Legislative Transparency and Credit Risk

Open governance requirements are designed to improve accountability, which implies that transparent governments are more trustworthy stewards of their publicly invested power. However, transparency may also reduce institutional effectiveness and inhibit political compromise, diminishing the capacity to manage resources responsibly. We assess empirical support for these competing perspectives in the context of American state legislatures, many of which have become exempt from state sunshine laws in recent decades. We leverage variation in the timing of these legislative exemptions to identify the effect of removing transparency in a crucial governing institution on investors’ risk perceptions of states’ general obligation bonds. Our analysis of these data during the period 1995–2010 suggests that removing legislative transparency reduces state credit risk. We conclude that while openness in government may be normatively desirable, shielding legislative proceedings from public view may actually be better for states’ debt repayment capacity, improving their overall fiscal health.     

One Kazak horseman

We are beginning our trip on the Silk Road near Urumqi, northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. If you picture the map of China, you will see a rooster with the beak. We are touring the rooster’s tail area. Our Uygur guide Kalim, says, "Today we’ll visit a Kazakyurtifwecanfindone." There are no yurts-round-like and portable dwellings-in sight here, just small stucco     

The New Partnership for Africa's Development: Social,Economic and Environmental Contradictions

Richard D. North: Life on a Modern Planet: A Manifesto for Progress. Manchester University Press, 1995.     

The Center-Periphery Cleavage Revisited: East and Central Europe from Postcommunism to Euroscepticism

The article examines the evolution of Eastern and Central European party systems from the previous communist/anticommunist conflict to the emergent division between pro-EU and Eurosceptic forces and puts forward a revised view of the traditional center-periphery cleavage in six countries: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. The first part addresses the question of “stateness” and the second the Rokkan spatial approach while the third develops a revised view of the center-periphery cleavage in relation to space at the national (minority ethnic groups vs. state), regional (EU vs. Eastern European member states), and global (USSR vs. satellite countries during the bipolar system) levels.     

Poner el Cuerpo: Women's Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina

This article explores the relationship between women's embodiment and political resistance in Argentina during 2002–2003. This was a time of socioeconomic crisis, influenced by neoliberal globalization. In this tumultuous context, women's bodies became embattled sites, shaken by the crisis but also actively engaged in constructing a new society and new forms of womanhood. Bodies are important to understanding political resistance, as reflected by the meanings attached to poner el cuerpo , a common expression in contemporary Argentine social movements. This article analyzes how women construct embodied subjectivities through their activist practices and how they define poner el cuerpo in terms of collective protest and daily activist work, coherence between words and actions, embodied sacrifice, and risk taking and struggle. As life in Argentina deteriorated because of the crisis, women's bodies represented not only suffering but also resistance and renewal.     

Ethnicity and gender similarity: The effectiveness of counseling for adolescents

Few studies in counseling and psychotherapy have examined the relationship between counselees' perception of counselors' attractiveness and therapeutic outcomes using high school-age counselees in actual counseling sessions. This study investigated the extent to which perceived counselor-counselee similarity affected the counselee's perceptions of counselor attractiveness and how perceived counselor attractiveness affected the degree of counselee satisfaction with counseling. The results suggested that racial and gender differences appear not to have operated as barriers to effective counseling. The implications of these findings for counseling research and practice, in general, we well as for successful counselor-counselee interactions in a multicultural context, in particular, are discussed.She received her Ed.D. degree in curriculum and counseling from the UCLA Graduate School of Education in 1987. She has a long-standing interest in minority-group accessibility to higher education and the importance of matching in counseling and guidance.Her Ph.D. is also from UCLA, where she is currently a faculty member. Her areas of research include discriminatory testing and psychodiagnostic issues related to ethnic/minority-group populations.