Normative Implications Research Articles

Public Opinion and Presidents’ Unilateral Policy Agendas

AbstractUnilateral power is an important source of policy change for contemporary presidents. In contrast with scholarship that examines the institutional constraints on presidents’ exercise of unilateral authority, I consider presidents’ unilateral behavior in a framework of political accountability. I argue that presidents have incentives to incorporate the public's policy priorities in their unilateral agendas. I examine this account using panel data on executive orders and public opinion across issue areas from 1954 to 2018. Across a variety of model specifications and estimation strategies, I find evidence that patterns of executive action reflect the public's policy priorities. Presidents issue greater numbers of unilateral directives on issues that gain public salience, particularly on issues that are more familiar to the public and when issuing more policy‐significant directives. These findings suggest that accountability mechanisms structure how presidents exercise unilateral power and have normative implications for considering presidential unilateralism in a separation‐of‐powers system.

Best Matching Scenario Earthquake: an alternative paradigm to disaggregation of PSHA

Disaggregation of Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment (PSHA) is commonly employed to estimate the most likely magnitude and distance values (Mw - R) contributing to the hazard at the site of study. Nevertheless, however defined, probabilistic disaggregation techniques are affected by several ambiguities. Among the others, they require the selection of a specific branch of the logic tree used to perform the PSHA, and of a specific structural period, which may be of limited use in some engineering applications, such as for structures with strong participation of higher modes and highly affected by non-linear response, as well as site response analyses and most of the geotechnical engineering applications. In order to overcome some of these drawbacks, this paper introduces a new possibility aiming at estimating a Best Matching Scenario Earthquake (BMSE) defined as the earthquake, specified in terms of (Mw - R), the median spectral ordinates of which best approach a target uniform hazard spectrum (UHS) for the range of structural periods of interest. A more general form of the BMSE can be introduced, i.e., in terms of (Mw – R –) instead of (Mw – R – =0), but the paper shows that excellent results can be obtained in most cases along the Italian territory, by limiting the search to =0. In this article, after highlighting the assumptions behind the method, a few examples of the application of the BMSE with reference to the current seismic hazard model of Italy are shown. Our results show the potential effectiveness of the best matching method that gives in most cases scenarios which are consistent with historical observations. Besides normative implications, such as the selection of input motions for non-linear time history analyses, the BMSE may provide a rationale support for using seismic ground shaking scenarios in a probabilistic framework.

An Event Study of Perindopril (Servier) Reverse Payment Patent Settlements' Case: Is Krka Truly an Exception Within the Pay-For-Delay Commission Decision?

The article aims to fill the gap in the literature on reverse payment patent settlements between patent-holders and generic pharmaceutical firms in EU competition law. Based on the event study of the Perindopril (Servier) case of the European Commission, the research provides a novel assessment of the welfare effects of Commission enforcement and the following judiciary decision on the legality of Commission sanctions. Within the case, the analysis paid particular attention to the generic corporation Krka because Commission fined Krka for the settlement with Servier that did not include the reverse payment, and the Commission decision did not survive the scrutiny of the General Court. The relative economic power of Krka in the perindopril market is also a factor that, together with the enforcement effect assessment, provides a different perspective of the event study's normative implications to the existing research.

A RETOMADA DO DEBATE SOBRE POLÍTICA INDUSTRIAL: LIMITAÇÕES E UMA SUGESTÃO DE TIPOLOGIA NORMATIVA A PARTIR DO DIÁLOGO ENTRE AS CORRENTES NEOSCHUMPETERIANA E DESENVOLVIMENTISTA

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to propose a typology of industrial policy based on the dialogue between neo-Schumpeterian and developmentalist frameworks that incorporates in its normative guidelines the transformations in the techno-productive paradigm in recent decades and their consequent impacts on the competitive, innovative and accumulation dynamics of industrial activities. The article proposes a theoretical discussion with normative implications based on the analysis of the literature on the transformations in the nature of two objects: the changes in the techno-productive paradigm from the 2000s to the efforts towards the promotion of Industry 4.0. As a result, an attempt is made to theoretically justify the design of industrial policies that shift from overly general normative guidelines towards the ones based on the simultaneous understanding of the combination of three specificities of activities supported: (i) levels of capabilities of agents-technological, productive and organizational, (ii) the analysis of the potential degree of effectiveness of industrial policies and (iii) the degree of transversality of the promoted activities.

