Triumph of the Will: A memorial in film

Despite Hitler’s efforts to transform Berlin into Germania, the capital of the new world he envisioned and which he believed would bear comparison with Ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Rome, there is little in the way of monumental architecture to bear witness to that ambition. Though there is only limited public evidence of Hitler’s architectural hubris present either in stone or steel, the same cannot be said of film. Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece Triumph of the Will (1935) (German: Triumph des Willens) is the most famous propaganda film of all time and a staple of university film schools and secondary schools across the world. At the time of its creation, celluloid motion picture film was a relatively new technology and the documentary format a nascent art form. Nevertheless, it was lauded almost immediately as a visually stunning imagining of the new regime and its leader. Though the film maker was subsequently reviled for her Nazi associations, as an art work her film has retained an almost miasmic aura that justifies continued re-assessment of its standing as a monument to the Nazi regime and the horrors perpetrated in its name.

Mapping the DMAIC Tool in the Public Sector

The quality and continuous improvement of products and processes continue to play an essential role in the business context, with the need for more responsive, flexible, and responsive organizations. Among the many tools and methodologies employed, DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control), linked to Six Sigma, is used to improve existing products or organizational processes. Nevertheless, if in the private sector, the adoption and practice of these tools and methodologies are widely used, in the public sector, in turn, the applicability of DMAIC is little employed. In this perspective, and using the methodological resource of systematic literature review, this article aims to identify the applicability of the DMAIC tool in the public sector. The review indicates that while DMAIC still has low public evidence, the tool can be efficiently applied across the industry, enabling positive results for organizations, reducing costs, delivering efficient processes, and increasing customer satisfaction.

20. Applications: police powers

Without assuming prior legal knowledge, books in the Directions series introduce and guide readers through key points of law and legal debate. It discusses European Convention law and relates it to domestic law under the HRA. Questions, discussion points, and thinking points help readers to engage fully with each subject and check their understanding as they progress and knowledge can be tested by self-test questions and exam questions at the chapter end. This chapter focuses on the authority of the police in the United Kingdom and on issues which are affected by human rights law under the HRA. Police powers are exercised with the authority of both common law and statute—the latter (e.g. the Police and Public Evidence Act 1984) must be interpreted for compatibility with Convention rights so far as section 3 HRA allows. The police are considered a ‘core’ public authority, and policing is self-evidently a public function. The following sections also discuss the extensive powers of the police in relation to, in particular, Article 5, regarding arrest and detention, and Article 8, regarding searches and seizure. English and Welsh courts adjudicating on these powers have generally found them to be compatible with Convention rights at the general level. Some important cases, such as over the retention, storage and use of personal data, have led to disagreements with Strasbourg and consequential changes to the law.

Election polling is not dead: A Bayesian bootstrap method yields accurate forecasts

We present a new Bayesian bootstrap method for election forecasts that combines traditional polling questions about people’s own intentions with their expectations about how others will vote. It treats each participant’s election winner expectation as an optimal Bayesian forecast given private and public evidence available to that individual. It then infers the independent evidence and aggregates it across participants. The bootstrap forecast outperforms aggregate national polls in the 2020 U.S. election, as well as the forecasts based on traditional polling questions posed on large national probabilistic samples before the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections. The bootstrap forecast puts most weight on people’s expectations about how their social contacts will vote, which might incorporate information about voters who are difficult to reach or who hide their true intentions. Beyond election polling, the new method is expected to improve the validity of other social science surveys.

Regulatory Costs of Being Public: Evidence from Bunching Estimation

Many disclosure and internal governance regulations for U.S. public firms trigger when a firm’s public float exceeds a threshold. Consistent with firms seeking to avoid costly regulation, we document significant bunching around multiple regulatory thresholds introduced from 1992 to 2012. We present a revealed preference estimation strategy that uses this behavior to quantify regulatory costs. Our estimates show that various disclosure and internal governance rules leads to a total compliance cost of 4.3% of the market capitalization for a median U.S. public firm. We apply the estimated costs to firms’ public-private choice and show that regulatory costs significantly impact private firms’ decisions to go public, while have limited effects on public firms’ decisions to go private.

Decentralization of Political Design in China

Political posters, banners, and similar objects are extremely common in China. This article uses political design from contemporary China, particularly emphasizing the government's Chinese Dream campaign, to analyze what at first appears to be a paradox. The subjects of the various campaigns and the language they use are mandated by the central government and promoted through central and local publicity departments. However, the graphic aspects of these campaigns, such as the choice of colours, images, layout, and typeface, are much less strictly controlled, and are decided by local governments or authorities. This makes political design in China decentralized. Decentralized design is inconsistent with the principles of global marketing and with the PRC's reliance on set forms of political discourse, both of which rely on the assumption that uniformity will lead to more effective communication of messages and persuasion of the public. Evidence from local design campaigns indeed shows that Chinese political posters are often designed hastily and without expertise, resulting in strange and unpersuasive images. Despite this, the article shows that decentralized design is not paradoxical. This is largely because the Chinese party-state uses propaganda as a method of "signalling" its overall power, more than as a tool of indoctrination or persuasion about particular topics. The central government's reliance on incentives and metrics to regulate local authorities means that the production of propaganda is also a way in which local governments can signal their loyalty to the Centre.

Civil Society and Freedom of Association

A right to freedom of association can both be justified to a diverse public, and exercises of that right help create and sustain social and political trust in the real world. Freedom of association can be justified to multiple points of view, both liberal and illiberal, to protect the pursuit of diverse forms of life. It creates real trust by putting people in contact with other members and with nonmembers. It creates trust for the right reasons because the recognition, protection, and exercise of the right of association serve as public evidence of the trustworthiness of association members and governments that recognize and respect and protect the rights of associations members. Since freedom of association creates trust for the right reasons, it can help arrest falling trust and increasing polarization.