Policy Ought Research Articles

Explaining Networks through Mechanisms: Vaccination, Priming and the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Crisis

There is an ongoing debate about whether and how the existence of policy networks can be used to explain policy outcomes. Making use of the concept of priming, it is argued here that network structures create differential opportunities for interest groups to persuade decision makers to act in particular ways. In conditions of uncertainty where there is a pressure to take immediate decisions, priming can help us to understand why some groups are more persuasive than others. This argument is developed against the backdrop of a particular puzzle: the British government's refusal to use emergency vaccination during the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001. This decision is routinely accounted for in terms of the bargaining strength of the National Farmers Union. Against this it is argued that farmers' influence over government policy ought to be explained primarily in terms of the way they were able to prime particular arguments and so help persuade the government to act in particular ways.

The competitive real exchange-rate regime, inflation and monetary policy

This article argues that in a stable and competitive real exchangerate(SCRER); macroeconomic regime, the exchange-rate component candrive up inflation through the very mechanisms that stimulate high rates ofgross domestic product and employment growth; to offset this pressure,fiscal and monetary policies will have to be used to control aggregatedemand. It finds that in an exchange-rate regime of this type, monetarypolicy has a degree of autonomy that can be exploited to apply activemonetary policies. It analyses the degree to which monetary policy canbe used to control aggregate demand and concludes that it cannot bearthe main responsibility for this, which means that fiscal policy ought to bethe main instrument for controlling aggregate demand.

CSR, Transparency and the Role of Intermediate Organisations

Transparency is a crucial condition to implement a CSR policy based on the reputation mechanism. The central question of this contribution is how a transparency policy ought to be organised in order to enhance the CSR behaviour of companies. Governments endorsing CSR as a new means of governance have different strategies to foster CSR transparency. In this paper we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of two conventional policy strategies: the facilitation policy and the command and control strategy. Using three criteria (efficiency, freedom and virtue) we conclude that both strategies are defective. Most attention is paid to the facilitation strategy since governments nowadays mainly use this. In evaluating this strategy we analyse the Dutch case. As an alternative we introduce a third government policy: the development of a self-regulating sub-system. By construing an analogy with the historical development of corporate financial disclosure, we point out that the vital step in the creation of a self-regulating subsys- tem is the creation of strong informational intermediate organisations.

DYNAMIC OUTPUT RESPONSE REVISITED: THE INDIAN CASH CROPS

Diverse instruments have been used to encourage developing agriculture. In the process, billions of dollars have been spent on providing incentives to peasants. Given scarce resources, an important concern has been the issue of what policy instruments to emphasize. In this regard, useful policy information can be gleaned from the role of expected profits (revenue and input prices), assets (irrigation and infrastructure), and relevant risks, in evoking peasant response. Using panel data for the period 1967/1968 to 1999/2000 pertaining to seven major Indian cash crops cultivated across 14 major states, we find strong evidence of a differential producer response in the post‐liberalization phase, although the important variables per se are much the same. Our results suggest that the preferred policy ought to emphasize availability of irrigation, affordable fertilizer, and rural infrastructure, rather than incessant increases in output prices.

Self-Regulation of Mobile Marketing Aimed at Children: An Overview of the Spanish Case

Mobile phones have changed consumer and company behaviour and today they constitute the most direct means of communication between them. Many groups are targeted through promotion campaigns using mobile phones. Children, who in the future will be the largest consumer of new technologies, are one of these groups. Given that current Spanish legislation does not clearly establish what company policy ought to be in relation to promotions aimed at children, self-regulation of the mobile telephone sector is imperative. Spain is already among the developed countries in which one out of every two children has a mobile phone. Firms should pay special attention to this target group. Firstly, because promotional campaigns aimed at children have their peculiarities and secondly because of the legal and ethical protection that children deserve. Company policy, in this sense, should include the drawing up of Codes of Conduct. This article begins by analysing the child segment as mobile phone consumers. It then highlights the legal and ethical problems of mobile campaigns aimed at children, and looks at some studies carried out by the European Commission and the Spanish government. Finally, this paper draws some conclusions about the measures companies should adopt and offers practical help for self-regulation of the mobile telephone sector in Spain and, if possible, in other countries (especially other European countries within the framework of the agreement signed by the leading European mobile operators in 2007 to develop self-regulatory codes by 2008). Moreover, future research needs to centre on whether these measures increase child protection.