There Is No Such Thing as Expected Moral Choice-Worthiness

AbstractThis paper presents some impossibility results for certain views about what you should do when you are uncertain about which moral theory is true. I show that under reasonable and extremely minimal ways of defining what a moral theory is, it follows that the concept of expected moral choiceworthiness is undefined, and more generally that any theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty must generate pathological results.

Egalitarianism and Economic Rents in Distributional Inequalities

The concept of economic rent is a prominent theoretical anchor for many sociologists studying distributional inequalities. However, its normative assumptions and implications have been undertheorized, leaving its connection to the reasons why we might object to economic rents unclear. In this article, I scrutinize economic rents through the two dominant egalitarian frameworks in political philosophy: luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism. I find that rents as typically conceptualized—as deviations from a competitive market outcome—fail to align with either normative framework, operating in some cases orthogonally to their concerns but mostly contradictory to them. Ultimately, economic rents provide an anti-egalitarian distributional metric, the perfectly competitive market, to pursue the egalitarian aim of eliminating structural advantages. The concept thereby fails to capture the way that distributional inequalities are normatively problematic or even what constitutes inequality in the first place. I conclude by using relational egalitarianism as a starting point for better grounding the concept of economic rent.

Perceptions of Jews in the Bosnian Franciscan Literary Tradition: From Anti-Judaism To Anti-Semitism?

The literary opus of the Bosnian Franciscans is interesting in many ways from the imagological point of view: both concerning self-perceptions and hetero-perceptions, which were constructed based on the importance of religion as an element of community identity. Analyzing the imagotype potential of religious and ethnic divisions, the paper reconstructs the controversies between Christianity and Judaism, as well as linguistic elements, folk customs, and contemporary reality. At the source of the Bosnian Franciscan literature, at the beginning of the 17th century, we find Divković, who, as is often the case in pre-modern culture, relates the religious Other to the ethnic Other. This tradition is continued by the 19th century’s Franciscan chroniclers (Lastrić, Benić, and Bogdanović), while Martić, Jukić, and Knežević, who stepped into the era of the rebirth of Croatian Illyrianism, we can trace various normative implications of the relationship between political, ethnic, racial and religious identity. Since the Bosnian Franciscans of that time, we remember the ecclesiastical and intellectual elite among the Catholic population in Bosnia, the imagotypical statements about Jews in their works reflect both the Christian heritage through history and the Eurocentric view of the Others. Therefore, reconstructing the Bosnian Franciscans’ perceptions and ideas about the Other and the Different is, at the same time, reconstructing the genesis of the narrative about the Other, i.e., social and religious stereotypes and prejudices, as well as the continuity of talking about oneself by talking about the Different.

Trajectories and regimes in research versus knowledge evaluations: Contributions to an evolutionary theory of citation

Citation analysis can provide us with models of the evolutionary dynamics in scholarly and scientific communication. We propose to distinguish between institutional research evaluation (usually, ex post) and knowledge evaluation ex ante, in relation to directionality in citation analysis. We discuss the theoretical literature on communication systems which distinguishes between information and meaning, in which the concept of redundancy plays an important role as measure of the potential of a communication system. This is the basis for a model of knowledge dynamics which differentiates between observable variation and latent selection environments. We use indicators at the journal level and analyze the citation environments of journals in both the cited and citing directions. Among journals, the citing direction can be analyzed by co-citation and indicates the integration of knowledge from different fields. The cited direction can analogously be analyzed by bibliographic coupling and represents the extent to which the cited journal has become relevant for different disciplines, hence indicates knowledge diffusion. We apply this analysis on three different case studies of journal-journal relations: a small scale study of the journal Public Understanding of Science, a random sample of 100 journals, and a large-scale analysis of the set of JCR 2016 journals. Combined, the results seem to confirm the hypothesis that interdisciplinarity cannot be captured by one-dimensional citation analysis. Both citing and cited directions are relevant for knowledge and research evaluations, respectively. We raise the question whether indicators of interdisciplinarity can be developed by combining both directions in citation analysis, indicate further research, and discuss the normative implications of our preliminary results.

