Search Results (21)

African immigrants in the UK, especially in places such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester, contend with institutional racism, xenophobia, and socio-economic marginalisation. This study analyses how first- and second-generation African diaspora communities understand Jeremiah 29: 4–7 to create resilience and belonging. This study uses desktop research from African diasporic churches and analyses the UK’s Inclusive Britain Strategy (2023) to contend that biblical tales are reinterpreted to confront modern issues, including the Windrush Scandal and racial inequalities in NHS maternal care. The document emphasises the influence of African-led churches in formulating integration plans and promoting policy reforms in the UK. The findings indicate that African diaspora churches reinterpret Jeremiah 29: 4–5 to promote resilience and structural involvement in combating systemic racism and socio-economic disadvantage in the UK. The paper concludes by reinterpreting biblical tales to connect spiritual resilience with systemic activism, promoting hybrid identities, and integrating legislative reforms with community-driven initiatives for equity. The paper recommends the decolonisation of curricula, the enhancement of culturally competent healthcare training, the expansion of church–state collaborations, and the modification of legislation such as the Hostile Environment to foster inclusiveness. This study enhances academic discourse by merging diaspora theology with policy analysis, presenting an innovative framework for the theological examination of migration and elevating African agency within UK socio-political environments through decolonial hermeneutics and hybrid identity paradigms. Full article

Similarly to “wars” on drugs and terrorism, the fight against corruption has recently emerged as an attractive political tool. From Argentina and India to the United States and the Philippines, anti-corruption rhetoric has been successfully utilized by political outsiders to challenge establishment candidates. It remains less clear, however, whether anti-corruption enforcement allows incumbent politicians to hold on to power. In this article, we use a comparative subnational design to analyze the impact of corruption prosecutions on electoral support for the president of Russia. By combining original survey data on popular political attitudes and behaviors as well as citizens’ own participation in petty corruption with official statistics on corruption prosecutions, on the one hand, and data on media coverage of regional corruption scandals, on the other, we reveal a small negative effect of anti-corruptionism on voting for Putin. Our data allow us to adjudicate among several theoretical mechanisms that may lead to this effect. We find that, although ordinary Russians dislike corruption and expect the federal government to fight it, Putin’s anti-corruption enforcement has failed to convince the population that he is the right man for the job. Some Russians, we argue, take the Kremlin’s prosecutions as an indicator of the regime’s failure to prevent corruption among its agents, while others resent the administration for trying to score political points through hyped-up and punitive anti-corruptionism. Full article

This article focuses on moral judgements about the integrity of politicians expressed by various actors in public opinion in the wake of Dutch integrity scandals. The research assesses the link between a supposed act on the one hand and moral judgements of the actors involved on the other in an effort to improve our understanding of how political integrity is perceived and how it is used in public and political debate. This exploratory study takes three Dutch case studies of supposed conflicts of interest. Each case offers a view on judgements concerning political integrity from various media outlets, focused on three different levels: judgements of personal integrity, role integrity and political system integrity. This novel theoretical construct serves to see whether and, if so, how moral judgements about political integrity are linked to systemic (dis)satisfaction with government and politics. In addition—and focusing on the Dutch context only—the article assesses how people’s supposed place on a political ideological spectrum from left to right might influence their moral judgement. The article underscores the theoretical notion that the meaning of political integrity is inherently subject to varied interpretation and context of place and time. This also has important practical implications for managing and improving political integrity. Full article

In this paper, we study the Greek wiretappings scandal, which was revealed in 2022 and attracted significant attention from the press and citizens. Specifically, we propose a methodology for collecting data and analyzing patterns of online public discussions on Twitter. We apply our methodology to the Greek wiretappings use case and present findings related to the evolution of the discussion over time, its polarization, and the role of the Media. The methodology can be of wider use and replicated to other topics. Finally, we publicly provide an open dataset and online resources with the results. Full article

