Bad Policy Research Articles

Theories, Facts, and Meanings in Political Philosophy

The consequences of correctly implementing a normative political theory arguably bear on its acceptability. A theory whose correct implementation permits slavery is highly implausible. We defend a claim about incorrect implementation. We argue that normative political theories that will predictably be put to bad use deserve harsher assessments than theories that will predictably be put to better use. Theories that key political actors will predictably invoke to justify bad policy recommendations are bad theories, even if those recommendations are not logical consequences of the theories (even in conjunction with well-established factual propositions). However, standard discussions of political theories ignore such “misapplications” when it comes to assessing the principles and values proclaimed by those theories. We reject this view because the action guidance that a normative political theory effectively provides is mediated by political actors’ prior beliefs. At the limit, these actors may regard public policies as specifying principles that the theory proclaims, as something different from regarding such policies as causally effective in achieving the ends or enforcing the rights proclaimed by those principles. As a result, political actors see themselves as exempted from the need to undertake careful causal analysis. Morally defensible action guidance requires, then, that those principles be qualified by empirically-grounded policy constraints. Normative political theories qualified in those ways constitute theoretical improvements, that is, improvements on the action guidance that the theories provide on their own.

The Real Existing Real Reality 2022. Article 1. From the Victory of Neo-Liberalism to the Self-Destructive World Society

The present study ‘The Real Existing Real Reality 2022’ consists of two related articles. These are reflections on societies, and perhaps the world on the road to self-destruction. The author wanted to add a subtitle to the article ‘The three-quarter time waltz of the self-destructive society, the new social structure of the Three Societies and a war, where good can at least fight against evil.’ In this work we discuss the currently urgent issue of how to interpret the rapidly increasing peaceful and non-peaceful transformations in the definitive global world. We point out the common features of the current events. Our title (The Real Existing Real Reality 2022) goes back to Boris Ponomarjov's phrase about ‘real existing socialism,’ which should have been higher than all ‘utopian’ concepts. All references to ‘reality’ seem to have two different directions. In the first case, ‘reality’ is more valuable than utopias (as in Ponomarjov). In the second case, reality is poor and negative compared to the ideas. But we have actually to deal with a third case. ‘Reality’ becomes the highest value, because the possession of the definition of Reality becomes the real goal of the present war. In the first article, ‘From the Victory of Neo-Liberalism to the Self-Destructive World Society,’ we show the ‘real’ process, and not yet reflected, of the political and social transformations. The triumphant neo-liberalism has appeared in every point and as the personification of every value in the current discussions. The greatest problem of the present is to identify liberalism with the monetarist economic system. The really existing socialism of the 1970s and 1980s was the subject against which a classical political liberalism of the human rights, a neo-liberal epistemology (Karl R. Popper) and a market-economy neo-liberalism could unite. Real socialism did not misunderstand this new situation. It has simply not recognized it. A new description of global society is only possible with a hypothesis of three ‘societies’ of this global world. The first society would be the society of the good will, for which the value-oriented life of this year (1989) can no longer be an open problem. We define the second society as the one that is not fundamentally constituted by the good will described above. We see the third society in that political class or elite whose power came into being in the year 1989. The ‘third’ society is the object of self-identification of the ‘first’; the ‘first’ is the product of 1989. The ‘second’ society, as the majority, lived in the shadows for a long time after 1989, its emancipation began after the first elementary shocks (economic crises or the imperialist turn) of globalization. When we talk about the further social embedding of these Three Societies, the phenomenon of public debt seems to be one of the most relevant constitutive factors of our society in the plan. The correlations are more than obvious. The third society suggests to the first society that the heavily indebted state is not a really relevant social fact. It also suggests that today's world economy is the realm of normality, in which only the bad and undisciplined policies of individual governments or the oil price are the real movers.

Does the European Union's rule of law require the criminalisation of EU public officials? A first appraisal

AbstractThis article emphasises the role of criminal law as a strategic form of accountability aimed at safeguarding the EU rule of law, especially when public officials are entrusted with powers that may violate fundamental rights. Abuses committed in the context of border management serve as a case study and a test bench for the more general argument developed in the contribution. It is argued that criminal law—through sanctioning serious abuse of power irrespective of any lucrative intent—contributes to the legitimacy of policies and actions carried out in the name of the union. As impunity gaps may result from the difficult application of domestic law, the article maintains that it is necessary to stigmatise at the union's level such misdeeds that go beyond cases of mere bad policy or ‘maladministration’. It therefore advocates for a directive requiring Member States to criminalise abuse of powers, which are in breach of the rule of law as one of the foundational values enshrined in Article 2 TEU.

