Sociology of law in Britain

This article reviews the state of law and society studies in Britain by revisiting the arguments raised by CM. Campbell and Paul Wiles in the late 1970s. It argues that the divide they identified between theoretically-oriented “sociology of law” and a-theoretical or empiricist “socio-legal studies” has widened, discusses some of the cultural and institutional reasons, and makes some practical recommendations.     

Erklärt die Rational Choice Theorie die Ungleichheit der Bildungschancen?

There are several plausible arguments which make it obvious to apply Rational Choice Theory to the process of educational opportunities and equality. Looking more closely at an empirical application or RC theory, several serious problems emerge: They concern the operationalization of the variables, the explanatory power of the central variables related to Subjective Expected Utility, the systematic omission of important variables relating to individual persons and their identity, and to social structural and institutional factors; the latter seem to be much more important than those indicated by RC approaches.     

Risk and Causality in Newspaper Reporting

The study addresses the textual representation of risk and causality in news media reporting. The analytical framework combines two theoretical perspectives: media frame analysis and the philosophy of causality. Empirical data derive from selected newspaper articles on risks in the Göta älv river valley in southwest Sweden from 1994 to 2007. News media content was coded and analyzed with respect to causal explanations of risk issues. At the level of individual articles, this study finds that the media provide simple causal explanations of risks such as water pollution, landslides, and flooding. Furthermore, these explanations are constructed, or framed, in various ways, the same risk being attributed to different causes in different articles. However, the study demonstrates that a fairly complex picture of risks in the media emerges when extensive material is analyzed systematically.     

Impaired Metacognitive Capacities in Individuals with Problem Gambling

Impaired insight into behavior may be one of the clinical characteristics of pathological gambling. In the present study, we tested whether the capacity to evaluate accurately the quality of one’s own decisions during a non-gambling task was impaired in problem gamblers. Twenty-five problem gamblers and 25 matched healthy participants performed an artificial grammar-learning paradigm, in which the quality of choice remains uncertain throughout the task. After each trial of this task, participants had to indicate how confident they were in the grammaticality judgements using a scale ranging from 1 (low confidence) to 7 (high confidence). Results showed that (i), problem gamblers’ performance on the grammaticality test was lower than controls’; (ii) there was a significant correlation between grammaticality judgments and confidence for control participants, which indicates metacognitive insight and the presence of conscious knowledge; (iii) this correlation was not significant in problem gamblers, which suggests a disconnection between performance and confidence in this group. These findings suggest that problem gamblers are impaired in their metacognitive abilities on a non-gambling task, which suggests that compulsive gambling is associated with poor insight as a general factor. Clinical interventions tailored to improve metacognition in gambling could be a fruitful avenue of research in order to prevent pathological gambling.     

State‐Building Taxation for Developing Countries: Principles for Reform

The practical implications of adopting a state‐building approach to tax reform need clarity now that the international community has come to recognise the importance of taxation as a ‘state‐building’ process. This article seeks to address this gap. It identifies seven operating principles (political inclusion; accountability and transparency; perceived fairness; effectiveness; political commitment to shared prosperity; legitimisation of social norms and economic interests; and effective revenue‐raising) as the essential characteristics for state‐building taxation, and offers recommendations on potential reforms to implement them, illustrated by DFID/World Bank tax reforms in Yemen, Sierra Leone and Vietnam.