Despite local instances of single arbitrators’ corruption not having proven completely absent from arbitration chronicles over the last decades, one may safely argue that until very recently, no scandal had ever been severe enough to shake the foundations of arbitration communities on a regional, let alone global, level. However, this eventually occurred in 2019 in Peru as the outcome of one of the countless parallel investigations stemming from the 2016 Odebrecht corruption saga, propagated from Brazil to the whole of Latin America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and beyond, and labelled by many as the largest scandal of its kind in recent history. Peru’s vicissitudes revolved around a number of corrupted arbitrators who systematically accepted bribes and political favours from Odebrecht in return for favourable awards upholding the repricing of public-procurement contracts. This story can teach us about more than the simple evidence that arbitrators, too, might fall for corruption; criminologically, it suggests that arbitration as a dispute-resolution mechanism can find itself embedded within regionalised networked systems of corruption-prone regulatory capture, and even play an active role in their normalised perpetuation. To prevent this, while having regard for safeguarding the independence and confidentiality of arbitral proceedings to the highest possible extent, the enactment of context-sensitive binding regulation is advised. Full article

As commonly used in its moral sense I will, for the purposes of this paper, take the concept of “conscience” to be the inherent ability of every healthy human being to perceive what is right and what is wrong and, on the strength of this perception, to control, monitor, evaluate and execute their actions. Such values as right or wrong, good or evil, just or unjust, and fair or unfair have existed throughout human history and are also shaped by an individual’s cultural, political and economic environment. The medieval penitential literature offers just one such historical snapshot. These manuals or guides for confessors, including prayers, lists of questions to be asked by the confessor, and penances to be assigned for various sins were an integral part of the practice of private penance which began in the Celtic Church and later spread through Europe with the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon missions. Penitential books for use by confessors in private penance appeared in the sixth through ninth centuries. These texts were not as a rule decreed by episcopal synods. Their authority generally rested on the reputation of their compiler or editor. Public penances were assigned for public sins that caused scandal for the church. Private penances were assigned for private sins or matters of conscience. The Penitentials were generally more flexible than the churches’ ancient canonical penitential system which they largely replaced. While later European Penitentials tended to provide more complete guidance for the confessor instead of mere lists of rules and penalties; such instruction is not entirely absent from the earlier Irish texts and ancillary documents. Thus, the goal of penance in the early middle ages was not only sacramental but also didactic. It would have been an occasion to inculcate Christian beliefs, an opportunity to model proper Christian behaviour and by extension a key part of the formation of conscience. As was the case with later expressions of casuistry (Etym. Latin casus, case, or problem to be solved) the purpose of the penitential literature was thus to adapt and apply the unchangeable norms of Christian morality to the changing and variable circumstances of human life albeit in somewhat rudimentary fashion. As such this literary genre and the pastoral practices stemming from it are a valid and worthy object of any historical study and theological analysis concerning the ‘formation of conscience.’ Full article

In November 1986, a Lebanese weekly published an article stating that high level officials within the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan had sold weapons to an embargoed Iran and diverted the profits to counterrevolutionary forces fighting the government of Nicaragua. Both of these facts violated domestic and international law. What ensued was the Iran-Contra scandal that almost ended Reagan’s presidency and jeopardized the credibility of U.S. foreign policy. Drawing from periodicals from the U.S. and international presses, as well as U.S. Congressional records, this article demonstrates that studies on the origins of Iran-Contra have overlooked one critical cause of the scandal—a lawsuit that Nicaragua presented against the United States at the International Court of Justice in April 1984. While the case “Nicaragua v the United States of America” played an important causal role in the history of the Iran-Contra affair, its importance goes beyond mere causality. As this article demonstrates, the impact that this international lawsuit had on the origins of Iran-Contra elucidates the influence of public opinion on shaping domestic and foreign policy, on the extent to which foreign policy is driven by domestic political realities, and on the importance of international courts as the theaters where battles for legitimacy are waged. Full article

