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The American administrative state has become a cost-benefit state, at least in the sense that prevailing executive orders require agencies to proceed only if the benefits justify the costs. Some people celebrate this development; others abhor it. For defenders of the cost-benefit state, the antonym of their ideal is, alternately, regulation based on dogmas, intuitions, pure expressivism, political preferences, or interest-group power. Seen most sympathetically, the focus on costs and benefits is a neo-Benthamite effort to attend to the real-world consequences of regulations, and it casts a pragmatic, skeptical light on modern objections to the administrative state, invoking public-choice theory and the supposed self-serving decisions of unelected bureaucrats. The focus on costs and benefits is also a valuable effort to go beyond coarse arguments, from both the right and the left, that tend to ask this unhelpful question: “Which side are you on?” In the future, however, there will be much better ways, which we might consider neo-Millian, to identify those consequences: (1) by relying less on unreliable ex ante projections and more on actual evaluations; (2) by focusing directly on welfare and not relying on imperfect proxies; and (3) by attending closely to distributional considerations – on who is helped and who is hurt.

Summary. “Legal corruption” may strike many scholars as a contradiction in terms, but in fact the concept can be essential if we are to understand the sources and consequences of corruption issues in politics. The analytical definition of corruption, as such, is not settled. Legal standards likely are preferred to those based on social values, public opinion, or notions of the public interest. But those conceptions of corruption omit many kinds of activities that, while legal (or not clearly illegal), capitalize on abuses of public trust and official powers to produce outcomes regarded widely as unjust. Those sorts of activities help explain the recent rise of “populism” and its links to diffuse, but intense and broadly shared, senses of unfairness and elite excess. “Legal corruption” as a category has definitional problems of its own, but recent data show that it is worth close study and refinement because it offers critical insights into political issues that—while they may not fit traditional conceptions of corruption—nonetheless increasingly are important aspects of contemporary politics.

Summary. Describes, among other things, how elected officials have allowed political considerations to influence them to attack their own health officers during Covid-19.

Summary. Many medical experts — including members of his own staff — worry about whether Dr. Hahn has the fortitude and political savvy to protect the scientific integrity of the F.D.A. from Mr. Trump.

Summary. The country deserves stable institutions it can trust. President Trump can continue tweeting, but he should not be allowed to put our public health and our economy in jeopardy.

Summary. Reflects on whether physicians’ concerns about liability affect their willingness to offer honest apologies to patients when errors occur, and whether legal protections for these statements are helpful.

Summary. Voters' punishment of corrupt politicians at the ballot box is oftentimes modest, at best. Recent studies suggest that this minor electoral sanctioning is due to limited corruption information and to the relative weakness of integrity considerations in voting behavior. We demonstrate that anti-corruption measures taken by elite institutions – in this case, the Israeli Supreme Court – in close proximity to an election, can increase electoral sanctioning by enhancing the importance of integrity considerations, holding corruption information fixed. We utilize the variation in incumbent integrity across time and space to identify the effect of an exogenous anti-corruption decision by the Supreme Court on voting (Study 1). We further test this effect in a novel survey experiment, with mayoral performance satisfaction as the dependent variable (Study 2). Both studies demonstrate that judicial bodies have the capacity to influence electoral behavior by enhancing the importance of integrity considerations, holding corruption information constant.

"Corruption in Higher Education" published on 08 Jun 2020 by Brill | Sense.

Summary. This article sets out the emergent challenges and opportunities for developing effective and ‘future proof’ policy for regulating media plurality. This analysis is carried out against the backdrop of UK authorities’ 2018 public interest test of the proposed merger between 21st Century Fox and Sky, and the latest data on the UK media ownership landscape. That merger review established important precedents for plurality reform, particularly in its acknowledgement that digital intermediaries are not an inherently pluralizing force and that regulatory intervention is needed to prevent concentrations of agenda power, especially at the level of wholesale newsgathering. The article goes on to critically examine the existing regulatory approach to considerations of whether media mergers are in the public interest, especially in the light of mounting evidence of intensifying consolidation within and across news platforms. This article argues that effective plurality reform must start with new legislation that sets out indicative thresholds and detailed guidance on the meaning of plurality sufficiency. This will enable a proper assessment of plurality outside merger activity and could serve as the basis for periodic reviews, enabling regulators to respond effectively to the challenge of new technologies and dynamic market conditions. We also address problems in the plurality measurement framework developed by Ofcom, namely, the inclusion of digital intermediaries as news ‘sources’ in data collection and analysis. In light of findings from the Fox/Sky merger review, a more effective approach would be to reallocate consumption attributed to major intermediaries based on analysis of the actual news sources consumed via those platforms. Far from privileging intermediaries, this approach will provide a more robust basis on which to bring them into the fold of plurality regulation, namely, through the development of plurality standards for algorithm governance. Such an approach also reflects a new reality in which the interplay of gatekeeping and agenda power between traditional media and intermediaries is not a zero-sum game, amidst growing evidence that major intermediaries are serving to consolidate rather than diversify the news offer in favour of incumbent and mostly legacy publishers.

Summary. Describes, among other things, the potential for information collected through digital contact tracing apps to be misused by governments.

Summary. Describes national leadership failures in the Covid-19 response, which we attribute to the inappropriate influence of secondary considerations.

Summary. This paper examines how anti-corruption educational campaigns affect the attitudes of Russian university students toward corruption and academic integrity in the short run. About 2000 survey participants were randomly assigned to one of four different information materials (brochures or videos) about the negative consequences of corruption or to a control group. While we do not find important effects in the full sample, applying machine learning methods for detecting effect heterogeneity suggests that some subgroups of students might react to the same information differently, albeit statistical significance mostly vanishes when accounting for multiple hypotheses testing. Taking the point estimates at face value, students who commonly plagiarize appear to develop stronger negative attitudes toward corruption in the aftermath of our intervention. Unexpectedly, some information materials seem inducing more tolerant views on corruption among those who plagiarize less frequently and in the group of male students, while the effects on female students are generally close to zero. Therefore, policy makers aiming to implement anti-corruption education at a larger scale should scrutinize the possibility of (undesired) heterogeneous effects across student groups.

Summary. In 1978, Ermann and Lundman put forth the most sophisticated organizational deviance framework to date. They conceptualized organizational deviance as actions by an organization that interfere with the flow of benefits to actors with legitimate claims upon that organization. Further, they stipulated that these claims are protected by “controlling organizations.” We apply Ermann and Lundman’s framework to Congress and conclude that it is a deviant organization. We then contemplate the challenges to social control that congressional deviance poses, and contend that the “exempt status” enjoyed by Congress—in that it writes its own rules and polices itself—should be removed.

Summary. The policy allows mint, dessert and fruit flavors to continue to be sold in disposable e-cigarettes, prompting many teens to switch from Juul to those devices.

Summary. This article critically examines the social science literature on the disclosure of financial conflicts of interest, and argues that disclosure illuminates but does not eliminate corporate influence. To eliminate such influence, other structural reforms are necessary.

Summary. This article analyzes in detail the webs of relationships that opioid companies created with doctors, professional associations, universities, academic medical centers, and public health NGOs. The article shows how these relationships exacerbated the opioid crisis, and argues that the default relationship with opioid companies should be separation, not collaboration.

Summary. Our previous findings about how Brazilian voters react to corruption replicate in Argentina.

Summary. Blog post on replicable data science to tackle corruption.