Counterpoint: Tax Exceptionalism from Notice-and-Comment Rulemaking Procedures Is Bad Policy and Bad Law

Counterpoint: Tax Exceptionalism from Notice-and-Comment Rulemaking Procedures Is Bad Policy and Bad Law

White Out Bad Policy: Pass-Through Under Costly Debt Sale (and its Reversal)

White Out Bad Policy: Pass-Through Under Costly Debt Sale (and its Reversal)

Cognitive Abilities and the Demand for Bad Policy

Cognitive Abilities and the Demand for Bad Policy

Cognitive Abilities and the Demand for Bad Policy

Cognitive Abilities and the Demand for Bad Policy

Imitation learning by state-only distribution matching

Imitation Learning from observation describes policy learning in a similar way to human learning. An agent’s policy is trained by observing an expert performing a task. Although many state-only imitation learning approaches are based on adversarial imitation learning, one main drawback is that adversarial training is often unstable and lacks a reliable convergence estimator. If the true environment reward is unknown and cannot be used to select the best-performing model, this can result in bad real-world policy performance. We propose a non-adversarial learning-from-observations approach, together with an interpretable convergence and performance metric. Our training objective minimizes the Kulback-Leibler divergence (KLD) between the policy and expert state transition trajectories which can be optimized in a non-adversarial fashion. Such methods demonstrate improved robustness when learned density models guide the optimization. We further improve the sample efficiency by rewriting the KLD minimization as the Soft Actor Critic objective based on a modified reward using additional density models that estimate the environment’s forward and backward dynamics. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on well-known continuous control environments and show state-of-the-art performance while having a reliable performance estimator compared to several recent learning-from-observation methods.

Bad data underpinning bad policies as Ministers correct the record

Bad data underpinning bad policies as Ministers correct the record

Pragmatic Analysis of Invectives in Fela Anikulapo’s Shuffering and Shmilling, Sorrow, Tears and Blood

Invective is the critical, unmitigated, non-euphemistic and non-attenuating manner of casting aspersion on a recipient. While invective is generally considered a base, undesirable form of expression, its potential as the most direct form of satire has equally been acknowledged in certain contexts such as music genre. The deployment of invective as a tool of satirical criticism is axiomatic in Fela’s songs. This study is concerned with the pragmatic interpretation of Fela’s penchant to use invectives as a satirical tool to lampoon the government, and also with the potential of invective as an aesthetic form. Some pragmatic tools subsumed in a modified theoretical framework of Mey’s (2001) “Pragmatic Act Theory”, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) “Politeness Principles”, and the canonical classifications of context are used to analyse purposively selected Fela’s songs viz., Sorrow, Tears and Blood and Shuffering and Shmiling. Findings from the analysis indicate that Fela overtly uses some high pejorative invectives as a direct-derogatory attack on the government as a result of the latter’s bad policies. Results from the analysis indicated that Assertive, Expressive, and Directive are the kinds of instantiated pragmatic acts performed in the selected songs. These acts reflect the subject matters of the songs. Similarly, two types of face acts were identified in the data: face threatening without redress and face threatening act using off-record politeness strategies. These show that Fela does not mitigate the propositional contents of the message in his songs. In other respects, context is pivotal in helping readers understand the physical, sociocultural, psychological and linguistic scaffolds underpinning each song. The researcher concludes that the aesthetics of invective yields a multiplicity of analytical possibilities and more so, that the pragmatic analysis of songs is enriching, and can give important insights into how language is deployed in music lyrics.

Anyone But Charles de Gaulle: U.S. WWII Policy toward France

In summing up his main argument, Michael Neiberg writes that the U.S. relationship with France during the Second World War began with a “bad policy based on flawed assumptions.” U.S. officials had “too much faith in the flattery of ostensibly pro-American French officials and they took far too long to realize that despite the obnoxious and difficult behavior of Charles de Gaulle, British support of his movement gave the Allies the best option both for winning the war and rebuilding France after it.” Instead, the United States supported “a succession of anti-democratic French officials” (7–8). This well-researched, written, and fascinating account of U.S. decision-making drives home the point that French capitulation to the Nazis in June 1940 and fear of losing all of France led U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to cling to one horrific French leader after another, which resulted in an “anyone but de Gaulle” policy. Neiberg begins by depicting the United States as a free rider during the interwar period, underscoring how limited U.S. military budgets and a policy of political isolation derived “in large part [from] its faith in the French military, which served as a protective barrier” (9). This unwavering faith made France’s collapse all the more cataclysmic. Indeed, the day Paris fell, according to Neiberg, was the day World War II became real for ordinary Americans. Chapters 1–4 detail this reality as U.S. officials struggled to develop a coherent policy toward the Vichy France government led by World War I hero Philippe Pétain and former prime minister Pierre Laval. Intriguingly, Neiberg also suggests that the fall of France led to some major domestic consequences, with the pro-rearmament and anti-isolationist Wendell Willkie securing the Republican nomination, FDR running for an unprecedented third term, and a massive rearmament program being instituted (56–60). Neiberg then focuses on various U.S. attempts to work with the supposedly pro-American commander of the French Army, General Maxime Weygand, and the significance of FDR sending the highly respected Admiral William Leahy as his ambassador to France. Here, Neiberg provides an excellent accounting of the reasoning behind formally recognizing Vichy and the sending of such a prominent ambassador. The Americans sought to keep the French fleet as well as Martinique and Guadalupe in the Caribbean, and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon on the St. Lawrence River from falling into Nazi hands. They also wanted to maintain open lines of communication and non-communist leaders in power (97–101). As Vichy moved ever closer to full collaboration with the Germans, evidenced by the Paris Protocols that allowed German access to French military bases in Syria, Tunisia, and Senegal, in return for a reduction in occupation costs, the release of thousands of WWI veterans from POW camps, and promises of Vichy “unfettered authority” of domestic issues, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and FDR still stayed the course (120). Even the Franco-Japanese agreement to allow access to French bases in Indochina, which prompted a furor in U.S. public opinion and led the FDR administration to embrace the idea of an international trusteeship for Indochina, was not enough to lead to a break with Pétain.

