Adoption of Tobacco 21: A Cross-Case Analysis of Ten US States

Despite the recent push for Tobacco 21 legislation in the US and the national adoption of Tobacco 21, there is a paucity of data on the process of policy adoption. To explore the key factors that served as facilitators or challenges to the passage of state T21 laws that apply to the sale of all tobacco products to anyone under 21 years of age, we conducted a comparative, cross-case study in ten states that adopted Tobacco 21 between 2016 and 2019. Stakeholders from selected states were identified via snowball sampling, and interviews were conducted from November 2018 to March 2020. Three primary factors emerged as facilitators to the passage of state T21 laws: (1) increased attention on e-cigarettes as the product driving an overall increase in youth tobacco use and depiction of an “e-cigarette epidemic”, (2) having at least one influential policy entrepreneur or champion, and (3) traction from other states or local municipalities passing T21 legislation. Challenges to T21′s success included (1) influence of the tobacco industry, (2) the bill’s low ranking among legislative priorities, and (3) controversy among advocates and policymakers over bill language. As e-cigarette rates spiked, T21 bills became legislative priorities, traction from other successful efforts mounted, and ultimately, the tobacco industry flipped from opposing to supporting T21 laws. Despite these favorable headwinds, advocates struggled increasingly to pass bills with ideal policy language.

Bargaining and Strategic Voting on Appellate Courts

Many appellate courts and regulatory commissions simultaneously produce case dispositions and rules rationalizing the dispositions. We explore the properties of the American practice for doing this. We show that the median judge is pivotal over case dispositions, although she and others may not vote sincerely. Strategic dispositional voting is more likely when the case location is extreme, resulting in majority coalitions that give the appearance of less polarization on the court than is the case. The equilibrium policy created in the majority opinion generically does not coincide with the ideal policy of the median judge in either the dispositional majority or the bench as a whole. Rather, opinions approach a weighted center of the dispositional majority but often reflect the preferences of the opinion author. We discuss some empirical implications of the American practice for jointly producing case dispositions and rules.

Everybody to Count for One? Inclusion and Exclusion in Welfare-Consequentialist Public Policy

Which individuals should count in a welfare-consequentialist analysis of public policy? Some answers to this question are parochial, and others are more inclusive. The most inclusive possible answer is ‘everybody to count for one.’ In other words, all individuals who are capable of having welfare – including foreigners, the unborn, and non-human animals – should be weighed equally. This article argues that ‘who should count’ is a question that requires a two-level answer. On the first level, a specification of welfare-consequentialism serves as an ethical ideal, a claim about the attributes that the ideal policy would have. ‘Everybody to count for one’ might succeed on this level. However, on the second level is the welfare-consequentialist analysis procedure used by human analysts to give advice on real policy questions. For epistemic reasons, the analysis procedure should be more parochial than ‘everybody to count for one.’

KEBIJAKAN HUKUM PIDANA DALAM PENANGGULANGAN DESTRUCTIVE FISHING PADA REZIM PEMBANGUNAN BERKELANJUTAN

Abstract, The criminal law policy in dealing with destructive fishing is currently primum remedium. However, in its development the criminal law policy in overcoming destructive fishing experiences several obstacles and is not yet in line with the concept of sustainable development. Considering that sustainable development is one of the principles in fisheries management, it is necessary to make adjustments between criminal law policies and sustainable development. Therefore this research aims to study and analyze the ideal criminal law policy in overcoming destructive fishing in the sustainable development regime. This research is a doctrinal law research using a statutory approach, analytical approach, conceptual approach, and case approach. The results showed that the ideal policy of criminal law in overcoming destructive fishing in sustainable development regimes is to make arrangements for sanctions actions that lead to social, economic improvement and repair damage to fish resources and their ecosystems due to destructive fishing practices. Sanctions for actions are more restorative, anticipatory, and educational so that they can reduce the degradation of fish resources and the environment. Thus, the balance between the use of fish resources and sustainable development can be realized. Keywords: Destructive Fishing, Criminal Law, Sustainable Development Intisari, Kebijakan hukum pidana dalam penanggulangan tindak pidana destructive fishing saat ini bersifat primum remedium. Namun dalam perkembangannya kebijakan hukum pidana dalam menanggulangi destructive fishing mengalami beberapa hambatan dan belum selaras dengan konsep pembangunan berkelanjutan. Mengingat pembangunan berkelanjutan merupakan salah satu asas dalam pengelolaan perikanan, maka perlu dilakukan penyesuaian antara kebijakan hukum pidana dengan pembangunan berkelanjutan. Oleh karena itu penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengkaji dan menganalisis kebijakan ideal hukum pidana dalam penanggulangan destructive fishing pada rezim pembangunan berkelanjutan. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian hukum doktrinal dengan menggunakan pendekatan perundang-undangan, pendekatan analitis, pendekatan konseptual, dan pendekatan kasus. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kebijakan ideal hukum pidana dalam penanggulangan destructive fishing pada rezim pembangunan berkelanjutan yakni dengan melakukan pengaturan terhadap sanksi tindakan yang mengarah pada perbaikan sosial, ekonomi dan perbaikan kerusakan sumber daya ikan dan ekosistemnya akibat praktik destructive fishing. Sanksi tindakan lebih bersifat restoratif, antisipatif, dan mendidik sehingga dapat mengurangi degradasi sumber daya ikan dan lingkungan. Dengan demikian, keseimbangan antara pemanfaatan sumber daya ikan dan pembangunan berkelanjutan dapat terwujud. Kata Kunci: Destructive Fishing, Hukum Pidana, Pembangunan Berkelanjutan