Acceptable objectives of empirical research in bioethics: a qualitative exploration of researchers’ views

BackgroundThis is the first qualitative study to investigate how researchers, who do empirical work in bioethics, relate to objectives of empirical research in bioethics (ERiB). We explore reasons that make some objectives more acceptable, while others are deemed less acceptable.MethodsUsing qualitative exploratory study design, we interviewed bioethics researchers, who were selected to represent different types of scholars working in the field. The interview data of 25 participants were analyzed in this paper using thematic analysis.ResultsFrom the eight objectives presented to the study participants, understanding the context of a bioethical issue and identifying ethical issues in practice received unanimous agreement. Participants also supported other objectives of ERiB but with varying degrees of agreement. The most contested objectives were striving to draw normative recommendations and developing and justifying moral principles. The is-ought gap was not considered an obstacle to ERiB, but rather a warning sign to critically reflect on the normative implications of empirical results.ConclusionsOur results show that the most contested objectives are also the more ambitious ones, whereas the least contested ones focus on producing empirical results. The potential of empirical research to be useful for bioethics was mostly based on the reasoning pattern that empirical data can provide a testing ground for elements of normative theory. Even though empirical research can inform many parts of bioethical inquiry, normative expertise is recommended to guide ERiB. The acceptability of ambitious objectives for ERiB boils down to finding firm ground for the integration of empirical facts in normative inquiry.

Digital Humanitarians and International Lawyers: Worlds apart or Two Sides of the Same Coin?

The field of humanitarian assistance is undergoing a computational revolution, but international lawyers are slow to realize it. Thanks to the deployment of data analytics, humanitarian agencies are increasingly able to forecast where and when a crisis will strike, whom it will affect, and what needs it will create. These developments enable new and promising models of anticipatory response, but also raise concerns in terms of risk management and irresponsible experimentation. Yet, so far, international lawyers have been strikingly silent about the normative implications of digital humanitarianism. Seeking to fill the gap, this article assesses the impact of data- driven humanitarian response on the practice of international law, and sets out some broad parameters for dialogue and mutual engagement between the two fields of expertise. That engagement requires, first, an understanding of the normative character of humanitarian data practices. Based on that understanding, international lawyers can contribute to the regulation of digital humanitarian networks and help steer the system towards greater accountability.

Conspiracism and Civility

Conspiracism has become a topical issue in democracies around the world, eliciting debate in political theory and philosophy regarding its normative and practical implications, especially its potential negative effects on democratic systems. In this article, we analyse conspiracism through the lens of civility. The public virtue of civility plays a key role in democratic politics and in public life more generally, by helping to sustain democratic institutions and facilitating social interaction despite disagreement. If conspiracism undermines civility and contributes to incivility, as we argue in this article, that might have distinctively deleterious effects on democratic life. We begin by unpacking the concept of civility into three key dimensions: (a) civility as politeness, (b) moral civility and (c) justificatory civility. We then illustrate how conspiracism can contribute to incivility and harm democracy in each of the three dimensions but also how it can sometimes be harmless or even helpful for democracy.

Digital sovereignty and Internet standards: normative implications of public-private relations among Chinese stakeholders in the Internet Engineering Task Force

ABSTRACT (How) are Chinese actors contributing to increased state influence in Internet standard-making? In its open and private-based dimension, the Internet is possibly the twenty-first century’s epitome of the liberal international order in its global spatial dimension. Therefore, many see deep normative challenges deriving from the rise of powerful, non-liberal actors such as China. In particular, China and Chinese stakeholders are often portrayed as supporters and promoters of a multilateral Internet governance model based on digital sovereignty aimed at completely replacing the existing multistakeholder, private-based model. Academic views on this topic have become less dichotomous throughout the years, especially as China’s position on it has become more nuanced. However, this academic and policy debate is still open. This article analyses Chinese stakeholder actions in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the key venue for Internet standard-making. Through network analysis, this article maps the engagement of Chinese stakeholders in selected working groups of the IETF over time. Through expert interviews, this article interprets the drivers, evolution, and impact of such engagement. This research yields two main findings: first, it shows that the Chinese government does not have full control of its domestic private actors, among which there is both collaboration and conflict. Second, it concludes that Chinese stakeholders have increasingly accepted the existing functioning of IETF standard-making as they grew influential within it.

