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THE CENTRAL ISSUE IN PATENT POLICY IS THAT OF THE STANDARD OF PATENTABILITY. BECAUSE THE STATUTORY LANGUAGE IS NECESSARILY GENERAL IN FORM, THE PATENT OFFICE AND THE COURTS ESTABLISH THEIR OWN STANDARDS IN APPLYING THE LAW TO INDIVIDUAL CASES. THE CASE OF PATENT POLICY DEMONSTRATES THE IMPORTANCE OF MECHANISMS TO REPRESENT DIFFUSE INTERESTS IN POLICY PRENAS.

Legitimacy exists when citizens comply with governmental edicts despite substantive disapproval. Attribution of legitimacy may proceed from at least three antecedents: subscription to a "judicial myth," diffuse supportive orientations, and approval of past specific decisions. Survey research on both black and white students, however, fails to support any of the three. Instead, the disadvantaged (especially blacks) demonstrate the greatest propensity to obey. This, coupled with the fact that these same persons are the least integrated with the polity (e.g., they exhibit lower levels of myth subscription and diffuse support), leads to a tentative interpretation of legitimacy in terms of vulnerability.

Using the infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma game as a modeling platform, we examine how domestic political institutions affect the ability of nations to trust and cooperate with each other. We propose a strategy, the agent-specific grim trigger, in which national leaders direct punishments for past defections at the leader of the nation responsible rather than at the nation itself. Leaders refuse to cooperate with those leaders who have cheated them in the past. However, by being prepared to cooperate with new leaders, cooperation can be restored. The focus of punishment on specific agents of the people (leaders), rather than the nation itself, means that citizens want to remove leaders who defect. Hence, domestically accountable leaders pay audience costs for failing to cooperate. These costs make accountable leaders more trustworthy and foster greater cooperation. In contrast, when replacing leaders is difficult, cooperation is less robust; and once cooperation falters, agent-specific punishment policies often lead to prolonged hostilities and periods of acrimonious relations between states.

Unter beispielhafter Darstellung des Gefangenen-Dilemmas wird dargestellt, inwiefern innenpolitische Institutionen die Bemühungen von Staaten, vertrauensvoll mit anderen Staaten zusammenzuarbeiten und möglichst zu kooperieren, beeinflussen. Politische Führer ziehen es vor mit solchen Führeren ausländischer Staaten zusammenzuarbeiten, auf die sie sich stets verlassen konnten. Dies wirkt sich auf die Stabilität in den internationalen Beziehungen aus, nicht zuletzt aus Sorge der Staaten vor den Folgen einer unkooperativen und unverläßlichen Außenpolitik (SWP-Fnk)

ABSTRACTLegitimacy is a bulwark for courts; even when judges engage in controversial or disagreeable behavior, the public tends to acquiesce. Recent studies identify several threats to the legitimacy of courts, including polarization and attacks by political elites. This article contributes to the scholarly discourse by exploring a previously unconsidered threat: scandal, or allegations of personal misbehavior. We argue that scandals can undermine confidence in judges as virtuous arbiters and erode broad public support for the courts. Using survey experiments, we draw on real-world judicial controversies to evaluate the impact of scandal on specific support for judicial actors and their rulings and diffuse support for the judiciary. We demonstrate that scandals erode individual support but find no evidence that institutional support is diminished. These findings may ease normative concerns that isolated indiscretions by controversial jurists may deplete the vast "reservoir of goodwill" that is foundational to the courts.

Abstract
This essay explores the individual-level determinants of trust in the U.S. military. Prior research has identified five possible drivers of societal trust in the military: performance, professionalism, persuasion, personal connection, and partisanship. Using data from the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey, we emphasize the importance of understanding trust at an individual level, as perceptions of military performance and professionalism are not objective but mediated by individual-level factors. Our findings reinforce mixed support for trust being linked to assessments of military success on or off the battlefield, and undermine arguments that relate high trust to a widening gap between the military and civilian society. We also present new evidence for generational and ideational sources of military trust consistent with recent speculation that trust in the military is declining. Overall, we show that individual-level trust may be difficult to change, but that public trust in the military has consequences for a variety of defense-oriented policies.

Political scientists have identified two principal dimensions of support for the Supreme Court, namely, "diffuse" and "specific" support. This paper examines the relationship between diffuse and specific in the context of a model of overall evaluation of the Court. Using data from a national survey, the paper demonstrates that specific support, which is in effect a policy‐based evaluation, and diffuse support, which is more of a normative evaluation, are both important components of the public's assessment of the Court's overall performance. However, the paper shows that the impact of diffuse and specific support on overall evaluation of the Court varies according to levels of attentiveness to the Court. Specifically, the more attentive segment of the population relies heavily on the normative criteria that underlie diffuse support and to a lesser extent on the policy‐based criteria that underlie specific support. The least attentive segment of the population is less able to utilize both normative and policy‐based criteria and consequently relies mainly on its general attitudes about government.

Trust is a good approach to explain the functioning of markets, institutions or society as a whole. It is a key element in almost every commercial transaction over time and might be one of the main explanations of economic success and development. Trust diminishes the more we perceive others to have economically different living realities. In most of the relevant contributions, scholars have taken a macro perspective on the inequality-trust linkage, with an aggregation of both trust and inequality on a country level. However, patterns of within-country inequality and possibly influential determinants, such as perception and socioeconomic reference, remained undetected. This paper offers the opportunity to look at the interplay between inequality and trust at a more refined level. A measure of (generalized) trust emerges from ESS 5 survey which asks "...generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?". With the use of 2009 EU-SILC data, measurements of income inequality are developed for age-specific groups of society in 22 countries. A sizable variation in inequality measures can be noticed. Even in low inequality countries, like Sweden, income imbalances within certain age groups have the potential to undermine social trust.