Decentralized MCTS via Learned Teammate Models

Decentralized online planning can be an attractive paradigm for cooperative multi-agent systems, due to improved scalability and robustness. A key difficulty of such approach lies in making accurate predictions about the decisions of other agents. In this paper, we present a trainable online decentralized planning algorithm based on decentralized Monte Carlo Tree Search, combined with models of teammates learned from previous episodic runs. By only allowing one agent to adapt its models at a time, under the assumption of ideal policy approximation, successive iterations of our method are guaranteed to improve joint policies, and eventually lead to convergence to a Nash equilibrium. We test the efficiency of the algorithm by performing experiments in several scenarios of the spatial task allocation environment introduced in [Claes et al., 2015]. We show that deep learning and convolutional neural networks can be employed to produce accurate policy approximators which exploit the spatial features of the problem, and that the proposed algorithm improves over the baseline planning performance for particularly challenging domain configurations.

Child Protection Policy for Victims of Sexual Crimes

The study aims to investigate the ideal policy in realizing child protection and identifying the steps taken by the regional government in responding to victims of sexual crimes. The normative judicial method was used to analyse the data collected onsupporting factors and obstacles associated with victims of sexual crimes in Cirebon. The result showed that the government is still stuck in dealing with this occurrence. Therefore, the government needs to identify ways to deal with this problem.

Public Policy Pragmatism on Special Economic Zone in Tanjung Lesung, Pandeglang Regency

The policy of Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Tanjung Lesung has provided various special facilities to investors, such as tax breaks, business use rights, and building rights for 80 years. This research is discussing whether this is an ideal policy or only pragmatism. It is an attempt to discover and analyze whether the Special Economic Zone policy in Tanjung Lesung is an ideal policy that has met the public interest. Using qualitative methods, researchers conducted an interview with the government, Regional House of People's Representatives, and society. The results of this study indicate that Special Economic Zone policy is divided into three conditions: conditions that describe policy pragmatism such as ensuring fair competition among hotel and lodging business actors, respecting people who do not want to sell their land, both domestic and foreign investors have the same rights and obligations; conditions that do not describe policy pragmatism such as rules that cannot be applied; and conditions that describe half pragmatism such as formal tourism education aimed for vocational schools only.

A Baseline ABM of Party Competition

This chapter specifies the “baseline” agent-based model of dynamic multiparty competition, which derives from an article published by (Laver 2005). This assumes that each voter has in mind some personal ideal “package” of policy positions and supports the political party that offers the policy package closest to this. The dynamic system at the heart of the model is as follows: voters support their “closest” party in this sense; party leaders adapt the policy packages they offer in light of the revealed pattern of voter support; voters reconsider which party they support in light of the revealed pattern of party policy packages; and this process continues forever. This recursive model describes policy-based party competition as a complex system, and the baseline model specifies three decision rules that party leaders may deploy when they choose party policy positions in such a setting. These rules are Sticker (always keep the same position), Aggregator (move policy to the centroid of the ideal policy positions of your current supporters), and Hunter (if your last policy move increased your support, make another move in the same direction; or else change heading and move in a different direction).

The Acceptance of Party Unity in Parliamentary Democracies

The central argument of this book is that voting unity in European legislatures is not primarily the result of the ‘disciplining’ power of the leadership of parliamentary parties, but rather the result of a combination of ideological homogeneity through self-selection into political parties and the calculations of individual legislators about their own long-term benefits. Despite the central role of policy preferences in the subsequent behaviour of legislators, preferences at the level of the individual legislator have been almost entirely neglected in the study of parliaments and legislative behaviour. The book measures these using an until now under-utilized resource: parliamentary surveys. Building on these, the book develops measures of policy incentives of legislators to dissent from their parliamentary parties, and show that preference similarity amongst legislators explains a very substantial proportion of party unity, yet alone cannot explain all of it. Analysing the attitudes of legislators to the demands of party unity, and what drives these attitudes, the book argues that what explains the observed unity (beyond what preference similarity would explain) is the conscious acceptance by MPs that the long-term benefits of belonging to a united party (such as increased influence on legislation, lower transaction costs, and better chances of gaining office) outweigh the short-terms benefits of always voting for their ideal policy outcome. The book buttresses this argument through the analysis of both open-ended survey questions as well as survey questions on the costs and benefits of belonging to a political party in a legislature.