The Foundations of EU Administrative Law as a Scholarly Field: Functional Comparison, Normativism and Integration

Functional comparison of administrative laws – Development of EU administrative law based on a state-matrix of general principles – Jürgen Schwarze’s approach – Choices of object, objectives, method, assumptions and normative implications – Structural features of the EU administration versus the binary liberty-authority of core principles of national administrative law – Liberal normativist approach – Contemporary critical examination of the legacy of comparative administrative law

Towards a Radical Feminist Resignification of Vulnerability: A Critical Juxtaposition of Judith Butler’s Post-Structuralist Philosophy and Martha Fineman’s Legal Theory

This research article aims to theoretically reconstruct a positive feminist conceptualization of vulnerability via a thorough systematization and critical comparison of Martha Fineman’s socio-legal philosophy and Judith Butler’s post-structuralist ethico-political theory. Through the introduction, the reader becomes familiar with numerous interdisciplinary re-articulations of vulnerability within the realms of contemporary feminist theory. The second subsection illustrates Fineman’s vulnerability approach in terms of an alternative ontological paradigm deriving from the recognition of our fundamentally fragile universal condition. It explores Fineman vulnerability theory’s normative implications in relation to the legitimate political organization of democratic societies and the fair function of their central institutions. The third subsection systematizes the dual texture of the Butlerian radicalization of vulnerability as an existential condition of irreducible relationality and a socio-historically contextualized and differentially allocated distribution of precarity among differently gendered, racialized, sexualized and nationalized subjects. Incidentally, the article elucidates the differentiations between the Butlerian conceptions of vulnerability, precariousness, precarity and dispossession and additionally investigates Butler’s revolutionary constellation of vulnerability and resistance. In the third subsection, this article designates the similarities and divergences between the two vulnerability frameworks and critically evaluates their epistemological capacity to reconstitute a politically empowering conceptualization of vulnerability within the heart of contemporary feminist theory. To that end, the author develops a critical assessment of Fineman theory’s epistemological, political and conceptual limitations in regard of its gender-blind universalistic structure. The author conclusively argues that Butler’s two-fold vulnerability perspective entails more nuanced theoretical conceptions and more empowering political devices for contemporary feminist struggles.

Algorithmic decision-making in financial services: economic and normative outcomes in consumer credit

Consider how much data is created and used based on our online behaviours and choices. Converging foundational technologies now enable analytics of the vast data required for machine learning. As a result, businesses now use algorithmic technologies to inform their processes, pricing and decisions. This article examines the implications of algorithmic decision-making in consumer credit markets from economic and normative perspectives. This article fills a gap in the literature to explore a multi-disciplinary approach to framing economic and normative issues for algorithmic decision-making in the private sector. This article identifies optimal and suboptimal outcomes in the relationships between companies and consumers. The economic approach of this article demonstrates that more data allows for more information which may result in better contracting outcomes. However, it also identifies potential risks of inaccuracy, bias and discrimination, and ‘gaming’ of algorithmic systems for personal benefit. Then, this article argues that these economic costs have normative implications. Connecting economic outcomes to a normative analysis contextualises the challenges in designing and regulating ML fairly. In particular, it identifies the normative implications of the process, as much as the outcome, concerning trust, privacy and autonomy and potential bias and discrimination in ML systems. Credit scoring, as a case study, elucidates the issues relating to private companies. Legal norms tend to mirror economic theory. Therefore, this article frames the critical economic and normative issues required for further regulatory work.

Microcontextual considerations in ouster clause analysis: A comparative study of parallel trends in the United Kingdom and Singapore

Abstract The classic legal approach to legislative ouster clauses in the common law was articulated by the House of Lords in Anisminic Ltd. v. Foreign Compensation Commission. However, recent developments in both the United Kingdom and Singapore indicate a judicial desire to shift away from that approach towards a more flexible analysis of an ouster clause’s effect, centered on the rule of law. This article highlights the significance of those parallel developments, especially given the starkly differing constitutional contexts shaping the approach to ouster clauses in the two jurisdictions. Capitalizing on these trends, it proposes a comparative assessment of the materiality of various microcontextual considerations in ouster clause analysis in the two jurisdictions—considerations such as the nature of the subject matter and the characteristics of the decision-maker—and inquires into the normative implications in each jurisdiction of these developments in ouster clause doctrine.