Poor Management Policies and Practices by U.S. Politicians Destroyed a Superpower

The Chinese ‘Three Warfares’(3W) strategy incorporates media or public opinion warfare, legal warfare, and psychological warfare. The 3W has evolved into a pursuit of ‘intelligentized warfare’ that aims to directly control the will of the highest decision-makers. This paper is focused on a DIMEFIL analysis of the United States to identify why and when the United States’ highest decision-makers surrendered its superpower status, without the Chinese firing one shot. This analysis of America’s National Instruments of Power serves as a wake-up call for the American people and business owners. The study concludes that the greatest threat to the United States is our American leaders’ arrogance and stupidity, as expressed in poor management, bad policies, and often incompetent practices.

The Risk of Capital Flight on Economic Growth and National Solvency: An Empirical Evidence from Palestine

Capital flight is a serious concern and threat to any country's economy, regardless of its level of development, because it represents a squandered investment that lays the way for future problems. The capital flight occurred in Palestine as a result of economic mismanagement, which was worsened by bad policy decisions that robbed the government of much-needed financial resources. This research investigates the consequences of capital flight on Palestinian economic growth. To obtain these results, they used yearly time series data from (1981 to 2021). The Autoregressive Distributed Lag ARDL model is used to investigate the research variables and data gathered from various sources. The findings reveal that factors such as real GDP in Palestine, capital flight, foreign reserves, foreign debt, and domestic investment are all connected in the long and short term. Moreover, the outcomes of various transactions show that capital flight has a negative and significant impact. In contrast, foreign currency reserves, public debt, and direct investment positively influence long-term economic growth. To curb the growing flood of capital flight, the government must implement realistic economic reform programs. These economic improvements must concentrate on these three areas to achieve strong macroeconomic stability, openness and accountability in public finance management and a supportive environment for local production.

Economic and social consequences of left populist rule in Venezuela in the first decades of the XXI century

Th e purpose of the article is to determine the economic and social consequences of the rule of left populists in Venezuela in the fi rst decades of the ХХІ century. Th e research methodology is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity, integrity, and systematics. Th e methods of analysis and synthesis, generalization, comparison are used in the work. Th e scientifi c novelty lies in the fact that the features of the economic and social policy of the rul- ing circles of Venezuela over the past twenty years were investigated. It was found that despite the loud statements of the authorities about overcoming poverty, social inequality, corruption, and scarcity, all these phenomena did not disappear, but in most cases, it was the bad policy of the populists that led to the aggravation of the mentioned problems. Conclusions. As a result of the research, it became clear that another experiment aimed at building an “ideal society” in Venezuela turned into a complete failure. In one of the world’s richest countries in oil resources, there is a shortage of products, essential goods, and medicines. At the same time, instead of social harmony in the country, there is a signifi cant increase in crime and degradation of public consciousness, which is characterized by the perception of murders and robberies as common el- ements of everyday life. In world history, there were many examples when the ruling circles of the country, in extreme manifestations of populism, began to set maximum prices for food and basic necessities. Always and everywhere, these measures led to the same result – the disappearance of goods from sale and the formation of a “black market”. At the same time, these diffi culties of an economic nature brought unexpected bonuses and advantage to the ruling elite. Th e search for internal and external enemies began, and an ideological campaign was launched, directed against representatives of medium and small businesses, who actually were the producers of the goods the country needed. Th e government, which led to an economic crisis and a shortage of products, declared itself the only savior of the people. Such a picture is observed in modern Venezuela, where offi cial propaganda, despite the obvious miscalculations of the government, considers Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro to be the “saviors of the nation”.

