elites in Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia and the challenges of nesting them into the statistical analysis. In particular, it addresses problems of how to prepare interviews based on quantitative findings and sampling strategies to counter bias through non-response. The case also highlights specific problems related to elite interview-based research in post-socialist Europe and sets these into perspective to the existing literature. Last, it offers more general advice on how to successfully integrate interviews into a mixed-methods framework.

Recent studies in general are positive regarding the effectiveness of US counterinsurgency programs in Iraq. The right mix of coercion, ethnic strategy, and public goods provision, it is argued, makes Iraqis less likely to rebel against the US army and the Iraqi government, thus reducing insurgent violence. In fact, the number of insurgent attacks dramatically declined shortly after the change in the counterinsurgency strategy in 2007. How robust is the positive finding? A common assumption behind previous analyses is that insurgent attacks have a strong local root and is unlikely to be reproduced in other areas. Violation of this spatial independence assumption, however, can potentially bias towards the positive result. Based on the novel spatial dynamic panel data (SDPD) model, my analysis shows that spatial dependence should be addressed and cannot be assumed away. Results based on the new model also reveal that, conditional upon other strategies, the effects of a counterinsurgency strategy vary considerably both in magnitude and direction, suggesting that some policy mixes could be counterproductive. Policy makers seeking to adopt similar strategies in Afghanistan should take the relocation into account in their policy evaluations.

This dissertation is a collection of three essays dealing with selected problems of the Euro Area during its most recent crisis. It applies empirical, theoretical, and institutional analyses to gain new insights into many of its financial aspects. The first essay offers an alternative explanation for the surge in government bond spreads. Many researchers attribute this phenomenon to market sentiment and multiple equilibria alone. We show that an often neglected fundamental variable may drive spreads: a decrease in the expected recovery value of private market participants. With an ever-increasing share of crisis countries' debt held by official creditors, private investors may feel pushed into the position of subordinated creditors. The other two essays both explain the sharp increase in central bank credit from different perspectives. First, from the national perspective, central banks may be confronted with a classical tragedy-of-the-commons problem, which gives rise to an expansionary bias. Second, from the perspective of the ECB, we argue that the empirical patterns surrounding the liquidity provision in December 2011 are reminiscent of a speculative attack on a fixed exchange rate system.

Burgeoning and increasingly important political and economic links between China and Africa have been accompanied by greater media attention on various aspects of this relationship and in particular, its benefits as well as problems for African states. While there are references to the bias against China in much of the western media's coverage of Sino-African relations in the scholarly literature analyzing this relationship, surprisingly little systematic work has been done to analyze and discuss this coverage. In this paper, I seek to fill this gap in the literature by providing a qualitative analysis and discussion of the recurrent themes present in the coverage provided by four main U.S. broadsheets on Sino-African relations from 2002 to 2012. Specifically, this paper argues that the following images and narratives dominate the coverage of Sino-African relations in these newspapers: (a) an opportunistic and merciless China that is out to exploit Africa, (b) an Africa that has no agency and must be protected from the Chinese, and (c) a West that has the sole ability and responsibility to protect Africa from the Chinese.Â

Longitudinal or panel surveys offer unique benefits for social science research, but they typically suffer from attrition, which reduces sample size and can result in biased inferences. Previous research tends to focus on the demographic predictors of attrition, conceptualizing attrition propensity as a stable, individual-level characteristic—some individuals (e.g., young, poor, residentially mobile) are more likely to drop out of a study than others. We argue that panel attrition reflects both the characteristics of the individual respondent as well as her survey experience, a factor shaped by the design and implementation features of the study. In this article, we examine and compare the predictors of panel attrition in the 2008–2009 American National Election Study, an online panel, and the 2006–2010 General Social Survey, a face-to-face panel. In both cases, survey experience variables are predictive of panel attrition above and beyond the standard demographic predictors, but the particular measures of relevance differ across the two surveys. The findings inform statistical corrections for panel attrition bias and provide study design insights for future panel data collections.

Since contemporary victims' policy features the pursuit of procedural justice, the criminal justice authorities have introduced procedural arrangements to serve victims' voice. Western states use (some form of) Victim Impact Statements, providing crime victims with room to inform the courts about the consequences of the crime. Nevertheless, victim voice is contested since it creates an imagery of bias and might cause repeated victimisaton. Indeed, victimologists point at the heterogeneity of victims' needs, stating that the topical focus on victim voice executed during trial proceedings is one-sighted. Notwithstanding this critique, the Dutch legislator has recently lodged a proposal to introduce a so-called adviesrecht, encompassing the full scheme of the court's decision-making (guilt and truth finding). Since the Dutch use non-bifurcated trial proceedings, the adviesrecht might have serious repercussions for the standard of a fair trial. A comparative (legal) perspective on the (use of) the Victim Impact Statement and the Victim Statement of Opinion as used in the United Stated of America appears helpful to expose the potential repercussions of extended victim voice in terms of procedural justice.

Since its approval, in 2007, the Spanish Law of Equality (LO 3/2007) has been the target of many scholars on gender issues. Those analyses (and those previous to the first observable results of the Spanish Law of Equality), have largely prioritized political representative institutions and political parties as the main arenas to assess the impact of the new regulation. Nevertheless, to make a comprehensive analysis of the increase and impact of the presence of women in contemporary democracies one cannot exclude the existence of many other crucial actors in our pluralist systems, such as business organizations.In this line, in order to widen the knowledge on the presence of women in Spanish contemporary democracy, as well as to further assess the impact of Spanish Law of Equality on the presence of women in economic and political life, our paper will look at the gender bias of the executive committees in the Spanish Chambers of Commerce and business associations during the period 20010-2012. By placing those actors at the front sight, we aim to contribute with new empirical insights to the current debate on this topic.

To what extent do we need a 'second-wave' of writing on depoliticisation to correct the biases of the first and thereby to improve our capacity to gain analytical traction on the dynamic interplay between politicising and depoliticising tendencies in contemporary liberal democracies? In this article I welcome the debate this special issue has opened, but defend the first wave against its critics. More specifically, I argue that the first wave literature provides ample analytical and theoretical resources to capture the dynamic interplay between depoliticising tendencies and politicising or repoliticising counter-tendencies which its critics rightly place at centre stage. Indeed, I go further, suggesting that the more empirical contributions of the special issue, while bringing a series of new and important insights to the analysis of politicisation–depoliticisation dynamics, in fact do so by drawing extensively on first wave depoliticisation theory. Such work is very necessary and advances significantly our understanding of depoliticising, but it extends rather than challenges first wave perspectives and is ultimately better characterised as 'second generation' rather than 'second wave'.

Global relations are largely shaped by what Charles Mills calls the racial contract: the sometimes explicit and sometimes unspoken agreement that social arrangements must favor whites over nonwhites. This bias is strong among white political philosophers and especially in the liberal contractarian theories of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Kant, and, most recently, Rawls. While these theories pay lip service to nominal equality in the name of universalism, they also ignore the inequality and disadvantage that nonwhites suffer at the hands of whites, and thus they contribute to epistemic obscurantism and racial domination. In this paper, first, I strengthen Millss argument by providing an even more convincing objection against the procedural requirements of John Rawlss theory of justice; second, I argue that this objection gives us a good reason to distinguish between Rawlss liberal contractarianism and other theories in white political philosophy that are far more sensitive to Millss critique; and, finally, I offer a partial defense of Martha Nussbaums and Amartya Sens capabilitybased approach, which I think is uniquely situated to address the inequalities of the racial contract. ; Published version