No abstract

Even though a citizen participation component is included in nearly every major local government planning and policy initiative, most citizen participation techniques have been judged to be less than adequate tools for informing policy makers about the people's will. Recently, having planners or policy analysts work closely with long‐standing citizen panels composed of a randomly selected sample of community members has been proposed as one appropriate response to many of the inadequacies of traditional techniques. In this article, staff from a municipal government policy analysis unit describe and critique a yearlong citizen panel project focused on developing a transportation master plan in a university community. They argue that panels can overcome many of the limitations to effective citizen participation. The authors also suggest that panels can work well, but only if policy analysts assume more pro‐active and advocacy roles than those routinely found in local government.

Research summary: Corporate scandals of the previous decade have heightened attention on board independence. Indeed, boards at many large firms are now so independent that the CEO is “home alone” as the lone inside member. We build upon “pro‐insider” research within agency theory to explain how the growing trend toward lone‐insider boards affects key outcomes and how external governance forces constrain their impact. We find evidence among S&P 1500 firms that having a lone‐insider board is associated with (a) excess CEO pay and a larger CEO‐top management team pay gap, (b) increased likelihood of financial misconduct, and (c) decreased firm performance, but that stock analysts and institutional investors reduce these negative effects. The findings raise important questions about the efficacy of leaving the CEO “home alone.” Managerial summary: Following concerns that insider‐dominated boards failed to protect shareholders, there has been a push for greater board independence. This push has been so successful that the CEO is now the only insider on the boards of more than half of S&P 1500 firms. We examine whether lone‐insider boards do in fact offer strong governance or whether they enable CEOs to benefit personally. We find that lone‐insider boards pay CEOs excessively, pay CEOs a disproportionately large amount relative to other top managers, have more instances of financial misconduct, and have lower performance than boards with more than one insider. Thus, it appears that lone‐insider boards do not function as intended and firms should reconsider whether the push towards lone‐insider boards is actually in shareholders' best interests. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It is assumed that parent-infant interaction reflects the operation of a selfregulatory component within each member of the dyad and of an interactive component that affects each member differently. Models are considered in which the measure of behavior is (a) continuous, in which it is assumed that the self-regulatory process is one of damping deviations from a baseline, while the interactive component is a function of the difference in behavioral levels between members, and (b) discrete, in which it is assumed that the selfregulatory process is one of generating and damping behaviors, while the interactive component is a function of both behavioral levels. It is shown that these models can account for various qualitative features of interaction data, such as single-peaked time-courses of behavioral level, cyclical behavioral patterns, and a difference between initial baseline and stationary level during interaction, provided the parameters of the models satisfy certain conditions. Estimates of the parameters are obtained mainly from group data, and some interpretation is given of these estimates.

Intergroup attitudes in children were examined based on Leyen's ‘infrahumanization hypothesis’. This suggests that some uniquely human emotions, such as shame and guilt (secondary emotions), are reserved for the in‐group, whilst other emotions that are not uniquely human and shared with animals, such as anger and pleasure (primary emotions), are attributed to in‐ and out‐groups alike. The present study explored Scottish 6 to 7 and 10‐ to 11‐year‐old children's ability to forecast the intensity and duration of primary and secondary emotions experienced by in‐ and out‐group members. Ratings of primary and secondary emotions forecast for national football teams (Scotland, in‐group and England, out‐group) for both a loss and a win, immediately after the game and 3 days later were recorded. As predicted by the infrahumanization hypothesis, forecasts for the intensity of secondary emotions experienced by the in‐group were significantly greater overall than those of primary emotions; while, for the out‐group, the intensity ratings for both emotion types were not significantly different. Importantly, this effect did not differ between age groups. These results demonstrate that even relatively young children discriminate between these types of emotion and provide qualified support for the generality of infrahumanization effects.