Depoliticization of politics and power: Mouffe and the conservative disposition in postfoundational political theory

Postfoundational political theory has been criticized for being incapable of establishing a normative basis for politics. This is because postfoundationalism's conception of the “political” as a radical contingency disproves the existence of an objective ground that would make it possible to evaluate political movements from a neutral position. In this article, I counter this critique by distinguishing between Chantal Mouffe's political theory and other postfoundational theories based on their respective normative implications. This is done by explicating how Mouffe's way of conceptualizing the political implies a conservative political disposition. In order to accomplish this, I develop an understanding of the conservative political disposition, which refers to the normative idea that police power is necessary for producing and upholding a social order. Through an analysis of Carl Schmitt's theory, I elaborate that the conservative disposition is an attempt to justify the depoliticization of social relations. On the basis of this idea that some political theories have normative implications that are in line with the conservative disposition, I examine postfoundationalism. My argument is that while Mouffe's theory does imply the idea that police power is necessary, this is not the case with other postfoundational theories. On the contrary, other postfoundational democratic theories categorically deny that a form of power, namely police power, would be necessary.

The Perils of Regulating COVID–19: Insights from Kirznerian Entrepreneurship and Ostromian Polycentricity

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments at every level in the United States made various policies to reduce the spread of the disease and to mitigate pandemic-related economic impacts. Such policies included stay-at-home orders that shuttered “non-essential” businesses and economic stimulus programs that provided financial assistance. Using Israel Kirzner’s insights from “The Perils of Regulation,” we argue that local, state, and federal COVID-19 policies have had and will continue to have long-run spillover effects and other negative unintended consequences. Pandemic policies have stifled entrepreneurial discovery and created opportunities for superfluous discovery, thus directing entrepreneurial efforts in directions that would not have existed otherwise. The normative implications of this analysis are that policymakers should better account for the wide variety of seen and unseen costs of policies that are likely to have many negative unintended consequences, regardless of the intentions behind such policies. One of the most effective ways to limit the perils of regulation is polycentric governance systems. With multiple, overlapping decision-making centers, polycentric systems allow for policymakers to experiment with different policy approaches and learn from other jurisdictions. Polycentric systems also limit the spillover effects of negative unintended consequences onto other jurisdictions.

Do they just know more, or do they also have different preferences? An exploratory analysis of the effects of self-reporting serious health problems on health state valuation

BackgroundHealth state valuation is often conducted by people valuing either only their own health state (experience-based valuation) or several stylised states (hypothetical valuation). The approach used can affect the elicited values, but it is not clear whether this is caused by different understandings of the states (an “information mechanism”) and/or by different opinions of the states (a “preference mechanism”). Justifying privileging the valuations of those with the relevant health state experience solely because they are better informed is insufficient when their opinions differ. This study proposes a new framework to examine the effect of having health problems on health state valuation by distinguishing “within-dimensional” effects (which can be due to better information or due to differences in opinion) and “cross-dimensional” effects (which must be due to differences in opinion). MethodsSecondary data from the UK that valued EQ-5D-5L using Discrete Choice Experiments with duration (DCETTO) are remodelled controlling for whether a respondent self-reports serious (viz., severe or extreme) problems in “pain or discomfort” (PD) or “anxiety or depression” (AD). The main analysis uses respondents who have serious PD or serious AD alongside matched respondents who do not, and assumes constant proportional time trade-off. ResultsSelf-reporting serious PD or serious AD problems has no within-dimensional effect on health state preferences. However, self-reporting serious AD problems has negative cross-dimensional effects on the utility of having any problem in PD, which suggests that the preference mechanism is present. A similar pattern holds when all available (unmatched) data are used and when constant proportional time trade-off is relaxed. ConclusionsFindings consistent with the preference mechanism indicate that those with serious health problems may have different opinions on the value of health states compared to the rest of the population, which has normative implications for the debate on which values to use.

Is There a Tradeoff Between Policy Responsiveness and Government Effectiveness? Evidence From the American States

Citizens in a democracy expect elected officials will be responsive to their political opinions and govern in an effective way that improves their quality of life. However, a government that is too responsive to public sentiments may, in practice, be unable to govern effectively and promote societal well-being. This study is the first attempt to date to empirically evaluate this important potential tradeoff. Using newly developed measures of public opinion and public policy liberalism in the American states over time and a diverse battery of societal outcomes as well as multiple estimation strategies and timeframes, I find a weak and directionally inconsistent statistical relationship between policy responsiveness and government effectiveness. These findings have significant normative and theoretical implications because they suggest there is not a tradeoff between a government responding to its citizens’ opinions and it governing effectively by promoting citizens’ well-being.