Politicians applying general rules as a reaction to local failures has contributed to mushrooming control in the public sector, which has in turn spurred higher transactional costs and motivation crowding among public employees. Drawing on a qualitative case study in a Danish municipality, this article explores the prospects and challenges for politicians of breaking the vicious circle of escalating control by adopting stewardship ideals into their leadership of the public employees. The results show that stewardship offers new opportunities for politicians, enabling better diagnosis of control problems, more robust control solutions, as well as a pronounced mobilization of employee support for those solutions. However, political competition, political discontinuity after elections, scandals in the press, resistance in the administration, and more diffuse decision-making processes pose potential challenges for politicians striving to tackle the problem of escalating control through stewardship. Full article

After almost every economic crisis and corporate scandal, political actors announce the need for stricter regulatory measures for financial markets and companies, in an attempt to appease their voters and defend their political agenda. Regarding the latest international financial crisis, the EU responded, among other things, with comprehensive regulation of the European audit market. In the context of auditor rotation, after 17 June 2016, the duration of audit engagements should not exceed a maximum of 10 years. In this paper, we therefore investigate whether there is empirical evidence behind the 10-year threshold—or is it simply arbitrary? Our aim is to evaluate the audit market reform by the European Union (EU) (Regulation (EU) No 537/2014 and Directive, 2014/56/EU) related to the objective of improving the quality of audits. Therefore, our article addresses the most crucial element of this reform, the implementation of a mandatory audit firm rotation for public interest entities (Regulation (EU) No 537/2014, Article 17). Based on a unique dataset of 11,834 firm observations from all listed companies within the EU between 2008 and 2017, we provide for the first time a discussion basis for the assessment of audit market interventions by the EU. Hence, we compare the new maximum durations with average audit tenure in the particular member states. Even where we present only descriptive results, our results at least indicate that the “magic number” 10 (years) could be more the result of a political process—i.e., a consent between the European institutions—rather than evidence based. Therefore, our findings shall serve as a first starting point in the discussion of a vast and interdisciplinary research field. Full article

The proliferation of social media platforms changed the way people interact online. However, engagement with social media comes with a price, the users’ privacy. Breaches of users’ privacy, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, can reveal how the users’ data can be weaponized in political campaigns, which many times trigger hate speech and anti-immigration views. Hate speech detection is a challenging task due to the different sources of hate that can have an impact on the language used, as well as the lack of relevant annotated data. To tackle this, we collected and manually annotated an immigration-related dataset of publicly available Tweets in UK, US, and Canadian English. In an empirical study, we explored anti-immigration speech detection utilizing various language features (word n-grams, character n-grams) and measured their impact on a number of trained classifiers. Our work demonstrates that using word n-grams results in higher precision, recall, and f-score as compared to character n-grams. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for future work on hate-speech detection and social media data analysis in general. Full article

Despite the well-developed Chinese National Immunization Program, vaccine hesitancy in China is rising. As part of the response, Chinese scholars have studied determinants and proposed solutions to vaccination hesitancy. We performed a scoping review of Chinese literature (2007–2019), drawn from four Chinese databases. We mapped relevant information and presented a systemic account of the proposed determinants and responses to vaccine hesitancy in China. We identified 77 relevant studies that reveal four approaches to vaccine hesitancy. Most Chinese studies define vaccine hesitancy as a problem of vaccine safety and vaccine incident response and place accountability on the level of governance, such as regulation deficits and inappropriate crisis management. A first minority of studies tied vaccination hesitancy to unprofessional medical conduct and called for additional resources and enhanced physician qualifications. A second minority of studies positioned vaccination hesitancy as a problem of parental belief and pointed to the role of media, proposing enhanced communication and education. Chinese literature ties vaccine hesitancy primarily to vaccine safety and medical conduct. Compared to international research, parental concerns are underrepresented. The Chinese context of vaccination scandals notably frames the discussion of vaccination hesitancy and potential solutions, which stresses the importance of considering vaccination hesitancy in specific social and political contexts. Full article

