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Scholarly Debate (scholarly + debate)
Selected AbstractsGovernments and unpopular social policy reform: Biting the bullet or steering clear?EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2009BARBARA VIS This article shows that there exists substantial cross-cabinet variation in the degree to which governments take unpopular measures and argues that current studies cannot adequately explain this variation. Using insights from prospect theory, a psychological theory of choice under risk, this study hypothesises that governments only engage in unpopular reform if they face a deteriorating socio-economic situation, a falling political position, or both. If not, they shy away from the risk of reform. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) of the social policy reform activities pursued by German, Dutch, Danish and British cabinets between 1979 and 2005 identifies a deteriorating socio-economic situation as necessary for unpopular reform. It is only sufficient for triggering reform, however, if the political position is also deteriorating and/or the cabinet is of rightist composition. This study's findings further the scholarly debate on the politics of welfare state reform by offering a micro-foundation that helps one to understand what induces political actors aspiring to be re-elected to engage in electorally risky unpopular reform. [source] THE PANOPTICON'S CHANGING GEOGRAPHYGEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, Issue 3 2007JEROME E. DOBSON ABSTRACT. Over the past two centuries, surveillance technology has advanced in three major spurts. In the first instance the surveillance instrument was a specially designed building, Bentham's Panopticon; in the second, a tightly controlled television network, Orwell's Big Brother; today, an electronic human-tracking service. Functionally, each technology provided total surveillance within the confines of its designated geographical coverage, but costs, geographical coverage, and benefits have changed dramatically through time. In less than a decade, costs have plummeted from hundreds of thousands of dollars per watched person per year for analog surveillance or tens of thousands of dollars for incarceration to mere hundreds of dollars for electronic human-tracking systems. Simultaneously, benefits to those being watched have increased enormously, so that individual and public resistence are minimized. The end result is a fertile new field of investigation for surveillance studies involving an endless variety of power relationships. Our literal, empirical approach to panopticism has yielded insights that might have been less obvious under the metaphorical approach that has dominated recent scholarly discourse. We conclude that both approaches,literal and metaphorical,are essential to understand what promises to be the greatest instrument of social change arising from the Information Revolution. We urge public and scholarly debate,local, national, and global,on this grand social experiment that has already begun without forethought. [source] Transnational political action and ,global civil society' in practice: the case of OxfamGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2009CRAIG BERRY Abstract The term ,global civil society' has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal-cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in practice , due largely, in the case of liberal-cosmopolitanism, to a shared normative agenda. We also assess what contribution literature on development and civil society has made to the analysis of groups such as Oxfam. In investigating Oxfam's own perceptions of its context and the meanings of its agency, we discover an anti-political perspective derived from an encounter between Oxfam's longstanding commitment to liberal internationalism and globalization discourse. Existing scholarship has insufficiently identified the local or parochial nature of the identities of global civil society actors. [source] Assessing evidence of environmental inequities: A meta-analysisJOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2005Evan J. RingquistArticle first published online: 4 MAR 200 Over the past decade activists, academics, and policymakers have devoted a great deal of attention to "environmental equity," or the notion that sources of potential environmental risk may be concentrated among racial and ethnic minorities and the poor. Despite these efforts, the existence and extent of environmental inequities is still the subject of intense scholarly debate. This manuscript reports the results from a meta-analysis of 49 environmental equity studies. The analysis demonstrates that while there is ubiquitous evidence of environmental inequities based upon race, existing research does not support the contention that similar inequities exist with respect to economic class. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management [source] Views of the downward extension: comparing the Youth Version of the Psychopathy Checklist with the Youth Psychopathic traits Inventory,BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES & THE LAW, Issue 6 2003Jennifer L. Skeem Ph.D. Increasing interest in "juvenile psychopathy" has been met with scholarly debate about the validity of directly extending the adult construct of psychopathic personality disorder to youth. To inform this debate, this study of 160 serious adolescent offenders compared two alternative, adult-based conceptualizations of juvenile psychopathy: that of the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) and the self-report Youth Psychopathic traits Inventory (YPI). The results indicate that these two conceptualizations overlap only partially, with the YPI focusing more tightly on core interpersonal and affective features than the PCL:YV. Each conceptualization is reliable and predicts different forms of short-term institutional misbehavior. However, only the YPI possesses a theoretically coherent, inverse association with anxiety. Despite this promise, these conceptualizations of psychopathy are less strongly associated with one another than they are with psychosocial markers of developmental maturity. This raises questions about their divergent validity and ability to identify a disorder that will remain stable during the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Implications for future longitudinal research on the validity, manifestations, and course of juvenile psychopathy are discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] GLOBALIZATION AND EXTERRITORIALITY IN METROPOLITAN CAIROGEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, Issue 3 2005PETRA KUPPINGER ABSTRACT. Rapid construction of new spaces like hotels, malls, private clubs, and gated communities in Greater Cairo, Egypt produces structures disconnected spatially and conceptually from most of the existing urban fabric. Their spatial concepts and practices, as well as architectural forms and expertise, are based largely on globally available models. Planning and construction are guided by the search for security in the face of real or imagined fear of the urban masses and political upheaval. Concrete walls, guarded entrances, and high-tech security technology bear witness to these fears. Analysis of the Mena House Hotel, the Grand Egyptian Museum project, and the First Mall in Giza shows how these projects globalize Cairo and localize the global. Often these globalized spaces are remade by creating local and regional ties and design features that were not anticipated by the planners. Such changes shed light on underlying dynamics and contribute to a better understanding of in situ globalization. Whereas their physical features tend to accentuate their globalized nature, these spaces do not exist in isolation from their geographical and cultural contexts. Their everyday realities tell tales of reterritorialization that are frequently overlooked in scholarly debates. [source] Old Jokes and New Multiculturalisms: Continuity and Change in Vernacular Discourse on the Yucatec Maya LanguageAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 3 2009Fernando Armstrong-Fumero ABSTRACT, Much recent literature on indigenous identity politics in Latin America has emphasized the emergence of new discourses on ethnic citizenship. However, the ways in which state-sponsored efforts to validate and revitalize the Yucatec Maya language become relevant to rural Yucatecans reflect far more continuity with older local narratives about the relationship between language use and modernity. Situating contemporary engagements with multicultural language policies within a broader history of locally meaningful language practices complicates the general model of indigenous language communities that has informed many recent studies of Latin American identity politics and reframes scholarly debates that have emphasized contrasts between emergent forms of essentialism or purism and more-traditional means of identity formation. This, in turn, suggests new routes through which multicultural and multilingual policies can be conceptualized for heterogeneous communities of indigenous language speakers. [source] Anti-corruption: What Do We Know?POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2007Research on Preventing Corruption in the Post-communist World This review assesses the anti-corruption literature in a first attempt to identify systematically significant trends so far and challenges remaining to future political science research. Research on anti-corruption is a young métier. While reflecting on the field at large, the review focuses on two issues that have been central to its development: the role of post-communist Eastern Europe and of civil society involvement. Organised in a chronological way, the review distinguishes and discusses four phases, in order to trace how scholars have addressed these two issues in the context of a rapid evolution of anti-corruption debates, ongoing transformations in Eastern Europe and increasing insight into the controversial matter of anti-corruption efforts. It considers four crucial periods: (1) earlier scholarly debates on corruption (pre-1990s); (2) initial anti-corruption debates (1990s); (3) a period of reorientation (early 2000s); and (4) latest anti-corruption debates (mid-2000s). Changing perspectives on anti-corruption in relation to post-communism and civil society involvement are discussed for each of the four phases in order to delineate the different research trajectories. This leads to the conclusion that future research, while addressing the theory deficit, needs to take account of increasingly complex conceptual challenges posed by the (interrelated) changes in international and domestic governance. [source] | ||||||||||