Toward a Gender-Inclusive Conception of Intimate Partner Violence Research and Theory: Part 1 - Traditional Perspectives

Some three decades after the first shelters for battered women were established in England and the United States, public discourse and public policy on intimate partner violence (IPV) has framed the problem in terms of male perpetration and female victimization. Ideally, policy ought to be informed by unbiased research. However, IPV research has, until very recently, almost exclusively been concerned with the physical and psychological abuse of women by their male partners, and has ignored or marginalized alternative lines of research that suggest female-perpetrated partner abuse is a significant social problem. The reluctance to investigate these issues in an objective and scientific manner has been due to the prevailing patriarchal conception of intimate partner violence, a paradigm based on radical feminist sociopolitical ideology. In this paper, neglected lines of research are reviewed, including studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s on offender personalities, self-defense, the effects of IPV and other contextual factors, emotional abuse and control, and the dynamics of high-conflict and violent couples.

Educational Research and the Restructuring of the State: The Impacts of Parliamentary Devolution in Wales

This article explores the relationships between educational research and the state. However, the aim is not to construct idealised versions of what the relationship between research and educational policy ought to be, but rather to examine the ways in which the state is able to influence the priorities of educational research through its role as the key funder of such research and as a principal consumer of its results. Empirically, the analysis is located in a particular historical context: the restructuring of the United Kingdom (UK) through the devolution of powers from the UK central government to a Parliament in Scotland and an Assembly in Wales, each with its devolved executive. In particular, the effects of this devolution on educational research are analysed through an examination of the transformation of educational research in universities; and of the ways in which the Welsh Assembly Government has used research in the processes through which educational policies are developed. Processes of globalisation have created complex interactions between civil society and different levels of government in many societies, which have had important consequences for the ways in which education policies are produced and the roles played by different forms of ‘expert’ knowledge (including educational research). Accordingly, the significance of the analysis extends beyond the specific, historical context in which it is located.

The need for dynamic drug policy

Drug use in a population varies dramatically over time in no small measure due to nonlinear feedback among factors endogenous to the drug system. This suggests that drug policy ought likewise to be dynamic, varying the mix of strategies over time as drug use waxes and wanes. A growing literature that models drug “epidemics” mathematically supports this hypothesis and offers perspectives that may break policy logjams. For example, supply control may be most effective early, in the explosive growth stage of an epidemic. Conversely, treatment and measures to mitigate the consequences of dependent use and flagrant drug markets may have their comparative advantage later, in the endemic stage. Fully harnessing the power of dynamic drug policy will require more research and collection of new types of data, but the promise is worth the effort.

Enforcement and Information Strategies

In this paper we show that, if the relation between the actual monitoring probability and the extent of compliance in the regulated population is concave to the actual probability axis, providing perfect information raises compliance rates, relative to what might be called the “keep-them-ignorant” option. We also illustrate that a quite simple method is available for checking whether, in a particular setting with a particular class of regulated parties, the full information or the keep-them-ignorant policy ought to be pursued.

Environmental Attitudes and their Relation to the Dominant Social Paradigm Among University Students In New Zealand and Australia

This paper develops a causal model of environmental attitudes using measures of the dominant social paradigm of Western industrial societies. Four components of the DSP framework are examined with regard to environmental attitudes and perception of change using a sample of university students from Australia and New Zealand. The results indicate that one's belief in the DSP has a negative effect on both environmental attitudes and perception of change necessary to ameliorate degradation of the environment. Thus, while public policy favors increasing awareness of and interest in the environment, policy instruments may remain ineffective in producing lasting change if the components of the DSP remain unchanged. It is argued that public policy ought to be directed at changing the DSP so that its negative effects will be minimized.