The Combination of Normative Juridical Methods and Literature in Educational Administration Research

Educational problems in the life of society and the nation, including educational administration, often require the use of research approaches and methods commonly used in other fields of science. The study of educational administration covers the area of study not only regarding administrative or management functions in education, but also other areas of study such as education policy, human resources, information systems and finance. Using the library method, it is known that research in education administration studies generally uses quantitative, qualitative, mixed quantitative-qualitative, and evaluative approaches/methods. Through a policy analysis approach, which originates from public policy studies, issues regarding education policy as part of education administration can focus on analyzing the substance of the policy in the form of state/government regulations that have been set by policy makers. Various educational policies that have been stipulated by the state/government, are areas of study for policy analysts so that they can be identified as belonging to the category of good policies or bad policies. Normative juridical methods commonly used in the study of law can be adapted as a methodological alternative in education administration research, which is combined with the library method.

Critiquing Capital Punishment in the United States: an Argument That the Death Penalty is Both Bad Law and Bad Policy

Critiquing Capital Punishment in the United States: an Argument That the Death Penalty is Both Bad Law and Bad Policy

A house is not a home: housing disadvantage, homelessness, and modern slavery

This commentary focuses on the underexplored links between housing disadvantage, homelessness, and modern slavery. Despite significant anecdotal evidence, there is a pressing need for proper theorisation of the connections between housing situation and vulnerability to modern slavery. This commentary combats this lacuna by focusing on four types of (un)housing: homelessness, safehouses, social housing, and the private rented sector. While each site has its own relationship to modern slavery, be it cause, consequence, or potential solution, commonalities emerge. Modern slavery is a form of �hyper-precarity�, and the �ontological security� of a place to call home is crucial when combatting this. But a house is not a home, and security of tenure alone is insufficient � in fact in some cases tenure security can actually increase vulnerability to modern slavery. A sense of home can act as a bulwark against modern slavery, but poor housing and bad policies increase precarity, homelessness, and exploitation.

Food Crisis in Nepal

The food crisis is a global and local issue since the expansion of COVID-19 and after that period. Most developing countries including Nepal has been facing food deficit before and after the pandemic because of the irregular supply-demand chain of food and increasing food dependency on foreign countries. According to WFP (2022), 345 million people in 85 countries have been facing food crises in the world in 2022 and most of them are from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. According to Pandey &Fusaro (2020), approximately 56% of women overall and 76% of Dalit women reported having food insecurity. Similarly, most of the districts of Karnali and some of the districts of Madhesh Pradesh and SudurPachhim Pradesh has been facing food deficit due to the low productivity and the bad policies of the government.

Analysis and Estimation of Short Term Residual Household Waste Production: Case Study Reunion Island

The objective of this approach is to evaluate the formation of waste production at the communal level in a small island state. The question of waste management is an important issue for all local authorities, but it is even more so in an island context. The small island areas are all the more confronted with this problem insofar as they must combine their own specific characteristics, which can be very restrictive: isolation and remoteness, centralized economy, non-competitive domestic market, geographical and climatic conditions, growing demography, social structure and economic and energy dependence. The list is certainly not exhaustive, but it is sufficient to establish a framework for reflection, where these different specificities interact strongly with the development of these territories. Although they reveal above all remarkable and fragile ecosystems, a bad waste management policy can cause irremediable damage environmentally, economically, and socially. It is therefore important to understand the implications of waste management on the island. This approach introduces an analysis, in order to express the communal specificities of the production of residual household waste, in order to bring contextualized elements of answers to the waste management strategy of Reunion Island. Indeed, dysfunctions have been noted in the collection and transfer process and more particularly, in waste disposal.

Biographical lives and organ conscription.

According to 2021 data, the United States' opt-in system of posthumous organ donation results in seventeen Americans dying each day waiting for vital organs, while many good undonated organs go to the grave with the corpse. One of the most aggressive, and compelling, proposals to resolve this tragedy is postmortem organ conscription, also called routine salvaging or organ draft. This proposal entails postmortem retrieval of needed organs, regardless of the prior authorization or refusal of the deceased or his family. The argument of most proponents of conscription relies heavily upon a denial of the possibility of posthumous harms. While I also deny the possibility of posthumous harms, I argue this denial fails to acknowledge other serious wrongs that could be done to the deceased person and his corpse. While the person can no longer be harmed, his life, in a roughly biographical sense, can be damaged. Humans highly value life in this sense, often more than biological life. Respect for this sense of life also informs appropriate treatment of particular human corpses, which already have special value beyond mere resource. I will argue that conscription proponents fail to appropriately value lives and human corpses. This failure can lead to multiple wrongs, among them a wrongful exploitation of the vulnerability of a person's life and corpse and a disrespect of persons. While it is possible that some biographical lives could be made better, or at least less bad, by conscription, the judgments such decisions would require make conscription bad policy.