Despite its 17-century-long history, Korean Buddhism is currently undergoing a crisis. In addition to the declining number of lay practitioners, Korea’s largest Buddhist order, the Jogye Order (K. Daehan Bulgyo Jogyejong, hereafter “JO” or “the order”), is facing a significant drop in monastic recruitment. Compounding this crisis, a series of scandals within the order’s monastic leadership have caused widespread loss of confidence among the order’s laity. In addition to calls for greater financial transparency and moral accountability for JO monastics, many reformers are demanding greater lay participation within the order’s political hierarchy, challenging the centuries-old roles assigned to monastics and laity. However, these challenges have failed to produce any practical changes within the order while its monastic establishment continues espousing rhetoric reinforcing monastic authority and its supremacy over the laity. In light of these crises, this paper will conduct a perfunctory examination of the attitudes the JO’s monastic establishment exhibits towards its lay supporters and the roles it expects for them. Utilizing, in part, previously unpublished internal JO documents, this paper will begin by investigating monastic attitudes expressed towards the laity in the order’s 2015 General Meeting of the Four-fold Assembly as well as the ensuing debate over these roles in Korea’s Buddhist media. This paper will then explore how the laity are viewed within the JO’s lay education program, additionally examining how the needs and concerns of the laity are addressed in introductory textbooks used within this program. While not exhaustive, by examining this variety of sources, this paper seeks to clarify the roles the JO’s monastic establishment expects for its lay supporters and interrogate whether such attitudes are sustainable as the order attempts to respond effectively to the crises it currently faces. Full article

In recent decades, a growing body of literature focused on the effects of scandals on congressional elections. The studies concluded that scandals decrease candidates’ vote totals, and that certain types of scandals have a more deleterious effect than others. Virtually all of these studies focus on House elections. The obvious differences between the two chambers calls into question the applicability of these findings for Senate elections. This study examines the impact that incumbent scandals had on senatorial elections from 1972 to 2016. Scandals are categorized based on the nature of the transgression in order to determine if the type of scandal made a difference. The results reveal that senators seeking reelection while confronting a scandal suffered a 4% decrease in the popular vote. Scandals involving political misdeeds, financial improprieties, and controversial statements hurt incumbents the most. Scandals also attracted challengers who spent more money against the incumbents. Full article

Credible audit quality is a precondition for a firm’s sustainability. External auditors offer assurance with regard to the uncertain factors that can jeopardize a firm’s sustainability and provide audit opinions that help investors assess risk. After the global crisis and accounting scandals, mandatory audit firm rotation has been implemented globally. However, few studies have investigated either the cost or the benefit of mandatory audit firm rotation. Prior studies provide only indirect evidence on the effects of audit firm tenure on audit quality/perceived audit quality. By discussing prior arguments, we examine how investors perceive the implementation of mandatory audit firm rotation in Korea. Using a unique and direct setting to examine our research question, we analyze the relationship between firms with mandatorily switched audit firms and the cost of equity capital from 2006 to 2008. We find that the mandatory change in the auditors has a negative association with the cost of equity capital. The results are robust to using the arithmetic mean of the cost of equity capital, lagged control variables, and the manufacturing industry effect. The results indicate that investors perceive that mandatory audit firm rotation provides an environment for qualified audits by enhancing auditor independence and skepticism, and thus decreases the cost of equity capital. This study helps to improve our understanding of the impact of mandatory audit firm rotation the information risk evaluations and provides political implications for policy makers by showing the benefit of mandatory audit firm rotation. Full article

The claim of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, that it was possible to influence voting behavior by using data mined from the social platform Facebook created a sudden fear in its users of being manipulated; consequently, even the market price of the social platform was shocked.We propose a case study analyzing the effect of this data scandal not only on Facebook stock price, but also on the whole stock market. To such a scope, we consider 15-minutes prices and returns of the set of the NASDAQ-100 components before and after the Cambridge Analytica case. We analyze correlations and Mutual Information among components finding that assets become more correlated and their Mutual Information grows higher. We also observe that correlation and Mutual Information are mutually increasing and seem to follow a master curve. Hence, the market appears more fragile after the Cambridge Analytica event. In fact, as it is well-known in finance, an increase in the average value of correlations augments the systemic risk (i.e., all the market can collapse as a whole) and decreases the possibility of allocating a safe investment portfolio. Full article