The Political Import of Intrinsic Objections to Genetically Engineered Food

Many people object to genetically engineerehd (GE) food because they believe that it is unnatural or that its creation amounts to playing God. These objections are often referred to as intrinsic objections, and they have been widely criticized in the agricultural bioethics literature as being unsound, incompatible with modern science, religious, inchoate, and based on emotion instead of reason. Many of their critics also argue that even if these objections did have some merit as ethicalobjections, their quasi-religious nature means that they are entirely irrelevant when interpreted aspolitical objections regarding what public policy ought to be. In this paper, we argue that this widespread view is false. Intrinsic objections have much more political import than has previously been recognized, and indeed the requirements of political liberalism and its associated idea of liberal neutrality, once properly understood, protect intrinsic objections from many of the most common objections. That is, policy-makers may not legitimately base public policy on grounds that are inconsistent with intrinsic objections, even when they believe those objections to be flawed in the ways mentioned above. This means that in the context of a political debate about GE food, the discussion should not center on the substantive merits of the intrinsic objections themselves but rather on the appropriate political norms for achieving democratically legitimate policy on issues that touch people’s deepest religious and moral beliefs.

Provider incentives and prescribing behavior in Europe

European policy makers have increasingly moved from primarily focusing on supply-side regulation of pharmaceutical costs to offering incentives for providers’ prescribing behavior. The nature and implementation of these provider-focused policies are as diverse as the health systems in which they are enacted. Some policies have undergone significant alteration since their initial implementation as health system design has changed and experience has yielded greater knowledge of the types of policy that achieve results in practice. Evaluation of prescribing incentive policies in several European countries is constrained by a lack of comprehensive information systems tracking prescriptions. Analysis of policy experience suggests that policy ought to be formulated with clarity and transparency of objectives, also keeping in mind the ethical concerns associated with rewards and fines for prescribing levels when the professional aspirations of doctors include maintenance of quality care and some degree of autonomous decision making.

Off with their Heads: The Need to Criminalize some forms of Scientific Misconduct

Improvement in policy for the management of scientific misconduct has been slow. While assurance of due process at the ORI level is now in place, similar protections at the institutional level and institutional responsibility for further oversight and a workplace where the responsible conduct of research can be practiced have not yet been addressed. In contrast, policy regarding human subject protection has evolved rapidly to reflect firmer norms, with decisive priority given to subject protection over scientific or social needs. Perhaps because scientific misconduct policy has the potential to harm the careers of individual scientists and harms to individual subjects are thought to be indirect, the scientific community has been successful in blocking every move toward testing more rigorous regulation. The mantras that scientists can discipline their own, and the price of competitive science is some level of scientific misconduct are not persuasive. The standards by which science is judged should not be an exception to those governing others who deal with the public's money and have a duty to the public interest.

We All Lost the Iraq War

LIKE MANY CANADIANS, I tuned in on evening of 17 March 2003 to watch President George W. Bush deliver his much-anticipated ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. Unlike most Canadians, I watched speech in US itself--to be precise, from Harvard University. About midway through speech, I began to surf for some alternative, but encountered same face--serious, sombre and smirk-free--on channel after channel. Until, that is, I reached niche public affairs channel, C-SPAN2. Here, to my surprise, I encountered taped coverage of Prime Minister Jean Chretien announcing and defending Canada's decision not to join the coalition of willing.Tucked away on C-SPAN2, Canadian position on war in Iraq was largely invisible in US. So, too, was I. Almost no one I encountered knew anything about Canadian position, and those who did, more often than not, preferred it to their President's bellicosity anyway. William Buckley once famously quipped that he would rather be governed by first 100 names in Boston telephone directory than by 100 Harvard professors. Predictably enough, support for war was much weaker on campus than in American population as a whole. Indeed, at very moment President Bush was appearing on national television to issue his ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, Harvard's daily undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, was polling students on their attitudes towards war. The irony is that, in this respect, Harvard students appeared more like Canadians than Americans. A solid majority of Harvard undergraduates (some 56 per cent) opposed war(1)--consistent with Anglophone opinion in Canada (including my own, I should add) and clearly out of step with broader, national sentiment in US.At one level, it was easy for me as a Canadian to watch war unfold: there were no anti-Canadian protests, no Canadian jokes, and no lectures about need to support our allies. Yet, for all this, I did feel like an outsider--even in cocoon that is the republic of Cambridge. This essay is a personal and somewhat desultory attempt to understand my unease about war.PEACE IS PATRIOTICLexington, Massachusetts is one of those lovely New England towns that has become a close suburb of Boston--not because urban sprawl created it, but because an expanding population met it. Like so many of Boston's suburbs, it retains its town centre, its common, and its array of white-steepled churches. Lexington (together with its neighbour Concord) stands out, however, for its mythological status as place where American Revolution is said to have begun. And, it stands out in my memory, as place where I first really felt a sort of disquiet about prospects of war in Iraq. Driving through Lexington one Saturday in late January with my family, I noticed a man standing at a major crossroads holding high a homemade placard for all to see, a revolutionary flag anchored in snowbank beside him. Judging from medals on his coat, he was a war veteran; sign read: Peace is Patriotic.The man on Lexington Common understood an important truth about current American foreign policy since 9/11: that it has wrapped itself tightly in fabric of patriotism. One need only think of legal centrepiece of homeland security--the Patriot Act--to see how powerful connection between security and patriotism have become. The slogan Peace is Patriotic was a kind of pre-emptive strike against argument that opposition to war was unpatriotic. But what of revolutionary flag? Presumably, man on Lexington Common wanted to make related point that patriotism is more than obedience to a President's orders as Commander in Chief. It is, rather, loyalty to a set of enduring, culturally entrenched principles that have a higher standing than pronouncements and orders of this or that Commander in Chief. For man on Lexington Common, ideals of Revolution, symbolized so powerfully by a flag, were true and original principles of American patriotism against which current foreign policy ought to be judged. …

Normative behavioral economics

This paper addresses the question of why, in spite of its recent success, behavioral economics does not influence most discussions about how economic policy ought to be made. Failing to penetrate into contemporary discourse on leading policy issues is a serious problem, because behavioral techniques often point to policy prescriptions that are at odds with the prescriptions which follow from models using more standard behavioral assumptions. By comparing how the universe of possible policy implications changes when different methodological approaches are used, this paper demonstrates a systematic link between methodology and the range of policy prescriptions that can be socially desirable. Because of this link, the methodological multiplicity of behavioral economics, and the ideological pluralism which it supports, favor the use of normative behavioral economics. This follows from the basic economic principle of diversification: a policy prescription that reflects averaging over a number of distinct kinds of errors (one for each methodology) is less likely to wander far off target than one generated by a single method.

Tax and the Philosopher's Stone

In the Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice (Oxford 2002), Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel discuss the relationship between tax policy and contemporary political philosophy. Murphy and Nagel essentially argue for the priority of political philosophy over tax policy. For them, there is little room for tax policy per se; they argue that tax policy ought to serve the ends of a philosophical conception of justice. They maintain that questions of fairness are, in and of themselves, irrelevant to tax policy, which should be understood as a slave to philosophical conceptions of justice. While we embrace Murphy and Nagel's central claim that it makes little sense to engage arguments over tax policy without an antecedently held conception of distributive justice and that questions of tax policy must be consistent with that conception, we argue that some aspects of their argument are ultimately too strong. Traditional metrics of tax policy analysis such as the benefit principle and the equal sacrifice principle are neither completely irrelevant to tax policy, nor inconsistent with all versions of political liberalism. We distinguish between "pre-institutional" and "post-institutional" conceptions of liberalism, and between "maximizing" and "non-maximizing" conceptions of distributive justice. We argue that while Murphy and Nagel's argument is powerful in the context of maximizing, post-institutional conceptions, it is less persuasive in the context of pre-institutional versions of liberalism and, perhaps, in the context of non-maximizing versions of post-institutional liberalism. Finally, we conclude by arguing that the central claims of Murphy and Nagel's argument are, to some extent, in tension with what they take to be their view's practical applications.

Housing Quality and the Provision of Accessible Homes

This paper describes and evaluates the reactions and responses of house-builders in England and Wales to government regulation concerning disabled people's physical access to new housing. The paper begins by discussing the role and relevance of government regulation in addressing issues of housing quality and, in particular, the housing needs of disabled people. Then, referring to postal survey and interview data, the impact and implications of Part M of the building regulations, set up to ensure a degree of access for disabled people to new housing, is assessed. The paper concludes by discussing different ways in which housing policy ought to address the concerns of housebuilders in relation to Part M while, simultaneously, addressing the, as yet, unmet needs of disabled people for good quality, accessible, housing.

Economic policy making in evolutionary perspective

Economic policy making is discussed from three different angles: the political economy of actual policy making (“what policy does do”), the analysis of policy instruments for given ends (“what policy could do”), and the debate on policy goals and their legitimization (“what policy ought to do”). Center stage in the evolutionary perspective is new, positive and normative knowledge which is unfolding during the policy making process and in its aftermath. It is argued that this implies regularities and constraints which extend and modify the comparative-static interpretations of public choice theory, economic policy making theory, and social philosophy.

The Case for gTLD Auctions: A Framework for Evaluating Domain Name Policy

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is charged with designing and implementing policies for names, which function as address identifiers for computers on the Internet. Domain names can have tremendous economic value, as do the registration services that control the databases that resolve domain names into numerical Internet addresses. Economic value is partly the consequence of scarcity in the domain name space. Incumbents strive to perpetuate scarcity so as to preserve the values of their domain names and name services. ICANN has struggled to establish a coherent domain name policy, especially for generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), for almost the entirety of its 5-year existence. In this policy paper we first present a framework for evaluating Internet domain name policy in general and gTLD policy in particular. We demonstrate that the domain name system (DNS) is what economists call a good and not a good. We then show that, because of what economists call effects, root service, the part of the domain name system that handles the TLDs, is a natural monopoly. At the first level of analysis, we establish that gTLD policy ought to take into account these two fundamental economic facts: (1) domain name service is a private good, and (2) root service is a natural monopoly created by networking effects. We next argue for a specific set of conclusions about gTLD policy. In particular, we demonstrate that there is a compelling case for allowing the market to operate in the creation of new gTLDs. This could be accomplished through a variety of mechanisms, including a rule of first occupation or through an auction. Although the creation of gTLDs should allow for the operation of market forces, it does not follow that ICANN itself should act as a profit-maximizer. Instead, we reason that, because ICANN is a non-profit corporation and because it is the trustee for a natural monopoly, ICANN ought to act in the public interest. We conclude that ICANN should structure the expansion of the root in a way that insures the stability and efficiency of root service. We offer a specific proposal for an auction of new gTLDs, and show that this approach offers substantial advantages over current domain name policy. Our conclusions are reinforced by a set of comparisons between the policy questions faced by ICANN as both a participant in and regulator of the DNS and with analogous policy questions faced by market participants and regulators in other sectors of the telecommunications system. In particular, we argue that there are important insights to be gleaned and lessons to be learned by comparing domain name service with broadcasting and telephone service.

Evidence-Based Health Care: Benefits and Barriers

The evidence-based policy approach – the view that social policy ought to be based upon supporting evidence that the policy works (and why it works) – is currently in vogue. In this article we reflect upon one aspect of the evidence-based approach: the use of quantitative evidence in health care decision-making. In particular, we discuss both the potential usefulness of quantitative evidence in this context, and the barriers to the appropriate use of such evidence at the decision-making level.